Orion's Dogs

J.L.D. Poetry 2019. Queer poet in a weird world. Main @tumblr.c0tt0nstar.com

[orionsdogs]

“after Joy Harjo I am not ready to die yet: magnolia tree going wild outside my kitchen window & the dog needs a house, &, by the way, I just met you, my sisters & I have things to do, & I need to talk on the phone with my brother. Plant a tree. & all the things I said I’d get better at. In other words, I am not ready to die yet because didn’t we say we’d have a picnic the first hot day, I mean, the first really, really hot day? Taqueria. & swim, kin, & mussel & friend, don’t you go, go, no. Today we saw the dead bird, & stopped for it. & the airplanes glided above us. & the wind lifted the dead bird’s feathers. I am not ready to die yet. I want to live longer knowing that wind still moves a dead bird’s feathers. Wind doesn’t move over & say That thing can’t fly. Don’t go there. It’s dead. No, it just blows & blows lifting what it can. I am not ready to die yet. No. I want to live longer. I want to love you longer, say it again, I want to love you longer & sing that song again. & get pummeled by the sea & come up breathing & hot sun & those walks & those kids & hard laugh, clap your hands. I am not ready to die yet. Give me more dreams. To taste the fig. To hear the coyote, closer. I am not ready to die yet. But when I go, I’ll go knowing there will be a next time. I want to be like the cactus fields I drove through in Arizona. If I am a cactus, be the cactus I grow next to, arms up, every day, let me face you, every day of my cactus life. & when I go or you go, let me see you again somewhere, or you see me. Isn’t that you, old friend, my love? you might say, while swimming in some ocean to the small fish at your ankle. Or, Weren’t you my sister once? I might say to the sad, brown dog who follows me down the street. Or to the small boy or old woman or horse eye or to the tree. I know you I knew I know you, too I’m saying, could this be what makes me stop in front of thatdogwood, train whistle, those curtains blowing in that window. See now, there go some eyes you knew once riding the legs of another animal, wearing its blue sky, magnolia, wearing its bear or fine or wolf-wolf suit, see, somewhere in the night a mouth is singing You remind me You remind me & the heart flips over in the dusky sea of its chest like a fish signaling, Yes, yes it was me! &, yes, it was, & you were there, & are here now, yes, honey, yes hive, yes I will, Jack, see you again, even if it’s a lie, don’t let me know, not yet, not ever, I need to think I’ll see you, oh, see you again.”

— “I Am Not Ready to Die Yet,” Aracelis Girmay  (via commovente)

[io-to-orion]

Dreams

In your dreams you do things you know better than to do.

The ocean is a sick, dark soup that sways you until your stomach is rolling,

And when the slow salty waves overtake you,

You drink and drink and drink until you wake up nauseated.

In your dreams the poplar bark is canary yellow

And you peel it off in strips and eat it like taffy,

You tear the stars out of the twilight sky and they peel like tangerines,

Their sour insides melt your fingers,

You dissolve like salt.

Seep into the soil, through the bedrock, pollute the tomb-dark cavern of the groundwater,

Become a tank of nothing,

In your dreams you can destroy anything without feeling guilty-

And fall asleep within the dream and dream of nothing.

In your dreams the malamute splits down the middle like firewood

And inside him is a jungle where herds of malamutes run,

Their heavy fur slick with sweat,

Feet pounding the underbrush faster and faster until they sound like the river,

Move over you like the river.

And it doesn't matter that malamutes don’t live in the jungle,

Doesn’t matter they don’t, can’t sweat,

Don’t run in herds.

It doesn’t matter who split the first dog, or if it hurt,

In the dream the endless rush of their paws over you become so constant that it stops feeling like being crushed and starts feeling like drowning

And you can’t breathe but its a dream, you’re only dreaming, you wouldn't like it if it wasn't a dream,

And that’s all that matters.

In your dreams you take things that aren't yours,

You find them on their wedding night and

Snake your hand up under their shirt,

Press your mouths together until you have to swallow a sound that comes out of them like a fist uncurling,

Take their vows from their lips before they've had a chance to keep them,

Take their wet breath and shaking limbs without a thought to their new spouse changing in the other room,

Take the body and the sweat and the love and the secret voice that was not meant for you,  

And with the sharp press of them inside take everything,

In your dreams it's easy to take what doesn't belong to you,

To do all the wicked things you'd never really do.

There are nebulous things in your dreams that take off their skin like a cloak

And do not hide their nakedness from you.

