kate

that’s where i’m going

[writingandshitt]

there’s a haze of volume blurred with the build of you and I. somewhere beyond the windowsill, the frost cracking veins on tempered glass, the sunlight clementine, glaze of gold, beating breath into the earth. the world lowers its eyes, submits to the rhythm making pulse of our time, metamorphosis of caution, of guilt. fear amputates your vulnerability, the turned cheek of a wound, you let your flesh melt in the tongue of the flame, pooling wax of a candle stick. you worship the bruises while they fade tuscany yellow. I could never look away, not here, that oceanic night sky, the inky tears spilling sea.

so when my breath fuels flesh in your lungs like promise, like redwood, like shades of relief drawn out on the pavement, run the blood through water. keep me from healing.

my lips are the needle pulling the stitch, your eyes a froth of arctic grey in the teeth of midnight. you’re filling dirt again, cheek to the clay, that earthy musk tangled in your hair. I want to ask about the hangman’s knot in your spine, the choking and slow burn of embers, something hard on your breath saying, “death is by design.”

did you really think you could just shake it off? the weight of a century safety-pinned to your lips, cotton candy fusing to the roof of your mouth and hoarding sweetness, pulling sleep. as if escape stretches out like an empty road ahead of you. we carry the times we’ve died like the wood of a cross, clarity of burning oil.

strength is illusion, prophetic, layering weakness. the floor of your certainty swallows and caves, a trap door. you have a torch-light fear of satiation, like a realized life could never materialize, like it would mean a sun dipping beneath the horizon of wilderness, the transformation of your wounds from gash to scar. you cry out with the break, the elasticity of skin, but I see your eyes following that crimson like it’s polarized and I think, “you’ll never look away.” it’s a headache of futility, treading furious water, your eyes sink away in the sapphire of twilight, the Oxford blue of midnight, blackened screen of sky.

the smoke rises, and despite our best efforts we never forget.

it’s not a symptom of breath but of you. this fever that never breaks, sweating through the winter, your eyes mosaic glass and our life falls prey to cremation, the future broken off in pieces digested as your last meal. I thread the holes in the sky, and you’re looking at me, and there’s nothing in the world that is just mine anymore. if we’re burning, reddening the flesh of this world, we push further. the continuity and blinded heat floods turbulence of all we have ever known.

[writingandshitt]

but it’s keeping the focus forward, head down, the world moves on and so do we. thrown into the next sunset, the next season, you blink and there are new arms around you and your cheeks are flushed pink with morning air. it’s just continuing to take the step, not allowing desensitization. don’t just let your eyes break up the sunlight without feeling it. try not to move an inch without feeling something, without knocking from wall to wall. it’s natural to get used to it when it becomes routine - don’t let anything become routine. what’s routine about tucking your chin into the sweatshirt, about following the pull of someone’s eyes, about the sage and honey of autumn cologne passing by in a rush?

what’s routine about the new bruises, purple and green against something so unexpectedly full and complete? our moments don’t exist as a continuum, yet we treat everything as if we already earned it. as if there’s a single surety in this entire world.

brushing the ashes of summer from your shoulders, the colors shading your cheeks from the amber glow of the bonfire, don’t I love you in every stretch of day, of night? haven’t I felt midnight surging in the steady rise and fall of your chest, the cool air through the window, the absent-minded and languorous look in your eyes when the light flickers and I catch some of the comfort on your face. tell me the truth: can you look anywhere else now that you’ve seen me?

I’ll say this: I lied when I said I could never live without the danger. all the settle, the touch-and-go that I blink away at, I could taste it. finally, for once, full moon and spill of stars, I see the tension breaking even, the taut surface relaxing, stilling. the climb steadies, cascade bottoms out, my movement goes from strain to involuntary.

there’s iced tea on the table. always a game on TV, a haze of sunlight through the open window. our bedroom is blue-grey, the sheets moonlit white, there are books everywhere, always. a whole room of just the library, your basement. I see the wood of a back porch, the cabinets, 6 a.m. air breaking on dewey backyard grass. I lay still for long enough and I feel myself wanting it so vehemently, it has that wide-open taste of ravenous hunger.

you don’t know, and maybe you never will, but this is what you gave me. will, and hunger, for what everyone else seemed to already want. as crazy as it is, as feet-first, as reckless...I open the door of that possibility only because you came along.

