February 2012
But more than that, no unloving words were ever spoken, and everything was held up as another small piece of proof that it can be this way, it doesn’t have to be that way; if there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it heavy walls, and we will furnish it with soft red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond...
“All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.”
– Henry Ellis
On the scales of desire, your absence weighs more than someone else’s presence, so I say no thanks.
You fell asleep and yeah, you fell for me.
I know a boy who called his girlfriend’s body a “crime scene.” Dad, my body is a crime scene. My body is lint and gasoline and matchstick. My body is a brush fire. It’s ticking, Dad, a slow alarm. I have rain boots. Lots of them. It isn’t raining anymore. The words are coming back, Dad. The way they fit and jump in the mouth. I want ice cream and long letters. I want to read long love letters...
“Let’s make the ocean quiet. Or oh all life smells of rush. How about we stay in tonight and figure out nobility? Probably there is somewhere where we were meant to be, but we discovered cars. Invented, I mean. We were halfway to anti-matter when it all combusted. So now the best we can muster is a fumbling for touch, and I reach with my hand and you are there, your hand, face,...
“Sweetheart,
Please, please don’t be so depressed — We’ll be married soon, and then these lonesome nights will be over forever — and until we are, I am loving, loving every tiny minute of the day and night — Maybe you won’t understand this, but sometimes when I miss you most, it’s hardest to write — and you always know when I make myself — Just the ache of it all — and I can’t tell you. If...
As in, in the, of course. The body knew the drill by now. Was are we there yet and then never been so, then so long. Heart tied with twine, with shorthairs, trip wires—whispered that bind. Drew the short straw, scared herself apart to spit-sweet shards and into time that counted backwards from two lips ago. Said done is done and is between me and those teeth. Some little story about...
In love, his grammar grew rich with intensifiers, and adverbs fell madly from the sky like pheasants for the peasantry, and he, as sated as they were, lolled under shade trees until roused by moonlight and the beautiful fraternal twins and and but. Oh that was when he knew he couldn’t resist a conjunction of any kind. One said accumulate, the other was a doubter who loved the wind and...
“In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance...”
– Rumi
It was everything, those nights on the phone, everything we said until late became later and then later and very late and finally to go to bed with my ear warm and worn and red from holding the phone close close close so as not to miss a word of what it was, because who cared how tired I was in the humdrum slave drive of our days without each other. I’d ruin any day, all my days, for those...
“No matter how much you feed the wolf, he keeps looking at the forest.”
– Ilse Lehiste
you, just you.
Words can relay nice - They can cut you open. And the silence surrounds you and haunts you. I think I might have inhaled you. I could feel you behind my eyes. You gotten into my bloodstream. I could feel you floating in me.
I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth...
“I’m not fascinated by people who smile all the time. What I find interesting is the way people look when they are lost in thought, when their face becomes angry or serious, when they bite their lip, the way they glance, the way they look down when they walk, when they are alone and smoking a cigarette, when they smirk, the way they half smile, the way they try and hold back tears, the...
“She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful.”
– Neil Gaiman
“You will be out with friends when the news of her existence will be accidentally spilled all over your bar stool. Respond calmly as if it was only a change in weather, a punch line you saw coming. After your fourth shot of cheap liquor, leave the image of him kissing another woman in the toilet.
In the morning, her name will be in every headline: car crash, robbery, flood. When...