So pillowy that your rain-soft fingers become talons that puncture and sink so deep that you come out with the juice of their spleens below your nails.

The you in your dreams pulls them apart like fresh bread,

Splits them like malamutes,

The you in your dreams hears their wailing but it doesn’t matter,

They are so warm and come apart so easily and it feels so good for once to have the power,

If it's only in your head, you don't have to call yourself a killer.

Like all the dreams before you can wake up and tell yourself it doesn’t matter,

Afterall who gets to decide what they dream, or if they do,

But the nightmare of it all is that the you in your dreams, is you.

[io-to-orion]

God Bless

God bless the day I got fat.

The long succession of days that lead to it,

The soft tissues that have hidden the suggestive angles of my skeleton,

All the bone and skin that has grown beyond any expectation to still hold me.

God bless the day men stopped asking for my body.

I was born early, didn’t even make it halfway to gemini,

What I mean is at most I am only half myself,

Most days even less than half.

Most days, at best I only resent having a face.

Sometimes while I wash my hands

I look up into the mirror and realize,

It’s been days.

So long since I’ve met my own gaze,

That my reflection seems strange,

But still plain, I find so very little of notice there,

God bless the day I cut my hair.

Forget who I was when I wouldn’t wear plaid,

Wouldn't wear lace,

Always in fear of being too butch or too femme,

Always tempering the volume of my exuberance,

Fighting through the silence of my shyness.

Forget who I was when I would have done anything,

Been anything to please you.

Would have melted all my weeping nights into quiet elegant baths,

Burnt my cruel tongue into something that only speaks sweet perfect fiction,

Hidden all the parts of me so soft they're always bruised, rotting, the pungence of them,

Broken off all my edges,

Bound myself into any painful shape, so long as it could be described as balanced

God bless the day I forgave myself my contradictions.

God bless the days I’m able to fade away,

Able to blend in,

To be the shadow.

When I’m not asked to speak beyond what will prove I still can,

When I feel safe enough to be lead by any steady hand.

And forget to worry sick about who I think I am.

I know that in the wild wolves don’t hold to the hierarchy prescribed to them,

But I am not wolf nor wild,

So I’ll always lead if no one else knows the steps,

But god bless,

The days I get to be the beta.

God bless the shopkeepers who do not try to tend to me,

The new friends who do not expect me to be clever or funny,

The magazines and make-up that no longer call out to me,

The fashions that don’t suit me,

The sensuality I’ve forgotten,

God bless being undesirable.

Being able, allowed, in the shadows to just be me,

Unburdened, without expectation,

God bless every shortcoming that has come to set me free,

So God bless the day I got fat,

Bless the day men stopped asking for my body.

[io-to-orion]

The Look-back Girl is Dead

There is enough distance now between me and the monster that was made of me,

I can see now how I let myself become a beast of burden,

Pulling a plow weighty and immense as God,

Tearing into the land of me, ruts deeper than the magma pools,

Turning my bedrock out to the air,

Turning me into wasted soil, into something gruesome.

I can see now how hate chisels the orange afternoon away into a pistol,

Turns men into wild boars, women into rusted traps,

Melts even the most tenacious hearts until they are thin enough to drink,

Turns even water sour,

Makes so heavy the work of life that even Atlas comes to envy my struggle.

And how wretched I was,

How pitiable that I taught my body to take pain like it was a gift,

Pulled back my veil for you, who wanted to strip me down to my skeleton.

Peeled the flesh away to reveal my bones for the splitting,

So to better allow you to pick out my marrow for a meeting with your tongue.

You, never full enough to deny yourself more of my meat,

And me, never satisfied enough with the sufferings that come natural with being,

How wretched were we.

Even this, now, right here, is some kind of punishment,

I’ve made a spectacle of my follies,

Turned my scars out to the light so strangers could see how I've flayed myself into strips so grizzly jagged that there is no way to see them and not be sickened.

And why?

So that one day you might realize the mess I let you make of me and cry?

So that you could watch as I turned all the sweetness left deep in me into salt?

There is enough distance between me and that ruined girl now,

And I am done looking back at her,

And back at you.

[io-to-orion]

Something Good

A spot of oil jumps up to bite the tender underside of your wrist,

Even as you hiss,

Its lightning hot bite turning your blue veined flesh vermillion,

You assure me that some pain is good.

And this is so typical of you,

pleasure between you and I was torture, even on our best days,

Your hands an apothecary for all things bitter and burning and biting

And always holding too hard.

