Gabriel Gadfly

I write poetry about love, mental health, communication, grief, and humor. Author of Bone Fragments and Ventricle, Atrium, and hundreds of poems online. Find my full collection athttp://gabrielgadfly.com

[gabrielgadfly]

What have you done to me?

Morning wakes light in the window. I pull away the covers and lift myself up, but my bones fall out between the sheets.

You are still asleep; the sun creeps across your lips and my skeleton beside you cups your breast in his hand, his bones fat-yellowed and marrowed out with desire; I leave your side and leave my love beside you, I leave all the white osteology of my love.

Is my love macabre? My love rattles. My love clatters and clacks, my love snaps and pops at the joints. I cannot quiet it. I can try to bury all the raw cartilage and calcium of my love, I can try to crack it and mortar it down to so much grey dust,

but my love must be bone: it wrestles under the muscle and blood of my love, under the skin of my love, the bones of my love are what the tendons and tissues of my love bind to when I love you.

My love is lunate and scaphoid. It is vertebral, sternal, my love is cranial and pelvic and hyoid. My love is two hundred and six bone white statements of my love.

[gabrielgadfly]

My heart wears yellow sunglasses. My heart wears satin in blues, wears all the hues of a flower garden bloomed in finger and paint. My heart wears galaxies in shades of bruise.

My heart wears cedar faces, my heart chases places magical and strange, my heart wears card games. My laughing heart laughs, wears song after song until my heart sleeps and music plays on. My heart wears long into the night.

My heart wears dizzy the flesh and scent of orange. My heart wears dizzy in love.

My heart wears wind, wears sand, wears stars, wears the thousand tail lights of a thousand cars. The thigh of my heart wears fire; the hip and shoulder of my heart wears plum. My heart in my mouth wears desire, my heart moans slick with desire, my heart wears my mouth, but my heart goes north while I go south.

My heart wears away like away is a dress, and my love for my heart is not little or less for my heart being elsewhere and away.

My heart will wear yesterday until yesterday becomes the next day I hold my heart in my hands again and kiss the lips of my heart and the throat of my heart, until I wear my heart and my heart wears me again.

[gabrielgadfly]

The weekend over, we left your parent’s house, and drove home in the rain, tense and tired to our bones from your father’s opinions about the government, from your mother’s mild but persistent interrogations, from your little brother and his dog Cheyanne, both joyful, but barking desperate for attention.

Neither of us said anything, you with your arms crossed in the passenger seat, me with hands white-knuckled on the wheel, weary to be home, but with miles to go.

The sun went down, and drove darker until we rolled along County Road 23, past a dairy farm and a baptist church with a parking lot full of farm trucks, even though it was getting late even for country preachers high on hellfire.

Those were the last lights we passed for miles, until pine trees nuzzled close in the dark and we hit a patch freshly paved: new asphalt so dark, so smooth it seemed like we sailed down a river of night,

a slick of black glass that stretched to the limits of the high-beams and seemed as if it might crack beneath the tires.

We were both startled by the tiny tree frog that popped into the road, by his little jubilant leap into the rain, his dance in light and wetness, his happy transit, and your hand flew to my thigh as I pressed the brake and slowed to let him pass.

Neither of us said anything, but your hand settled from tension to comfort and I eased my grip on the wheel as the small green wanderer landed safely in the pine straw piled on the other side of the road,

and then we continued on our way, but your hand never moved, not for the next fifty miles until we made it home.

[gabrielgadfly]

I think for a moment you sweep past:

a smoke of rose, a wisp of heat, a hint of calm, a whisper without sound but scented with your lips, your tongue, your breath, it eddies through the turbulence of my everyday.

Inhale your scent, pretend your scent is present to be inhaled.

Swallow the lump rising in my throat.

This is how I get through the moments between our meetings.

[theoldness]

[the-sarkai]

When your shadow reveals your true form

[artificeoftheheart]

Life and Death and Knowledge

Gabriel Gadfly

I.

You have only these hours and days.

II.

When you accept them,

you have no need of

afterlives or prior lives.

You have the single empty box

of a life and all the universe

to fill it with.

III.

Live like this: there is an end to you.

Don’t fear it. Don’t wallow.

Flowers wilt. Rivers dry up.

Even the stars extinguish themselves.

Have your time and then let it go.

IV.

Do not shy from your ending

with mad horse eyes.

V.

Allow the box of your life,

when you have filled it,

to have its spaces.

Resist the temptation

to stuff the gaps with gods

who do not know you.

