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Homespun (Maps for December)

In my dreams it is quiet, the house lights are on and the front hall is dark and I can hear breathing, the universe is sleeping. In my dreams I’m not running, for once, snow is falling and I am just watching, afraid to tramp through the pristine unfolding. In my dreams it is December and the shops have gone quiet lights line the driveways, runways pave the road to home. Maps for the winter. In my dreams we are together in this homespun conception of a time space continuum where a single point can hold me, call me home, be alone. With me.

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On Cultivated Agnosticism

I have seen the things that fear of God can do to a person; seen enough to know that the cruelest sin at all is to take it away from him.

On Settling, far away

There was a very specific type of loneliness to those nights, a sort of belligerence. A refusal to be anything but fulfilled by the empty rattling of the tin can skyline.

On Misplaced Vibrations

My first night in the city, I dream of nothing but earthquakes. Even though I have been so careful, stacking everything to avoid toppling – never mind that this is the Northeast and we don’t have to worry about these things. Days later, lying awake in my box spring bed stacked on stilts and drawers, I feel the vibrations of the city moving through me. Every truck, every gust, every neighbor’s slammed door sets off the same bell in my skull. For a moment, I appreciate the irony. Because I never feared seismic shifts when they were an honest possibility, never stirred from the bed in which I had woken so many times to find the walls around me shaking. I only started fearing quakes once you were 3,000 miles away.

On Indelicacy

I don’t want to call you interesting because I realize that this is the actual real life you are living. [ruining]

On the Categorical Trouble of Poetry

It doesn’t feel fair that I probably haven’t actually thought of you much more than you have thought of me but when I am thinking it ends up in writing, which is harder to expunge from one’s memory of being.

On Discovering Unpleasant Truths, the aftermath

And now I am calibrating every excuse for what I knew 0.5 seconds after I met you.

On Travel Planning

I know I need to stay here long enough that when I leave I will be counting the days to my return inside ticking veins.

On the Homespun Manifesto

I want to make something because I want to prove there is something to be made.

On Insistent Indifference

It is the middle of the night here and it is even more the middle of the night there and I want to call her and tell her how much I never could have loved her anyway and how much I’m not even thinking about her. But she is probably asleep and I know she needs to sleep.

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On Empty Preservation

She was leaving as soon as she arrived. We spent nine weeks finding different words to add up to goodbye. But for a minute there, she was mine. And I want to remember what that was like.

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On Hypervigilance

I am craving the way my skin reacted against your gaze. As if you had crawled inside my veins.

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On the Assertion of Sameness

Come talk to me when you are fifty-two and still look over your shoulder every time you pick up your lover’s hand.

On Occupational Hazards

You can’t just write one poem about someone. Because as soon as you write one, they will assume everything you will ever write is also about them.

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On Muscle Memory

I do imagine you, sometimes, going about your life. Going to work and coming home and not coming home and drinking cider and playing soccer and driving the FDR and doing crafts and calling your mother and being called mom and boss and love. And in the image, you do not think of me. But it’s not that you have become accustomed to not thinking about me, although I’m sure you have. It’s that you don’t know who I am. And this has all been just a fantasy. Time softens the edges of memory until it barely feels like reality. But I asked you once, if you were real. And you said yes. And squeezed my hand.

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tiedupinkitestrings

On Horticultural Proficiency

I have been trying to keep a plant alive for one year. It has been two months and my plant is withering something awful. But I have been trying to keep it alive because I have heard that if you can’t even care for a potted plant, how can you expect to care for another breathing human being. But I am thinking of letting the plant die. Because I don’t want a love like that, constant trading of nourishment and benchmarks, ivy climbing up to wrap the ceiling. these marks of us in tidy increments through my apartment. I want a love that screams. That kicks and fights and fucks and loves like staying alive is going out of style. Because maybe being able to keep things alive, isn’t the same as sustaining a life force. And I am a fucking life force. So let’s claw the walls til the ceiling falls and never for a minute wonder if all we have to do is add water.

#tbt poem #poetry #poets of tumblr #poem #poets on tumblr #writing #writers of tumblr #my writing #poet #new works poetry

On Connecting

On the phone, I try too hard not to sound sad. But I am too tired to try too hard and it hardly lands. You tell me you are worried and I tell you that the doorbell is ringing and I have to go. Talk soon, though.

#poetry #poets of tumblr #poem #poets on tumblr #writing #writers of tumblr #my writing #poet #new works poetry

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