[writingandshitt]

to the last breath. if it’s respiration you want, or stagnation, unification, translation, come in. fall, and with no intention of rising. as heavy as you end, so let you begin. in the storm tonight, I already love you. between the threads of the sheets, molecules of space separating us dampened like a dying flame at the foot of a match, a char of black. the way a fire can burn like limelight, posthaste and caught mid-break. I already know.

fear wounds you, stabilizes the spread of infection. the way misunderstanding multiplies and duplicates, a flash of a carcass, something dark and dead kept alive with artificial breath.

don’t break the silence if you can’t look me in the eye. if the clock stops, the glass breaks, and you’re paralyzed, if you know there was something else, something more, then you’re left to choke on it. don’t go a day without crossing a line. it’s not about power, or control, or staying one step ahead. it’s did you feel. did you become a flood. or did you escape.

[writingandshitt]

If I’m lost in you, if love bleeds into addiction and I feel full only when I’m filled with you, let the time run out. Let the throat strain closed.

You ask what I remember and the world stills. What piece of it can’t I pull from my own chest? I remember the drip of the charcoal into my throat. Hallucinations in a hospital bed, the realization that despite everything, despite all that I thought, I didn’t know a single goddamned thing about being alone until I was laying in that bed.

[writingandshitt]

I want to stop everything, I don’t want any movement past the moments I have so deeply submerged in you - scarlet-peach of your voice and laughter, grey tint when you’re sad, how it feels to wake up from a dream so distinctly centered on you. The sunlight breaking through the blinds, filling my bed the way water fills a glass, oh. I could trace details for the rest of my life and never get used to their taste. 

For all the beauty in illusion, I step back, free-fall and September nights deep in my eyes. I see the pink train-tracking the sky and immediately think: this is how I feel about you.

[writingandshitt]

the weight of experience a tremor in my chest. the night revolving like hands on a clock, all feeling is jutted and transposed in fast forward, glitchy. I’m dizzy, feverish, thoughts shaped like nooses and lifelines, hurtling toward each other like trains on the same track, a single headlight sweetly blinding, company like the soft flesh of gums, loneliness fixed as teeth, head heavy with it, mouth dry. stabilize a frenzy of escape with a touch, something intimate, never satisfied with just laughter. with just anything. release so the memory of captivity is smothered, a pillow over an open mouth, struggling and then limp. it’s not a coincidence the way my creativity sparks after moments with you.

if it was fluctuation I wanted, I’d turn to myself. if fear, if dissatisfaction, if spontaneity, if understanding.

we exist in continuum, and suspended. fluid, always, sliding on a scale of lucidity: vertically, horizontally, diagonally. beyond conception, cross-eyed with all the fate tugging at your sleeve. ever wonder why your mind always goes back to me? ever let yourself believe it’s something bigger?

that’s okay. let the moment pass before either of us does something to stop it. let it go safely. let everything go and cut through the red tape and keep pretending we’ve got time.

[writingandshitt]

that drop-dead look in your eyes like we’re a heartbeat in the rib cage of a dream, some surreal frenzy of black light melting the world away like hot wax, nothing but you, nothing but me. head-spinning and wild-eyed and a string of moments so ripe and real I didn’t even consider they might end. how it feels to bite into something, to take it by the teeth, recharge the air between us. to breathe life from my lungs to yours with a touch, or a look, or nothing at all. a shock of your pulse out of mundanity, monotony, captivity.

I’m nothing if not free, and I want to say: here, look, this is exactly what you mean to me. let me spell it out in the space between us, as if it could fit there, or anywhere. I want to say: the world isn’t big enough for all the things I want to show you. but we’re here now. the sky smoldering a ravenous bruise, nowhere near healed, cavernous purple, the night crystallizing around us. the mint green of the flesh of the trees, the snowy light of the stars, that stark air, all gone. locked in a moment we’re exempt from because we’re together, because the aftermath of this collision could take a lifetime. if you want to breathe - really breathe - breathe into me. don’t kick and fight against crystallization. hold the secrets like grudges, tightly, unrelenting. don’t you dare see anything if not through the lens of this night.

9 july

[losingmymindtonight]

super excited to announce that I’ll be giving up writing and ejecting myself into the stratosphere!!!! really looking forward to this new phase of my life!!!!

