Silver Afternoon Poetry

“Poems are never just poems. They’re compensating for something. Here are the words I wish I had written in crescent-moon bite marks down your neck. Here are a hundred words for “stay,” and a hundred more for “please.” Here is how I hold a pen. Here is how the pen holds me. Here are my thoughts, over-steeped in empty fervor. Here is nothing and everything all at the same time.” — Fragment 5, Kristina Kutateladze

[silver-afternoons]

Sometimes when I am driving late at night I forget which coast I am on, which year of my life I am existing in

I am the single point of convergence of all past selves collapsing inward, fumbling towards a moment of blinking clarity, it is Now

I am having the same arguments with myself, with you

Nothing feels real You get used to it.

[silver-afternoons]

The moon was waning and so were you by the night of dark moon you were finally resting, finally stopped to lick your wounds, to wait

You were a river running through me, bringing new water and life in as fast as you rushed it onward

One day we will meet at the ocean under perigee moon the water still and black, our hearts open but hardened by the answers we sought and then denied

We will drain our anguish into the dark sands and step softly into the lifeless tide together

[silver-afternoons]

Everything in here reeks of stale nicotine. Close your dusty book and look me in the eyes.

Do you think this is a fucking joke?

The bodies are piling up at your feet, the knives are singing for blood again.

The patterns on the carpet are dancing for you, twisting and fading over themselves, pulling your mind away from what is real.

Nothing is real.

Do you want to fix yourself or fall into the abyss?

I know the swell and burst of decision making is what keeps you in bed on Sunday mornings but you have to choose: life or death, recovery or relapse.

Wipe the crystals from your gum line with your dry tongue and move on, the high will fade and you will still be here staring yourself in the bloodshot eyes.

It is morning, the sun has risen, get yourself into a bed or pull yourself out of one, just, take care of yourself if you can, okay? Pay attention to how the sunset makes the world seem soft, and feasible, how one day its light will burn through your eyes and you will believe it.

[silver-afternoons]

As long as my foot is on the gas I know I am doing something right as long as the rear view holds faces I cannot bring my eyes to meet, I will drive until their beating gaze cannot finger at the steering wheel 

I am navigating through lightning and fog just trying to get back to my body but I am sleeping nestled in strangers rib cages on the long Western road, where the horizon is broken and warped by the rising heat 

I cannot foresee what it holds in its outstretched palms, if anything at all but in any case it will make for a better tomorrow than here, for at least the mountains will cradle me in the ways I have neglected, at least I will transcend this apathy in favor of fostering my humanity, and at least I will be back in my body, back in my skin 

[silver-afternoons]

The clouds sit dense and low in the pasture where my horses lie dead and buried, where the deer gather at odd hours, pause their grazing to lift their heads at me, deciding in a tense moment whether I am something to be feared, their high beam eyes make me sweat, remembering my hands, cutting hands, hands on shoulders and wrists, hands wrist deep in old wounds these are not my own bloody fingers, hanging on by threads  I stare down at them until they fall off one by one splashing into puddles of moon glow, and I am just standing there in the blinding light, waiting for the heads of deers to dip back down into the grass, undaunted

[silver-afternoons]

I am back underneath the trees where I was born  where the lies come spilling from my closed chapped lips, where my blood is not my own 

Headlights come seeping out of the the cemetery where my father lies, I shouldn’t have come here, I shouldn’t have gotten behind the wheel manic and blind, I shouldn’t have dug my hands into the dirt, burnt my flesh with the rosebud of a lit cigarette, I shouldn’t have fucked my best friend because I was bored and lonely I shouldn’t have.

I am burning bridges just trying to stay warm 

There is nothing romantic about this blizzard, you offering your carcass as a shelter from the cold while I keep on walking, leaving you open, freezing

I am making love to small people, covering their bodies with my broken bones, coveting their light and mistaking it as my own

No one spurns the wolf for the fawn it must eat, but that does not cleanse the blood stains from its toothy grin 

[silver-afternoons]

I am the sinkhole sleeping below the cities we built over each other  nestled between goose bump mountain ranges - we thought we were safe from all that incessant emptiness, but it is not death we were meant to fear  it is the abyss you pour yourself into, the lack of recognition  when I am confronted with my own reflection 

How do you love someone so erratic? Do you love the tempest or the halcyon? The volatility itself? 

