fragments of feeling

my passing fancies on steroids

[likeaburningbuilding]

I wanted to say something about lovers and the way they are intimately acquainted with parts of your  body that you have  never even seen,

or about the skin of your arm where it meets your elbow, and  how you’d deny it  but you always wanted to be a martyr, still do, on the front lines of the class war or the music scene.

maybe about how sometimes you talk about the things the pretty buff boys at college did and said when they should have been in bed, how you are still hoping to forget.

You know, you can give some of it to me if you want to.

Sitting in my  passenger seat, Eyes downcast, you glow more brightly than you can begin to imagine.

You know, I love you more than I can understand.

-K.K.

[likeaburningbuilding]

We find ourselves in August, deep in the belly of the year.

Surfacing for air, I watch as you bend to pick up shells, study them, tuck them carefully into your pocket to give to me later.

The sun, I think, has never been as hot as it is now.

I think, even God couldn’t have dreamed you up.

-K.K. 

[likeaburningbuilding]

I Imagine myself someday,  sitting alone,  thinking about you.

Maybe  it can feel like the sharpest edge of dusk;  life, finally, unfurling her tendrils around me.

K.K.

[likeaburningbuilding]

I am always counting down the time until the next time I can be alone   What a shame. Always chewing on life just waiting to swallow.

-K.K.

[likeaburningbuilding]

In the kitchen, In the quiet, I sit in the chair where you sat, a dog licking round and round  the rim of his bowl.

-K.K.

[likeaburningbuilding]

In the kitchen, In the quiet, I sit in the chair where you sat, a dog licking round and round  the rim of his bowl.

-K.K.

[likeaburningbuilding]

What I wanted to ask:  what else is love  other than an excuse to  wake up in the morning, something to think about when your arm presses against the fabric of your sheets?

What I mean is that, when my hands start to shake,  folding the towels or picking out jars of olives,  I still picture myself in your car  next to you.

-K.K.

[likeaburningbuilding]

Lately I occupy myself mapping out the different roads to the same places I tell people I don’t visit anymore, wonder what they’d think  if I broke down. 

This I know; if i have  a guardian angel I hope they’re at some bar already five shots deep.

This I know; The stillness Has cut the June out of me.

-K.K.

[likeaburningbuilding]

When I was nineteen I got so sick, I couldn’t wake up for weeks.  I dreamed of eating only meat, walking through the world always pressing my tongue against the the gummy remnants stuck to the back of my teeth. 

When I come home, I try not to cry at the dinner table but later I still beg my mother to braid my hair.

She talks about the year her blood betrayed her and she moved through the world like something suspended in honey. How her brain was never quite the same.

I don’t ask But  I still wonder, sometimes, if she ever misses it.

Even only the after, that first time. The way the sun felt on her knees.

-K.K.

[likeaburningbuilding]

In the dream I see you again at a funeral for someone whose name I don’t remember.

Rumor has it kid fell asleep with a cigarette in his mouth, burned the house clean down.

As we make to leave, you stop to help me button my coat.

Neither one of us says a thing. 

-K.K.

[likeaburningbuilding]

Some warm-strange time in October, when the days seem suspended in amber I drink too much whiskey from the lowest shelf and let a stranger touch my hair and listen to them make up reasons to get me to sleep next to them.

Depending on the night, I take them up on it or move my feet slowly toward home. The light from the swinging bar door pours and  puddles in the street, exposing the smoke slinking shyly skyward as I make my way through  the garden of limestone.

-K.K. 

[likeaburningbuilding]

When I mention that I miss you (words rushed as if apologizing for themselves), what I am really saying is 

there are fragments of you wedged into me  like little pieces of glass embedded   in the soft underside of my foot.

-K.K.

[likeaburningbuilding]

When I saw you a few months ago, I was trying to come up with something to say about the weather. But really, I was thinking of when once, on our way to dinner, we passed a bird lying on his side by the curb, still like sleep.

You said that you had forgotten something in the car. Through the window, I pretended not to watch as you cupped your hands, and covered him with blades of grass, laying a branch of holly across his breast, and  pretended not to notice me watching.

I was thinking about how  there’s a wall in some backcountry joint, somewhere states away, with our names still tattooed into its fake wood paneling, how the men stopping for burgers and cheap beer might notice it, as they talk shop to the bartender as an excuse to keep on talking, and the toddlers fidget in their booster seats until the waitress comes with crayons and a printout coloring page, and their mama coos over their newest design.

I was thinking about how I’m not sure I would be able to find the spot, even if I remembered the name of the place, even if I really tried.

-Impromptu Burials by K.K. 

[likeaburningbuilding]

i just wanted to say that i love your poetry specifically the one that starts with “we spent the rest of the smoke break chasing the ufo” also your other stuff as well it’s kinda been inspiring me to pick up writing poetry again!

Oh wow! This is so kind and really made my night, I'm so touched someone else found some meaning in it. Thank you so very much for your lovely words 💌

[likeaburningbuilding]

There’s this game I play with myself occasionally, although I don’t remember deciding to. It usually happens when I’m driving down a familiar road some evening on my way home from work, or maybe I’m in the supermarket parking lot hurriedly unpacking my groceries into my car, and something about my surroundings, something about the way that this particular night composes itself, gives me pause. 

 It becomes suddenly very important, then, to imagine I am a traveler seeing this this place for the very first time, passing by too briefly to form any lasting impressions. Some indefinable hunger makes itself known, and compels me to try and look at  the shadows of the streetlights and the manicured islands of lime green grass and tiny trees between the rows of parking spaces as something alien and new.  It’s a subtle shift, an inexplicably gratifying self-discovery, like when you’re a kid and you first realize you can deliberately un-focus your eyes until the edges of the  world around you smears into a satisfying blur. 

It never lasts very long, but, while it does, it’s as if these ordinary snapshots of objects you pass every day suddenly hold a limitless possibility. For those few moments, you’re not inside of your own life but looking at it as you would some still-life or pastoral tucked into the middle of the permanent collection in a museum, the kind of piece that boasts nothing particularly remarkable in form or subject matter, but in front of which you stop for a few seconds longer than you do the others all the same. Not really knowing why, you linger, imagining  exactly what it might feel like to slip inside the frame.

What is it that makes a  place feel so much more inviting, so much more real, when you don’t know anything at all about it?

 An exercise in unfamiliarity. 

The freedom that only comes from being a stranger. 

-K.K.

[likeaburningbuilding]

The improbability of finding someone willing to love us gently. An intimacy that doesn't feel like a kind of dissection, someone else finding an excuse to cut you open, poke around at the most tender parts of you in search of some greater knowledge that can only be experienced. Some fundamental truth that more than makes up for the lingering smell of chemicals burning your nostrils and the scraping of skin into the garbage bin when it's done.

Oh, well. It can't be helped.

-K.K.

[likeaburningbuilding]

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

💌🌺🍬