In His Womb

- You can't downsize your close up. -

[in-his-womb]

+972

I may relay my words, so that I remember and that I revisit and that I can know then, for sure, whether I’m still breathing underwater. I could tie my fingers around your number once more, while you’re still in sight. But I think I’d rather we miss each other completely so that we can find something entirely new, should we ever rub shoulders again. 

This is not poetic. Not everything is.

[in-his-womb]

You’re already in (again, now)

I wanna give context to the lack of pouring, but I can’t. Not now, with something so urgent playing deathglobe in my ribcage. I knew the danger of loving you, of lying with you, licking your gums. I knew there was danger, and I saw you wanted to burst out of this. To hear you now, you were sitting across the table from me, and you drop the H bomb...and before I consider what Death might knit me, I first consider taking you in my lap and kissing your forehead. To have you confess you knew what you were doing, and you wanted to die - and I wanted to die, before you - and killed me instead - but not quite, not really. I survived to hear you tell me you knew.

I survived to hear you asking me to forgive you. You said you’re sorry. And I concede you my blessings, because I drip Love from my fingernails, and now the question that hustles in loops from my right to my left year, hammering the walls of my throat - why? If you knew you were hurting me, why? and I let you know I’ll be loving you still. Why?

- C

[in-his-womb]

Mums

feet to ground upper lid perked hair on my back a white strand grows amidst the seedpods and I run every night. I don’t sleep early and the day is long. I’ve made it past the dead line. if I can eat that moan this new, prepped womb will grow bombs. ready to burst.

- C

[in-his-womb]

and all this activity in Mars...

Where to even start....after the kisses which cost me heaven, and I saw his Mars hiding in the XII, all wartank, and I survived the minefield and I held your hand - your hand - and I could not walk away. Chest carved itself into shelter, molded after your measures, and all of that, never enough. You claim I cut you too deep and then you cut me in a thousand pieces to feel justified and we’re passing our Love through the grinder, all the while “forgetting” how it all started to burn down. And I SWEAR I try my best to kiss new life into us, but as I passed the Featherfields, it dawned on me, right inside of my stomach and all up my throat. The end has been drawn as you paced the nightstreets on Sin City as I slept. Its colors all too vivid brushed by the sunset. I’ll meet you soon to hate you face to face. It will be the saddest cry of failure I will have uttered. - C

[in-his-womb]

Before Sundown

It’s 5pm. Summer is approaching - sloooowlyyy - and I feel the rain air balming in from  the east. My clothes, tightly gripped around my body. I walked some 15minutes and I’m drenched in sweat. You have just raised me your white flag and now is when I begin to understand, as I recollect the lines said, and the unsaid parts lying beneath them, what we have meant. Venus is in Scorpio and Mars in Capricorn, just like my birth chart, and you’ve been eclipsed, from end to end. “You little war tank”, I say, “and this dull drag beside you, behind you, around you”. “Curandero”, you call me, and ask “how have you been?”. I kissed a little playboy on the way down and his scent is all over my hands. Backseat, dead end. I am possessed by the force I exerted upon you. Your question, I’m not yet ready to answer. - C

[in-his-womb]

i don't know what living a balanced life feels like when i am sad i don't cry i pour when i am happy i don't smile i glow when i am angry i don't yell i burn the good thing about feeling in extremes is when i love i give them wings but perhaps that isn't such a good thing cause they always tend to leave and you should see me when my heart is broken i don't grieve i shatter

Rupi Kaur, from "Milk and Honey"

[in-his-womb]

Microbeads

I try to listen to a hinge of willingness in your voice, like a silver lining. How hollow of my wisdom to keep pushing seeds in deserted sand. Last we sat at the table, you leaned back on your chair like wave recoiling, arms crossed. You said no to dessert. I accept it, now. - C

[in-his-womb]

lovevoidedlove

I unbottled my thunders and rubbed away my skin to reveal the bottomlessness of the within. Then you called me “God”, and adored me - with the distance and reverence with which we’re taught Gods should be adored. I called myself the words you couldn’t use for yourself, and with those words you’ve built an altar, boxed in glass - me, never to be touched. I don’t want to harness this Divinity if it is to be parted from where you elevate your Lust. I’m bursting with Rage for all the constructs that make me a perfect screen for your Projections, though equally perfect for your supposed “mundane” Rejection. - C

[in-his-womb]

“it’s like when you find a perfect fit, missing a button, last piece on sale” I don’t even know who you are. We talked of mermaids and wreckages, and I saw the picture of your friend who looks just like Jade Pools Wheatfield, but taller. There is a thread driving me back into these drawers...I saw a Fortune Teller, and she opened the cards over the feet of four men, and none of them are you. “You”. As faceless and nameless and not on the horizon as you’ve never been. I have built up a fortress so solid between me and the names that I knew, and now, everything new, I know not how to operate. Every one of You feels so distant. I’m dealing with a mass of leftovers from lovers who could never be. Who didn’t want to. And one who does, so much so, I don’t know if I can. Is this the big funny twist I kept on missing with all the others? I’m carrying a mess of blurred lines that don’t ever connect cohesevily enough so that I can understand. I guess I’m back to that old maze of paths crossing a map that has not been finished, yet. Feet dipped in ink. Heart dropped in bomb. Head rising from the faithless plunge of a fool’s gold crown heavily hung. Because I believed the suffering would open tunnels across these fears...that they’d be ghosts I could blow out by whispering “I won.” Little did I know...I used to know you so well. I’m just getting to know myself, this time without a You to contrast to. I don’t have to know who you are. - C

[buttonpoetry]

From Jacqui Germain’s new book, When the Ghosts Come Ashore.

[in-his-womb]

Won’t.

You in here black swan nightswimming I for you fire hungry tigerlilly there’s a swamp by the edges of this lake by the edges of these petals, I grow blades you reach out in the dark I burn the bridges, cut a spark your damp hollow I’ll sword swallow these undulations won’t travel far these love regions remain apart. ((four lips folded apart, in pockets and four eyes pulled out of their sockets gravitating in collision course four black meteors made of magnets And we swear we can escape. This is madness.)) - C

[in-his-womb]

Notes from The Rescue.

I didn’t much write for the time you stayed, for that’s been the first time the poetry was being laid on the everyday, not on the secret pages. - C

[in-his-womb]

and you don’t know what you feel / but you know it’s not ‘satisfied’

[in-his-womb]

great magnet pulls

this purity that smells so good on your breath slid off on through the back of my hands before ebullition began milky sweet you hold the promise the world couldn’t keep for me and I want you I crave you  as if I could feed on your nectarine saliva in sips of the taste it all could have been had these eyes not seen so much so young. I crave you like honey on toast. the me I picture to be with you is the one that I wanted to be the most. - C

[in-his-womb]

The Last Three Years Were Just Pretend

lungs full of breath unused I used to say words I wouldn’t regret and with you, my open wounds I just don’t know what to say "come rest here on my lap” I would call you to my nest to lull you all loved the way we should have had pouring tears over scars to tender the fibers for the bursting of new stars from underneath our skin so toughed out from hurting so loud I guess this is forgiveness I’m begging to learn now (...)

- C

[in-his-womb]

Hariboom

four lips folded apart, in pockets and four eyes pulled out of their sockets gravitating in collision course four black meteors made of magnets And we swear we can escape. This is madness. - C

[in-his-womb]

Pearl-to-dust

as I part these lips and let all the emptiness leak the words that escape as I speak have shards and edges stiff enough to grind these teeth pearldust. the last smile buoy keeps sinking ever so deep as I’m ground between the days that never seem to leap up off the rut I’ve been hit hard with. - C