VIII
All of my poems are too many poems to be one poem. + this is my fifth attempt in the last three hours to write anything useful, but I'm too sleep-deprived to make sense. I'm alone weekly now, the partner staying in the city for two days + one night to give relief to the commute. + with all of that time, I've cut my hair + it's made it curlier. A sweet little shag to frame my face, slicing away the dead stuff + watching as it floated down into the sink. The cats woke me early + so my rest was a mere five hours or not enough in other words. I've finished the branding for my project, + I force myself not to show it to you. Somewhere, there is a man who refused to answer my insistence, so I said be free, as who am I to stop anyone from the full realization of their wishes, to disrespect the want of any other.
Which is a funny question when that's all we do to ourselves, cauterizing our feeling + delaying the inevitable for the sake of every imagined consequence. I suppose I should confess now my failures to read enough in the past five days to write anything I'd be pleased with. Too much travel. Too much family + friends + all the noise that comes with these things. I suppose the fatigue plays itself out here alongside the unfedness of my memory. I suppose it all culminates into the predicament I'm just about to place us in when nothing but the plainest language seems capable of holding down the line enough to not frighten the wild animal of togetherness. The deer has only now come back into view + here I am wanting to run right at it. Here I am spooking the beast by talking too loud.
I've not been writing either, another problem for today besides the reading. Too busy, too distracted, too avoiding of myself. I write + a cat cries to be fed. I write + it all comes out in a voice I barely recognize. I write + scrap + write + scrap.
I say: I would travel miles, suffer any month, just to hold your shaking hand. To lie next to you, peaceful + breathing slowly in the warmth that carries itself through the window + lands upon the ruffled bed. To eat strawberries in the sun, swallowing laughter + milling the sand beneath our feet. To sit still in the gentled ease of silence as we watch the birds flying beyond us, with my fingers + your fingers bounded together for however long we've stolen from our separate realities. These moments. Our patience. Your tongue in my mouth + your lips upon my eyes like two coins placed before you sail my body down the river of my eventual end, which is, yes, a cheap + vile trick meant to remind you that we are dying + only have so many chances at these brief happinesses. So let us be brave for once. To carve out our need + claim it sacred. An island of intimacy. A smooth pebble in your pocket when the truth is that I'm already there. + so are you. So let us have what proves itself resilient to the ordinary, the happening that has already happened.
Trust that we will handle it well.