VI.

Pull uncertainty into your arms

and kiss her lips;

too many neglect her,

but she is an eager lover,

and desires only your attention.

Let her teach you how to say

“I don’t know and that is beautiful”

VII.

You have only these minutes and years.

[gabrielgadfly]

Archipelago

The tiny freckles clustered on your collar bone

are just six of the reasons my lips keep

seeking you.

[fleurishes]

I have unrolled a map onto my kitchen table and put one finger where you are and another where I am. The space between is only inches. That close, I could feel you breathing. I could reach out and run my fingers through every strand of your hair, touch your lips and barely need to move. In the corner of the map there is a guide for judging scale: every inch a hundred miles full of roads and rivers and trees, the guide a sharp reminder that you are where you are and I am where I am, inches apart.

Gabriel Gadfly, “Why I Hate Reading Maps” (via fleurishes)

[wnq-writers]

I am the flower and the thorns. I don’t need you to touch me in order to blossom

a 365 poetry project entry by Haley Hendrick (via haleyincarnate)

[gemstone-deactivated20180927]

“omg! a new history of-” siiiiighhh

[gemstone-deactivated20180927]

theres a rape joke in the fucking new video more clear than the last you keep that fucking bullshit off my dash im not even joking right now i wont hesitate

[deletingadsfhkjdhflkdjsf-deacti]

white people trying to distract from the realities of africas suffering: “HGSJSDJ THE NEW :HISTORY OF” VIDEO HAS A RAPE JOKE. DONT WATCH IT”

yall literally went to africa and raped people. thats not a joke, its what yall did. shut up.

[hayategekko-archive-deactivated]

the rape…… of africa………….. is what the colonization/pillaging of africa…………….. is called……………….

the rape of nanking is also in that video, because that’s literally what it is called. the word rape has more than one definition. not to say that sexual rape didn’t also occur bc it most definitely did, but in historical context rape also means to ransack. he’s using historically accurate terminology to make his point quickly and efficiently.

it’s not? a joke?

[gabrielgadfly]

I want to point out that the Rape of Nanking was not just a ransacking (although a lot of that happened), but quite literally a brutal event of mass rape. At least 20,000 women and girls in the city were raped over a period of about six weeks. Paragraph 2, p 1012 of the Judgment of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the war crimes trials brought against the Empire of Japan after WW2, says this about the event: “There were many cases of rape. Death was a frequently penalty for the slightest resistance on the part of a civtion [sic] or the members of her family who sought to protect her. Even girls of tender years and old women were raped in large numbers throughout the city, and many cases of abnormal and sadistic behaviour in connection with these rapings occurred. Many women were killed after the act and their bodies mutilated. Approximately 20,000 cases of rape occurred within the city during the first month of the occupation. “ Many of the women raped were then killed, or mutilated, many by being bayonetted or shot through the vagina.

[clementinevonradicspoems]

Every time a man yells you are seven years old again and he is packing that suitcase once more. Picking you up the by neck, teaching you obedience. To be soft, like the belly of a fish exposed to a knife.

Clementine von Radics (via clementinevonradicspoems)

[bedlamsbard]

The difference between learning a modern language and an ancient language is that in first year French you learn “Where is the bathroom?” and “How do I get to the train station?” and in first year Attic Greek or Latin you learn “I have judged you worthy of death” and “The tyrant had everyone in the city killed.”

[just-shower-thoughts]

It took me until now to realize ‘news’ stood for notable events, weather and sports.

[gabrielgadfly]

No, no, no.

Everyone knows the nightly news began as a digest focused on the goings-on of Newts, Egrets, Winnebagos, and Swindlers. It was only in 1653 that the Royal Journalistic Society petitioned the Crown to broaden the definition to include such parochial things like weather and sports.

[wrote-you-a-poem]

[epicmurdock]

I really hate it when parents of autistic kids use phrases like “I know they’re in there.” Bitch they’re right in front of you! You haven’t lost them! They’re not locked away like a final boss in a video game!! This is your child As Is! Love them for who they are not what you wish they would be! Fuck!

[epicmurdock]

I didn’t expect this to get notes but it’s absolutely ok to reblog and I’m glad it has been

[juansendizon]

[heathens-and-kings]

Found one of my posts on Twitter with 15k retweets and no credit so I went on a little rant. Plagiarism isn’t an uncontrollable side effect of the internet. Y'all have just gotten too comfortable disrespecting and devaluing art. Get right.