In these poems I only use the most flattering animals to represent me,

And you are written in as little more the sour taste that lives at the back of a seasick mouth.

But the truth is we are both beasts,

Both turned by cruel teeth which fell down on us

With no greater warning that the sudden, unexplainable,

Gut-deep realization that you are about to lose something irreplaceable.

How lucky that I have grown so fond of the feeling of healing,

When I know what pleasure you've come to find in the breaking of things.

Not to say I was never asking for it,

In fact at times it seemed like there was nothing in the world so sacred that I wouldn't tear its legs off to feel something again.

No, I was never afraid of you,

Only of forgetting  yet another sensation.

Of never knowing again what it's like to feel deeply,

When those canyons in me where anger and elation and all else used to well out unbidden

Swelled shut like a black eye,

Your hard hands could still squeeze something out of me,

So maybe you were right,

Some pain is good.

[io-to-orion]

No Remorse

They say as soon as you feel remorse in your heart,

You are forgiven.

So I've never been forgiven.

I've turned out to be much harder you ever expected when we met,

Seemed like such a soft place to land,

Rumour was I smiled even as I was crying,

That no matter what I was hit with the bruising didn't show.

All a promise of soft body and mercy

Wrapped around your waist,

But it was false.

So on the surface, I am sorry.

In some places, even below the surface,

But the heart is deep and your whimpers do not resonate to there,

When you bear your neck for me something inside throbs, deeply,

But it is not my heart.

I stay up all night praying, but not for god,

No, to the sheep that jump your bed.

I've never been as good as you once thought,

Not as kind as you'd expect.

Waste all my nights whispering curses over your head,

Trying to turn your sugar plum dreams into brimstone instead,

Trying to poison your pink insides to a darker hue which suits me.

So I'm sorry that I dug my nails into you so deep,

Pierced you and would not retreat,

Relished the infection,

I'm sorry that the bitterness I offer has come to sustain you,

Im sorry,

But I'm not forgiven.

[io-to-orion]

Of Course

I expected too much of you and your hands,

How good you’d be a wringing, washing, scrubbing, blotting out.

Of course,

All the white gossamer in the world can’t undo the red of the sun,

Of course.

Of course hate will leave claw marks in the most secretive parts of you,

Will shave away strips of your question mark curves until all you can be is exclamation,

And cure you like clay into hard shapes that cannot be undone,

Of course.

But love can leave you with nothing but roiling guts,

Take a bite from you like a glacier slices through the appalachians

And leave behind nothing but naked hillside.

So I thought you could save me from all my sins

But you’re not the type of god who can even hear prayers,

And all my supplications bought me nothing,

All my pilgrimages to your temples left me nothing but salt on my lips,

Of course.

Of course there was nothing I could get from you but that which your body couldn’t help but give,

Of course you couldn’t exonerate me of all the transgressions I was still committing.

Of course love is not the same as atonement

And what I was looking for in you wasn’t love anyways,

Of course.

[io-to-orion]

A Mirror, Darkly

Lately my reflection only looks at me darkly,

I open our mouth and her tongue is a feast of splinters,

I would like to reach out and touch her,

Offer the comfort of body heat to that dimly polished copper,

But her swarthy cheek flinches away and suddenly it is so obvious,

I’ve betrayed her.

The stars were there before any hominin imagined to name them,

And so it is true for many things

How insensible to label anything that exists beyond our palms,

Afterall what will we call great Orion when Meissa goes out and he is left headless?

What sense will our legends make then?

Can any tongue of man or beast pronounce the names the bacterium have given themselves?

And it is an injustice to call anything by muddled echo, moniker, or shadow,

A harm to try and shut up anything into the sounds we’ve been trained to make,

Who has the right to baptize anything but itself?

Who is holy enough that they could try to name the stars and not taste soot

In their mouth at the utterance?

After all, what can turn the wave of evergreens red but the coleopteran?

Maybe the fungi,

Maybe the brushfire,

All designated for what they gut,

Beetle with your mouth full of slivers,

Do you resent us?

If we too were named for what we best destroy,

Who would name us?

[io-to-orion]

A Different Life

I was in 5th grade when I learned of the English and their Lay land

And Fallow summers

And 5 year rotations,

And I knew some years the field out back was full of hay, and others canola, and others wheat,

But never empty, never resting,

And I wondered if somehow, we were doing something selfish.

And when I told grandpa all about it he laughed and asked if I thought I knew more about what the earth needs than him,

If I already knew better than all his years and his father’s and his father’s,

If I had realized so young the sacrifice that land demands.

