they have each other

i'm suffocated by the blackness of their hearts.
they live in these worlds that divide and jeer and cast people aside when they shouldn't be able to.
we are their children. humans beings aren't bits of trash.
but their religion says we are exactly that, so they cling to their commandments commanding them to kill their beautiful babies because that's what you do when you love something to death. you kill it.
we aren't normal, and that's not my religion.

they are normal. they know it.
everything else is less of life in life. they are untouchable that way.
no one can scale high enough to penetrate the thickness of their hatred, the whole ugliness of it.
all of the world's fear bundled safely away in four hearts.
four people that can do so much damage to us.

she and i

so, what are we? she turned to me and asked in the plaza. what do you mean, i replied, casually, simply implying a sort of unspoken detachment that betrayed everything that i was and felt up till that moment.
i could possibly be in heaven.
she was implying monogamy.
as if i hadn't dreamt of being hers forever. you can't say those things out loud when the music is playing louder. you can't say things like: i knew i wanted to be with you the first time i looked into your eyes. the first time you put your head on my shoulder.
i remember there was a pillow in between us. i remember your uncertain stares and misleading embraces on road trips that would take us there and back again only to vanish sooner than i wanted.
i couldn't dare say those things back then when we both would go home and fall asleep in the arms of other women, or men, depending on what you felt like.
so what are we? you asked again as i came crashing back from where i'd just been. the stars and back, or quite possibly heaven.
i saw the past and the future colliding with this moment. everything would change. i couldn't go back. no longer would it be just about me.
in that moment, those few seconds in the plaza, there, that's how she and i became we.

smelling your hair

i could have your child if you showed me love. my soul would be yours if you could look into my eyes and see yourself. love me and be yourself. i would give you the world if your heart could beat to our truth. our love would presuppose. it would endure and take us both back to the beginning of "us" even though we walked to the end. i could be the happiest person, a complete person because i was walking with you. i walked with you in my heart. you were holding my hand and whispering things. pretty things. helping me with each step. sometimes you'd kiss me and bring me back to where i was supposed to be. someplace quiet and bubbly maybe. someplace happy. we can pick anywhere really as long as i can still smell your hair and stare at your pulse beating to the rhythm of my reality. i imagined you to be this perfect thing. this beautiful and perfect thing that i want to squeeze and lick and serve for as long as i can still smell your hair. smell your hair and smile and be happy. take me there.

fidelity

when you went away, it was hard for me to regain my balance.
it was as if the blood in my head drained into my hands and legs giving me these thick tree-like branches for limbs i would use to navigate the next bodies that came along.
unfamiliar and not you.
the love we had was dead and all i wanted to do was bury it and walk far away from it. walk somewhere where i could find myself long enough to hack these obscene branches to pieces like a lumberjack on acid. in peace and in death.
but dying is never easy.
she found me huddled up and bleeding in the corner of my burned civilization. trampled and torn.
there was so much blood and damage done to my body that she thought this was the end. i was there, at my end not even able to say thank you properly when she washed my face and said i was pretty.
pretty special. pretty smart. pretty amazing.
i couldn't remember hearing any of it. my ears were ringing too loud to the sound of you breathing.
she could see that i was on the edge, that the black would come and get me. so she gave me her heart and told me to start living in this beautiful world even though it meant she was no longer going to.
this was her fidelity.
she gave me her heart so that i could understand what she saw when she looked into my eyes and believed in someone worth dying for.

whistling

early onset puberty. men whistling, catcalls calling. calling you to remember their crudeness.
sex was nothing, it just happened. no attachment, no sacredness.
action.
your reaction was to dive into it. you don't look back ever.
it's better that way.
sweat and tears later. fastforward.
i love you, i still love you.
take my fears away.
you can't because you don't know how to.
all you can do is hear catcalls and whistling.

amy

one day i want to close my eyes and open them again to find you sitting next to me on this train. you'd look at me and say, "i never left, i was always here with you." your eyes would blink in a way that would reaffirm my firm belief that you can't live without me.
it would be nice to hear that. perhaps not. not contrived.
i want the ocean, big and blue, and sometimes green and brown mixed. i want to discuss the possibility of gnomes and whisper fairy tales i don't know and laugh with you till i die.
i want to bake fresh bread from scratch and feed you breakfast in bed sometimes, and fall asleep in our park on a sunny day when we could be doing a million other things instead, but we wouldn't because right there, in that moment, we'd feel bliss.
enough not to feel like we missed out on anything in life.
we have each other.
every breath, every sigh, every moment, every cry, i want you standing beside me, tall, reaching up high towards the sky because that's what i'll be doing and i hope you'll try too, because that's really all we can do and i really really want to be here with you.
always sitting here with you.