[writingandshitt]

it’s an overgrowth. I feel used, considered, awake with sight. I feel you, pulling the knots loose, pulling me close without reason, without thought. it’s not being touched but being touched by you.

this blood-red, fleshy pink sunrise soaking my bedsheets, the bulk of your sweatshirt pressed into my chest, black waves scorching moonlit shore, stars glazed over translucent light like a warning, like tear-soaked cheeks, like a gutted swan song. I move with you, locked into that free-falling look in your eyes, stealth swelled between us, something criminal. adrenaline circling, predatory, heartbeats like the rapid switch of light, I’m shell-shocked with the initial sting. the heat of your breath slows us down, myriad of color flushing from my lungs. collision of peace.

I know you dangerously, already, my fingertips fluent in all that you are, a balk at bleeding authenticity. I want to say, lay with me right now. rest; it’s safe because it isn’t. let me taste the peaks, salt on skin, a night glazing through dawn, just lay with me now. we’ll run against the grain again in the morning, muscles flexing against the tide, we can go back to the restless hum of fighting when we wake up. just now, a moment or an eternity, that measured smile, together a sweet retribution, moderation to the wind.

kiss me so there isn’t an inch of you I don’t taste. for the times you’ve thought about it, because I know you have, the answer is yes. if you can’t already read it in me. the answer is unequivocally, treacherously, yes.

[writingandshitt]

this reverberance of impulse an open flower, swell of a peach, guts ripe and veined. indigo flush of deep summer sky, I feel you where I always have: against the grain of this world, jaw-set determination to never let a single thing be easy. I want you for the grit of release, your tongue wet and sweet over everything broken you’ve already moved on from...how does it feel to build yourself from fractions of other people? to holster the gun, set the knife back in the drawer, and do it with your bare hands instead?

I don’t know you, I know, but if it were up to me I’d devour you whole. hold your breath and let me show you where all this talk comes from, hold a lit match against everything that makes you who you are, I could give you a lesson or two in flying too close to the sun. if you want truth, I’ll open into it, black heat and that curl into violence, I still know the taste of every heart I’ve ever swallowed. I could be anything if I press the line far enough - the first or last or nothing, really. you’re set in one place and I’m fucking everywhere, a mosaic of location, a cage heavy with the weight of too many prisoners, hypocritical captivity and a flood rushing between the bars. the only current you’d ever drown in, no matter how well you can swim.

no more air, fill your lungs with this first, and close your eyes into a deeper shade of darkness, a more strangled silence. pleading for painless ceasefire, the slice of a throat spilling into thin blood and weightless breathing, nothing easy. nothing ever easy.

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

“I have read your poems with my door locked late at night and I have read them on the seashore where I could look all round me and see no more sign of human life than the ships out at sea: and here I often found myself waking up from a reverie with the book open before me. I love all poetry, and high generous thoughts make the tears rush to my eyes, but sometimes a word or a phrase of yours takes me away from the world around me and places me in an ideal land surrounded by realities more than any poem I ever read.”

Bram Stoker, from a letter to Walt Whitman written c. February 1872

[writingandshitt]

you’re a sweet misdirection. intense, wary with warning, tongue-tied warmth and those assassin eyes, shallowly colored with depth like a shadow, a paint-swatch of violence - a look daring me to ask the question frozen behind my teeth, connotations seeping through my gums. stars blinking bewildered white light, the moon as deep and blue as drowning twilight sky, none of this makes any sense but it’s a river washed over me, glittery sunlight hand-painted on the surface, without that windblown calm I wear like a badge but I’ll admit: I haven’t felt truly weak in months.

you look at me with hunger stripped bare, desperation a drawn curtain, an open window. I want you like this: rooftop lazy in the golden fingertips of late afternoon light, the trademark of your unreserved laughter, the indent of your teeth. let me be a canvas for once, surrender control, uncharacteristic forfeit. if you want me, just for today, I’m yours. blink and it’s gone - don’t you know me at all? I’ll never be what you want if it wasn’t my idea first.

a palm tree in the swirl of a monsoon, the cloud keeping the sun a prisoner, a kiss on the lower lip of everyone who’s wrong for you. the moon is melted into the surface of this ocean, each moment of longing, eyes shut, physicality bleeding into emotion. feel me the way your mind searches for, desire pooled in your eyes like sunlight saying, “more. more. if I can breathe easily, you’re doing it wrong.”

