#feelings

You and I both know this is just a whole lot of #feelings poetry.

[in-articulacy]

I show up to the backyard house show empty-handed. Most of the people around me are holding Tecate tallboys, so I take out a cigarette and light it. I haven’t smoked in 48 hours, and I feel accomplished enough. I’m wearing half of my hair up in two little buns vaguely resembling cat or bear ears. I find my friend in the crowd and ask if my hair makes me look young, if anyone will be able to tell I have a 401k. He feels uncomfortable in the crowd, too, which he describes as “nineteen and vaping.” We both comment on a young man in a button-up short-sleeve with Rick and Morty’s faces all over it; we’re not fans.

I stand in the back while my other friend’s band plays. They’re loud and both poppy and unbalanced. There’s a cluster of men--I guess that they’re younger than me but not by much--to my left, right up against the fence. They’re shouting names of the band members, requesting songs, rocking back and forth and jumping when appropriate. This band already had a small, committed fanbase when my friend joined earlier in the year. I went to one of the first shows he played with them, thinking that I would of course be one of their most loyal fanatics. But people already knew the lyrics, already knew when the time signature was going to change. So now, after seeing him perform with them a few times, I stand in the back. He knows I’m there. 

Before the last band, just as it’s starting to get dark out, I see one of my clients from work. I don’t think they recognize me, and I’m glad (HIPAA compliance can be difficult in a place as small as Portland). But I know they’re 19, and suddenly I do feel old. I can crack jokes all night, but I realize I’m a little worried about aging out of the house show scene at 25. Not that anyone is making me feel unwelcome...I just am starting to feel like this isn’t my type of fun anymore. 

[in-articulacy]

hold me as hard as you can

[in-articulacy]

Starting Again

I haven't written much in the past year, and it's making me feel useless. Like a waste of space. My body is a headache anymore. And the words that used to flow from me can't even be pulled out. They run through my fingers.  My days bleed together, and my heartache grows dull. Writing brought my life into focus. It gave sharpness to the ambiguous and names to the ineffable. Now I watch TV. I talk on the phone and cry when I hang up. I scan books at work. I go to bars but never get drunk at them. I eat smaller portions. I skim my homework.  They say starting is the hardest part. But I think starting again is even harder. But here I go. A step away from uselessness. 

[in-articulacy]

When You Whisper, "Oh Fuck"

You wanted to fuck me to the sound of the dog whining downstairs. But I wanted to fuck you to the silence. You complained that your windows don't let the sound of the rain in. I wanted to just hear your breath, hear your rough, up-all-night monosyllables. Let the dog out; let it rain. I wanted to be alone with you.  I want to know what cassette you put on to see if it would convince me  to devour you. I didn't need convincing. I want only the click and the sigh and the stillness between sides, before you get out of bed to flip it. To flip me. I want to be alone with you.

[in-articulacy]

I Still Don't Care about the Present

I have been letting your dusty past dictate what we are  for so long that I have lost sight of what I cannot see.

Ahead, still around corners and behind curtains yet undrawn is a future that I had a stake in. But I was turned the other way.

As though your past could be arranged around me. As though room for me there would guarantee me a space later. How shortsighted I was  to reach back so far. How wrong I was to think I could have a future that I didn't show up for. 

[in-articulacy]

Dirty Haiku Pt. I

Your face is a throne, and I am a queen. Let me take my rightful place.

[in-articulacy]

The only things keeping you together are the same things that you will eventually have to let go of

[in-articulacy]

Crazy

I know my craziness. Can see it superimposed over the calendar year in undulating waves and deepest ocean trenches. I take pills to hold-me-together. Feeling too much at the wrong time is not as poetic as it sounds-- it is dark here, often, but I have looked apathy in the eye and dragged myself from its gaze. 

This is not your craziness. Yours is lies, yours is third grade-style bullying and pretending not to care. Or, perhaps, never really caring. You are not caught up in waves of emotion that threaten to  carry you off or even drown you. No, you lash out at those who stay nearby. Easy targets. You mimic what others feel so you can take and take and take. 

This is your craziness. But you insanity would be  to ever try to see the boy you hurt the most. Because if you come back to this town I will fucking cut you. Because you're my insanity.

[in-articulacy]

War Story

Love was always the easy part for me. But my strategies are useless in your nostalgic territory.

I have held your heart when it grows too heavy to carry alone, stuck in this past I begged you to burn. But you would not tear up the roots, would not salt the earth. So I waged a war with your wounded essence in my right hand and a torch in my left.

There are no rules here, only guerrilla tactics; this is a war that awakes you with the smell of smoke. I have only ever harvested passion on scorched land.

Adam Gnade told me fighting and loving  are the two best things. And he spoke a Truth that cannot  leave me. I've never learned how to do one without the other. I can draw my enemies near and battle those I hold the closest. 