I am the void where men are lost at sea, I never meant to hold anybody, I am just trying to feel alive

[silver-afternoons]

I just need a minute on the floor to figure out what the FUCK I am doing here

Once I was a woman who knew, but now I am just the stranger who woke up in her sheets and I cannot remember her face even when I stare at it, unblinking in the cold bathroom mirror, I cannot remember the way she looked at light - changing it from blue to yellow, all waxing moon and roaring ocean, on days when I am this, I cannot recall her gentle touch, the soft cadence in her whisper as she promises Tomorrow

[silver-afternoons]

It is not the onus of my hands to instruct yours how to hold me without breaking or burning 

I am tired of your touch telling me that I  am hard to love 

I did not expect the pin holes in your sides the leaky faucet pitter patter eating through the silence all the breath and blood I poured into you, trickling out puddling under the bed where I held your empty body 

I picked at my seams and let you peek inside, not to plead you for stitches, but to see if you’d fathom what it means to float in the middle of my ocean the water warm and black, and sky bleached white, the the hum of this obstinate splitting all along the horizon

I am tramping towards the stars, but I did not ask you to carry me to them I know your maps and bridges are just as burned as mine, I merely wanted an open hand to eat from while I climb towards the abyss that all the cosmos come spilling out of, crashing like skipped stones into the black ocean, rippling the horizon into a composed and unfamiliar shade of gray 

[silver-afternoons]

The storm is settled, but we are still standing in the puddles it has left

The butterflies are blinking their wings in the sunlight,  remembering they are butterflies

I tried to love you the way I try to fall asleep,  but it is the trying that brings hours of ceiling staring, collecting bags for under dry eyes, a refuge for old mints and crumpled dollar bills, as well as a passport and a ticket under a false name 

Perhaps it is the easy way out of the hospital bed, but now I see we were never made to touch one another we were two supernovas imploding into black holes, trying to be a constellation when it was far too late for star mapping, lost without a compass in a sea of absence and sovereignty 

[silver-afternoons]

You are the dawn warmth between my thighs that wakes me, unraveling me into the day,

There are parts of me that will remain in that crescive heat, under the cryptic covers, for what little daylight hours remain

Perpetually becoming taut under your lips, quivering under your fingertips; a phantom of volatile gravity ebbing into vernal levity

[silver-afternoons]

Wanderers of the night: cold flesh, empty hands heart sunk into the vacant drink you left at the bar like the flag a man left on the moon  -a false understanding of significance 

You are weary, wallowing, lonesome but if nothing else, take solace in this the dim glow of the street lights paints your path golden and my cat watches as you make your way homeward he blinks his full moon eyes, and wishes you goodnight 

[silver-afternoons]

For all ye lonely valentines

[silver-afternoons]

I want to breathe but it is too late now

Remind me tomorrow. I will excavate my veins like beefy men in Rome, gouging the earth for the next blanket of marble to be laid down they toss up fragmented hands, the Venus de Milo’s arms and pussy, it is nothing to them but in the way, and this is how I want to think of your ruins, tomorrow I will be rid of them, I will lay the foundation for the next empire to fall upon

[silver-afternoons]

What can a human body tell you? How water wears down the stone? How lightning  burns the earth where it meant to elucidate?

Your touch tells me what you crave and why  and I am ravenous for your sunlight, gold through the trees, and on the beach where mountains sit pink on the water that stumbles toward laughing feet

Or your moonlight, lingering behind bodies washed ashore, wrapped around each other and a waning fire, the tide rising to take the three away again  evanescent burning covering pale flesh in luminous drunken kisses 

We cannot train our hearts, nor can we forgive them we will all bleed out eventually, with nothing left to offer but the quiver in our bloody shaking hands 

[silver-afternoons]

If I am the ancient marble excavated from your ruins, then you  are the thousand years of venerating hands, wearing me down making me soft

We are the starved ravens, pausing from the hunt to play in the snow winter morning impatiently frosting our toes so that we will press against one another waking, thawing sparking flames with our kindling thighs, tangled in the pink sunrise sheets

[silver-afternoons]

Bodies stirring, speaking in twisted tongues cold lungs, pulling in the same stale smoke laughter exhaled into the nape of a neck that you clutch as if you see frost bitten toes pointed toward the open door I am waiting, and this is the wind that fuels the fire that sends it scorching across a landscape that you can no longer recall being anything but a pulsing red inferno

[silver-afternoons]

You touch me as the brush touches the canvas as the bow caresses the strings and yet you deny your ability to transform and translate light

Hours pass in the drunken abyss that is my salted sheets it is midnight until it is not and suddenly it is midnight again and you kneel at my altar praying for all the light left inside of me (there is no light left inside of me)

We bite off our tongues and bleed into one another how does it feel to wake up alone, next to me? how does it feel to burn for me? be burned by me? don’t tell me, for I am dying to know and it will be a fitting end where will we hide the poison? how will it find its way into our gilded cups? yes, I am dying to know, and I am dying to die for you