And he said maybe if I was so clever the farm should be mine,

That maybe Johnboy had come competition,

But I knew he didn't.

And when grandpa died all his lands and all their burdens were held in trust,

And they buried his ashes under the tamarack,

Beside the tractor garage where I used to think I'd get married.

And then when John died still a year shy of his inheritance,

They buried him there too,

And then my uncle sold everything he could.

When I first drove by the silos and saw the name on the side had been painted over, I cried.

I would have done it.

Would have lived a different life,

Never became a city girl,

Never forgotten what it's like to pack hay,

Or the stench of chicken coop,

Or the hard hot rasp of sun and wind and cold beyond my usual ephemeral urban excursions,

I would have learned what the soil demands of its keepers,

Would have grown rough and sore and stooped and short of fingers,

I would have taken my mothers maiden name if it mattered.

Forget the English,

The Romans,

The Egyptians,

The Israelites,

I’d follow the rotation that fed my family for generations,

Ride the old IH until it fell to pieces,

Covet the neighbors John Deere.

I’d wash my hands with laundry soap like Grandpa,

Bathe in rosewater like Grandma,

Marry someone who would grow potatoes

And carrots and beets and turnips for pickling,

Raspberries and Saskatoons for pies,

Someone who would bring egg sandwiches and mason jars full of black coffee

Out to the fields on hot summer days when I can’t stop the combine for even a moment

Because the almanac says it’ll rain any day.

And I’d hunt wild turkey in the spring and harvest chickens in the winter,

I’d learn all the ways that cussing helps helps fix an engine,

How to oil and grease and tighten and sharpen anything that needs it.

Never would have sold the homestead to the railhead,

Or the quarter section by the river to the Beales,

Or any other single acre, I would have fought for them all.

It would have been a different life,

A hard life.

But I would have done it.

[io-to-orion]

Laws of the Land

There are rules carved into my bones like cuneiform,

Ancient as Moses and his commandments,

My body remembers all things,

Even that which didn’t happen to it.

1. Lost lifetimes in a land of plenty,

Strange full fields green and blue and yellow,

And surrounded at all sides by a jut of mountain,

Terrible, smothering, and awful,

To be orphaned by the horizon,

To live surrounded, encircled by arms, to know despite the comfort that you are sunken,

To never witness the vanishing point,

Never learn the word “horizon”

To need above anything emancipation,

Freedom from that close cruel echo,

From the cruelty of closeness, in general.

2. Being myself a land of want,

Barren, dustbowl, desert,

Shrouded in the red and brown and grit of endless dust storm,

With every shutter closed against me,

Each breath was a dry rasp against the ash.

Even when it rained in the mountains,

And the cracked creek beds reawakened,

Not to flow again but at least to host the richness of mud,

Every delta of me grew suddenly green and flowering

But still the animals did not come back,

And anyways it didn’t last,

So from this humiliation came the first of my covenants:

Never let it show that you thirst.

3. My body remembers a time when all the men and women

Lost themselves to madness for love,

Before penicillin, before the cure, before the brothels closed their doors to the shivering rabble,

When our greatest minds and bodies were destroyed by dementia and blister and fever,

And all the plagues of sex,

And it was worth it, they said,

How she held me, how for one moment in the dark I was not alone,

Even as their eyes and livers and hearts were melting inside them,

They asked for more.

So came the second rule: Don’t ever taste it.

Save yourself from ever knowing what it’s like to sup life from a sweet spoon,

Save your fingers from the knife of longing.

After all being guarded never cost me anything in flesh,

Never hurt me in any way that could be traded in tales of woe among friends,

I never had to crave for anything I didn’t know the flavour of,

And never had to pay for any delicacies I didn’t devour.

3. And last a life upon the pyre,

A city state of brutal rule,

And every night a sacrifice,

Another pound of muscle to burn for gods who aren't listening,

Who never turn their heads to look down on us

Unless the smell of burning flesh dissipates too much,

Unless we dare to let our peals of joy lift up into their ears.

We hide our pleasures under stone roof and darkness of night,

Live lives that are only half alive,

Deny that love has ever hastened our hearts,

And cut away as much of ourselves as we can stomach for the fire

And die legless, armless, lighter than we ever were in our youth,

All to avoid the punishments that happiness might bring down on us.

And here is the last of the laws I took,

Heaven will not abide the joys of earth.