face

i secretly want you to tattoo my face on your brain ripples.
maybe that way you'd never forget me.
but you will.
you will too often.
you'll come and go, disappearing back into the places that i'm not allowed to follow.
your secrets. your mind.
there's a little line that i'm not allowed to cross. it's dotted and white and undefined. not clearly visible to those you don't let see, but it's clear to me that i'm not meant to step over it.
i find it difficult to understand the part of myself that keeps trying...
fighting, forcing, wanting...
empty yourself of desire, i will forever tell myself,
forever convincing myself as i undress to find that i've tattooed your face onto my heart.
i know that soon i will find the missing pieces of who i was in a trash bag,
just like the rest of your memories.

red booths and leather

the moon howls at a tormented soul, wretched with fear and perplexion.
we sit here in red booths with squeaky leather at a diner, for drinks, or dinner.
the crevice that hides in between my knee and thigh is sweating beads that paste themselves alongside whatever forgotten things get stuck under a benched seat.
i don't want to look.
i'm in an old dirty movie.
the lights flicker to a monotone beat that somehow makes me think of a morgue,
but no, i'm in a diner with red leather seats.
while a juke box spits hypnotic melodies from the forties i realize this is not my generation and i feel uneasy.
people are looking, staring blankly into the past.
it's not ours. it's depressing.
a shadow has been cast over the eyes of our imagination creating the silhouette of floating promises decomposing.
it's hard to see now, but if you squint hard enough, the thought of other people being happy can be squeezed out of the corner of your eye.
a teardrop.
i'm consumed by the memories,
they all have a story to share.
it's this place, i can tell it sucks them right out of people and keeps them lingering, almost floating in the air.
at least i have Marlene.
the bartender stares at me quietly from the bar.
we both see in black and white.
he bats his eyelashes. wink.
i blink a few times before i return to my stale reality.
at least i have Marlene.
my mind wanders. let's ditch this place, this time, this man.
let's leave this dive and fly far away.
let's go someplace sacred.
someplace that doesn't have red booths and squeaky leather.

a train passing

i saw a family of four living on the side of the road.
their home is a space between tents and tracks,
held together by wooden pegs and tarnished tarps that have been battered down and beaten by rain and wind and whatever people throw away that happens to land on their heads,
over their heads,
under their fingernails bleeding mud.

this colony of transplants teeters on the border between pennies and panic,
while i border somewhere between this and that normal place between sugar and shame.
my life is too normal,
is that normal,
maybe it was me panicking for them as i raced by,
too fast to cry.

i was moving too fast.
too fast to look them in the eye.
the farther away i move the more they look like dots that shouldn't be there,
against the backdrop of a perfect sky blue bleeding into the blackness of an imperfect black going nowhere but south of nothing.
almost perfect,
almost there.
i was moving too fast because i didn't want to see the things they've seen.
my life would seem like a joke that way.
their pain would suffocate me each day...
i stood mute.

i want to scream the names of their kids.
i want to memorize their faces and kiss their scars,
and tell them that they are not far from humanity,
or far from being forgotten at all.

those kids looked happy.
they were playing with each other.
they didn't do anything wrong.
watch them sing beautiful words and paint pictures of hope with their songs.
dream, child.
i want to scream.

wake up to love,
fall down,
get back up and try again.

i think all i can do is cry.
i'm on a train moving away from them.

hourglass twirling

the i in her we is as obstructive as her concept of who she sees me to be.
she thinks she understands, she thinks she can see something beyond the borders of black and a sort of blurred opaque,
but how can she...
she remains in a state of complete monotony, mirroring the reflection of some obscure shade of what could be...happiness.
i don't know where that is.
you can't be whole when you've given up bits of yourself to other people.
sand blows its babies into a desert with the simple ease of an hourglass twirling.
you can't be happy when you refuse to believe your eyes when you see the tip of a better tomorrow surfacing just over the horizon of your damaged heart.
i start to say comforting things,
you stop hearing beauty.
i stop saying comforting things,
you don't make it your duty to change the state we've been cemented in.
instead you start to unravel what's been done to you for the hundredth time.