If this isn't a war, I don't  know how to fight it. If this isn't a love story, I don't know how to tell it.

[in-articulacy]

Dangerous Brunch

I knew if we just kept walking down Burnside we'd eventually find a bookstore or a music shop. We reach our music Mecca, only to rip ourselves away too soon. We walk downhill a few blocks. We look across the street. "There's the bookstore." I'm laughing.

We make it back with enough time to look over menus before his name is called. When we are seated and smiling and somehow content at this wobbling table  in this roaring chaos, I offer him something dangerous. "Maybe it will be like this from now on." This is what I call a lie. He wants to take it from my hands. This is what I call hope.

[in-articulacy]

Wade

There were summers when all you could do was swim but now you can barely get in.

You don't recognize the girl who is content to wade. You can backstroke until your shoulders have disintegrated and you  have seen every color of the night sky but you will still be so far from the chlorine-dried skin you once carefully cultivated. Dripping on the concrete as you darted between the hot tub and the pool, you hated drying off, sliding into shoes.

But he doesn't swim. Doesn't take to the water the way you do. "I'm a water sign," you say, "And you are rooted in the earth."  You take off into depths for a few silent minutes. You slow down. You wade with him. You are a water sign on the cusp of the water bearer and you are wading. And maybe this is what growing is. You adapt. To the earth and the stillness.

There were summers when all you could do was swim.

[in-articulacy]

Your Ghost

You can't win against a ghost because a ghost can do no wrong.  When the unshaven legs have walked away, when the bangs are being cut in bathrooms in another timezone,  (another realm), forgiveness comes easily. My feet are rooted here so deeply that even if I died, there would be no ghost-- only a body decaying in place. My fleshy cheeks and thighs can't compete with the collective memory of what you all shared. I am still making mistakes, and I will keep making mistakes because I am here-- and I will never be your ghost.

[in-articulacy]

Saltwater Doesn't Heal All

You don't cry alone as much anymore. There's no point to it. No catharsis, just wet sleeves and pillowcases. You cry on the phone with him. You cry in the car with him. You cry across from him at a Shari's. It is the only way you can even get close to making him understand just how bottomless your despair feels. There's nothing melodramatic about it. Sometimes the tears just fall out, and you are just as surprised to find that you are crying as he is. Sometimes you're choking--gasping for air--but it's genuine. You are drowning in more ways than one. 

[in-articulacy]

Misandrist

I thought I could be made of iron and leather and bricks for everyone else Thought I could be tough enough for my mother and your daughter I wanted so badly for my solitude to  look like martyrdom  Instead the world is chanting for me to swim I haven't been out this far in a long time

[in-articulacy]

Tuesday//Wednesday Vignette

We stay up all night because a month ago you told me that you like your bananas the same way I like mine: yellow and firm with no brown spots and still a little green at the top. We stay up because after four anxious weeks of silence, we are talking to each other. We only stop to bring our mouths together and sigh. We stay up because it feels like summer, and there are still menthols left in your pack. It's 5:30 and the sky is lighter and I'm hungry. We walk to Shari's in the bright cold. You happily order coffee. We watch the sun come up over the not-yet-crowded intersection and talk about how we're not even tired. We order the same breakfast, and I am reminded of our banana conversation. My heart swells in an odd way. I try not to sound too excited when I mention that no one likes their eggs overhard. Then the waitress is echoing that no one--no one--likes their eggs overhard, and it sounds very significant. I want my bare thighs to stay stuck to this vinyl booth forever.

[in-articulacy]

Saturday Vignette

I would always rather fight than sit in silence. I get defensive over my distaste for Jay-Z. He waits a second before offering me "constructive criticism" that he hopes I "won't take personally." By the time he is finished constructively criticizing me, we are exiting North Lombard and getting onto I-5 South. There is more suffocating silence. It lasts until he narrowly avoids being forced to exit onto 405. That's when I look down at North Greeley and quietly mention, "I used to drive home from work this way." But that was a thousand summers ago when I was sober and hardworking and the city's sodium lights moved me in more powerful ways than I can explain now. Silence as we pass the exit for 84. Silence as we pull onto the exit for McLoughlin and OMSI. Finally, I speak. Not to fight. But I'll take it over the silence. Later, he gives me enough tiny translucent lines of ketamine that I stop wanting to talk. The only sound is of the train tearing through the east side.  The next day at lunch, he won't speak to me--just scrolls through his phone. I am too tired to fight. 

[in-articulacy]

Rostro

All these faces I fall in love with but can't touch threaten to drown me. I dream about cupping jaws, about fingertips kissing cheekbones and collarbones . But these faces have claims laid to them. Contracts that were written with women like me in mind. I see the way our eyes meet-- almost as if I were a third-party observer who could watch these men tear up whatever they thought they knew.

Hold me down, tonight. I'll go looking for them. My hands will find a face, so beautiful it  burns my palms. And nothing colder will do.