My body remembers all these lives, lands, profoundly,

Memory carved beyond the last depths that light can reach,

All the tender tending I have given every field in me cannot overgrow the salt of their decree,

Cannot allow for your root, leaf, stem, or twig.

I know this is an absurd explanation,

But it exists to deliver you one truth:

If not for the laws of this land, I would have cherished you.

[io-to-orion]

Stages of Grief Remix

Denial is not a factor, this time.

This time it begins with depression,

This time love comes as a form of self immolation,

It's so easy to find cruel lovers when you're a cruel woman.

Easy to bite your tongue clean off

When you've come to fear the voicing of any appetite,

When your deepest repositories of dream repel you like bile.

Easy to fold your sweet longing secrets

Close, into your breast so many times they turn into a paper crane,

Halved again and again until it is infinitely complex and atomically small,

And then easy to accept,

That Like so many things in life that close,

you may never again unwrap her.

Nothing else could make you shine so much as my anguish,

Your righteous glow uranium bright

As you told me I must take it all and throw it in the reservoir,

Everything that turned me into bruise,

Purge our lives of all that made me septic,

So I'm sorry that I tried to drown you.

And I'm sorry that when they drained the lake there were so many abandoned bicycles that it looked like a field of metal rose bushes,

That I ever let myself forget how many times I tried to run away

And only got far enough to leave some blue or red or silver, shining spokes and

Hair moving in the wind, piece of me somewhere no one would ever find

And know that I had stolen it.

That I let them become lost to tangle and rust,

That they sank out of my prayers and my memory,

I'm sorry I cried over them and let you see it.

I would give anything to take back those vulnerabilities

I traded to you for another pinch of your salt,

I would give my next ten years to take back that one,

Where I lived in your brine,

Became hardened,

How I hated all the bitter fruit in me,

And the rotting fruit,

And the sweet fruit,

How many stars I would tear from their stem of sky and crush into dust along with my own fingers

If I could have you un-eat me,

Un-cure me, un-leven me,

But just like with bread I know I can't be flour again.

No matter how many times I told myself “it doesn't count if I never loved you,”

I can't deny that I've sunken into that oldest profession,

Sold my body for the punishment,

For hurt and hate and to feel hands in the only way I wasn't terrified of,

For hardness.

No matter how much I’ve said “it wasn't real”,

I must admit that my body still lives with the marks I let you give me.

Maybe it’s true,

That I was asking for it,

Pushed you ‘til your first broke through the plaster in our bathroom,

Broke my tooth on our brutal kiss,

Asked you to grow your nail out until you could pierce my tongue with it,

I asked for every inch of fight and pinch and dirt beneath my nails

And every drip of every fluid my body could give,

I asked you to take it and if I said “no” not to listen,

It’s true, I asked you to,

But then gladly you did.

[io-to-orion]

Hunger

And what a pity that a pitiless woman would still reach for love,

To ask for clemency where she has given none,

To feed for once those feelings she’s made a reputation out of starving.

Understand this, if nothing else:

Once you taste it, it changes you.

Love lives forever between your bones,

And so you will crack every joint looking for any

Tiny release of the memory of that sweet murk,

Despite airs,

I am no stronger than anybody else.

How easily I’ve come to let myself indulge in cruel fantasies,

To turn the tables on this wanting,

To see my smothering tunnel of love turned into the inside of your ribcage,

And imagine how I might touch the muscle and delight at it’s tremble.

How good to feel the salt of my skin against the meat of something,

How good to burn

And for once not be burnt.

In these dreams I have lived inside your mind and with mirth called it a terror,

Bit into your swollen heart and sneered “it is a taste to be acquired,”

Stopped for once my disgraceful chasing,

And lived an imaginary moment as something hunted.

Pranced through your dreams as only the most flattering of animals,

Clung to being wanted like a parasite,

Grown fat from the butter of your affections.

My weakness for these fantasies ripen sinister,

Grow larger within me the longer I live without rightly knowing you,

And carve out from the center all which used to be in me before I sold it

For dreams of your tongue melting like snow against mine.

It swells larger the longer I crave,

Lack of feed never threatening to emaciate it,

After all a monster weaned too early

Finds comfort in hunger.

I tried to pluck you from my hand like a wart,

But it bled and bled and bled

And left us both wet,

Betrayed the sweat of my dreams.

Left a hole in me,

How constant of you, to grow in me,

And leave a hollow where you grew.

A part of my flesh that was once complete

But by knowing you has learned newly to hunger.

[io-to-orion]

Old Burdens, Left Behind

There is so much I wanted from today,

Not smallest some peace,

But the tiny sparrow with his tiny eyes and tiny wings

At my window has unraveled me.

