Posts tagged poetry

The writing scares me when it doesn’t come,
But then when it does, and I am honest,
I shake and tear the words with my teeth
And swallow them back down in gulps.
All I want to do is beg to be left alone.
I beg to be forgotten and anonymous.
I have cursed myself enough.

This is all a great waking, a very long sunrise, welcome after the rain that woke the birds in the night and made them sing. This is leaves unfurling and leaves tucked in leaves. A glacier groaning, a sharp moving stone.

I lay chest down
And beat my heart into the blankets
Until everything shakes
With life and love
And other things the heart makes.
The mattress pulses
Waiting for an echo that doesn’t come
And this is how it is without you. 

I text you every morning and say I love you,
but I’m sometimes sleepy and would always rather have you beside me.
But you aren’t, and so, with my eyes half-open, I text,
“I love you.”

Sometimes I get it wrong
in my half-sleep stupor
and I type instead,
“I live you.”

Odd, awkward grammar,
but at the heart of it, still true. 

When I was young I froze my ears
and they went hard as stone
and burned night and day
and now they do not.

They are soft again but
become red at the tips
and scream when the air
and the water freeze.

It does so often here
and I hear what no one says. 

How clumsy of my teeth to
miss my tongue and to bite out
chattering words.

How my jaw will clench
and grind in the night. 

Less than a week ago I
flew over your neck of the woods
that I loved in the morning
where the hair was short and soft
where I loved to place my lips
and while I was flying
your neck of the woods turned a shoulder
at the wrong moment
and one of us needed to look away first
I stirred and I craned
and I knew I would lose. 

Give me your nights.

Do not defend yourself
from me, whose hands only
hold space for yours. Empty
palms. I blush and change
my voice for you, under
bitten lip and soft teeth.

Do you not understand
how I look for warmth?
Your voice gone from me
and your goodbye sudden
and I tried to do the same,
but not so easily done for

you know I love a long goodnight.

There is love on my tongue yet,
shocking and hard, like my child’s mouth
on some cold metal in the snow.
I’m stuck to my flagpole for another night. 

It sticks until I say these words
to you, at the right time when we aren’t
so tired and separated. We’ve said
goodnight and that is something

we can’t make right
until morning. 

Climb high to my earnest mouth,
the place where I am most honourable,
where I give you each of my truest promises.
When I tell you of the plans I have
or tell you that I love you,
don’t ever think any value is lost.
I don’t know how to deceive you
or be impure towards you at all.
It’s simply that each confession
feels like the first sweet murmur.
These words, your lips taste the same.

You should see the stars when the sky is black with winter.
I connect them with white lines, invent a geometry to
make your shape glow in the night.
You are a constellation and the wild wordless tribe of my heart
has painted your image inside of me, on the walls of my body.
Do I love you? I’ve never lived a life so clear or true.
I make a world of our love, constructing gods
so I have something more to thank than chance.