[writingandshitt]

moonlight dripping down a canvas, your laughter tangled in the tall grass, if I tried I couldn’t be farther away than I am right now. the skin of the night moving the way a throat does while laughing. sky after rain. you after me.

I want the stars and their stillborn light to liquify, fill this wine glass with a nocturnal warmth. I want your eyes burning holes into me, overflowing with recognition. see me even after I’ve disappeared, make me a gold cross on the neck of someone who believes - make me real and seen and seen and seen.

catch your breath and give it to me. if even just for a few seconds I want to know how to breathe myself full of you, the wet of your lips, silk of your tongue, I want to lose the moment before it’s really mine. I want the pulse of the sun. velvet with those huge crystals of sugar dashed with the in and out of slow-motion time, the hands of summer nights. all this irony as fat and ripe as it has always been.

and oh, finally, my life ripped wide open, a glowing of voracious color, strike a line through the monochrome of you. nothing in this world tastes quite the way freedom does after a long winter of captivity. if you’re gone from me, I’ll never know you again.

[writingandshitt]

This ugly game of possession, my comfort ripe with the shelter of your words, I curse at the language for its own weight. That I feel the way I do a strike against meaning. That I know how to speak in a way that will make you listen, write in a way that will force a hand of familiarity, love in a way that is wired and wrong and desperately my own. Maybe there are times I hide out like this but you should see me with the fire wide and alive, trapped in the seascape of my rib cage, volcanic chambers of a chest rising and falling in sweet and dark blood.

may 30

[writingandshitt]

never able to find the words, I stop trying.

you make me the green of a meadow, a deep forest, the thick of the trees. if there’s no way out, I’ll just lie down. you know - sometimes it’s weightless and sometimes I’m a body at the bottom of the lake with stones framing my ankles like photographs. I didn’t say “in love” but I could read truth in your eyes as plain as words, a look which creates its own language.

tell me about the space between us. the lack thereof. I tell myself I surrender as if it’s a one time thing. I tell you I’m sorry as if it matters. I want to live in the center of the thunder, a bird with wings I won’t use. I want to scream at the feeling of everything even though I asked for it. even though I’d be blind with boredom and apathy if I didn’t bleed every once in a while. what’s living if you aren’t feeling? what’s feeling full if the hunger wasn’t eating you alive? I’ll admit that sometimes I don’t want to be found but I never want you to stop looking for me.

maybe we’ll never speak again, but I’ll always be the person who opened your eyes. I let go once, twice, and then I pull back. I wrap my hands around your neck and you let me. I take something from you without permission, you say. you drive me mad, I say. tell myself it’s not okay to like mad anymore - I’m not 13. but I don’t know that I can help it. if there’s broken glass, I want it to cut me. if there’s fear, I want to feel it. if there’s rain, I want to taste the thunder. and if I’m going to love you, I want it to hurt.

journal 5/19

[finita--la--commedia]

“You alone … control my history And write your name on the first page and on the third, on the tenth, and on the last. […] You alone can add to my days what you wish And delete what you wish My whole history flows from the palms of your hands And pours into your palms.”

— Suad al-Mubarak al-Sabah, “You Alone”, translated from the Arabic by Lena Jayyusi and Naoimi Shihab Nye in: “The Literature of modern Arabia: an anthology”, edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi 

[writingandshitt]

silver streak of moonlight cut across your jawline. I think I love you because you taught me truth. the taste of it. the depth. our refusal to see a thing blinking right in front of us. ability. freedom. insanity, sliced and jaded. flaws and problems matched and mirrored, quick smile saturating laughter, the flash of a look I reserve, without realizing, for you and you only. I am vulnerable to the extent that you know me - a word from you and I’m a thread pulled loose. knowledge steady in breeding power - over you, over me.

move around me like this, I move around you, a switch of light, keep your cards covered, I don’t care. you forget I read you like nobody else - one of the reasons you love me like you do. say a word, make a face, move an inch, and I know why. hide and hide and hide. I know everywhere you’d think to go before you’ve shown up there.

intimacy doesn’t exist. not with us, not like this. you taught me that. don’t you remember? go running if you must but you’ll always slow down. the truth slows with you, and this is stronger than even that. a pull like a current, electric and wired. lick it up for me, will you?