His tiny curved beak pulling at a ribbon in me,

Red ribbon, stretching, glistening,

And dripping.

If you want to know what this means

Ask the brown bird that watches me,

As I spend my days doing nothing,

Thinking on nothing,

Having dreams of nothing.

If you want to know what that means,

Ask him “will we ever be happy?”

Some days I have wanted so much,

Others only one thing.

But who has the right to decide the length of a life anyways?

What if all the creatures that will eat my bones are not ready for

Dinner?

What if the small bird that watches me is not yet hungry for my carrion?

And knowing its not up to me

Is some small bit of peace,

Something that re-ravels me.

[io-to-orion]

Anniversary

December comes around again,

And it’s finally snowed the way the Almanac promised it would,

It’s an anniversary.

Incredibly it was November only last week,

And though days always move in the same direction

It surprises me.

It surprises me that for once I haven’t thought of you in some time,

But to me December is some kind of anniversary.

Or maybe it’s the foot of snowfall or the slick streets

Or the thought I’ll be going back home sometime soon.

I’ll be decorating the Christmas tree,

And it’s then,

Halfway through some explanation of how the only thing

I ever loved

About this month was decorating the Christmas tree

That I remember that’s not all I ever loved about December.

And it surprises me,

That after all these years my stomach still turns over

When I think about our winter,

And every little opportunity we missed.

It’s December again,

And I’m halfway through some kind of explanation

Of all the ways this month disappoints me,

When I remember how close we came to perfect circle,

The disappointment of partial eclipse,

And I think of you again like I used to.

And I wonder for a moment

If we had been able to grasp even just one of those missed opportunities

If maybe this year We’d be decorating,

If maybe by now we would be married.

December is some kind of anniversary to me.

[io-to-orion]

On an Afternoon by the Sea I am Remembering

All our distant years,

They roll me across their tsunami wide shoulders,

And I find only seasickness between them.

All I ever asked for was a moment of rest,

A grassy knoll for my hands to grasp,

But you have me nothing but depths.

You only ever helped me like how an angler

Helps to yank the barb from his catch.

You only ever taught me that which my knowing could serve you.

Once I painted a picture of you and I and left it out so you might see it,

I painted a picture and you were the ocean,

My body a white speck of flotsam against all the blue in the world.

We once sat silent,

Sunburnt all day on a small lake that smelled of bile only to catch nothing,

I once considered this to be a happy memory.

I once painted a picture of the ocean

But it wasn’t you,

So I guess it’s okay that you never saw it.

[io-to-orion]

Talkative

There are many things I’ve learned in this lifetime that I wish I hadn’t,

The bitterness of partial eclipse,

How space and time tend to line up not-quite-right,

The betrayal of learning how to sign someone else’s last name,

Of forgetting how to,

How our insides are much wetter than we ever imagine them to be from textbook pictures,

And that your bones melt like sugar inside you when you most need their strength,

Or even just that time is far more subjective than we ever consider,

When we’re just kids sitting in the barber’s chair and an hour takes all day.

That there is so much more to say than what we ever think of when we first learn language,

That oftentimes we must decide which we would rather be, the dictator or the scrivener,

Sometimes I wish I’d never learned to read.

Sometimes I wish I’d never come to understand speech.

Never felt how some things can stick in your throat like you swallowed a whole apple,

Never learned the taste of tender words and how they make shapes in your mouth before they fall out,

That you can almost feel them on your tongue,

Against the roof of your mouth like precious stones of every shape that magically disintegrate like phantoms as soon as they pass your teeth.

Never been given something that seems like it could be made into a key to finally decode the cypher of each other's depths,

And to realize somewhere along the way that the tower of Babel could never have been built high enough.

Sometimes I wish I’d never learned how to turn all the fathomless things in my heart into something more graspable,

I wish I’d never learned how to make all my feelings small enough to fit into my mouth,

I wish I’d never tried to make words enough,

Never learned they are never enough,

And mostly, I wish I hadn’t become so preoccupied with being misunderstood.

[io-to-orion]

Yes

Say yes,

Say yes again.

Say it so many times you could climb them to the sun.

Let life give you warmth,

Be receptive,

Perceptive,

Let your heart feel it all-

Don’t protect it.

Justify indulgences,

Know that some days you deserve excess,

Don’t hold back your thirst,

Taste of everything in life which quenches.

When asked to partake in the zest don’t waffle,

Say yes.