and so i wait.
a girl can't wait forever, i think, or this is what i want to think, but for you, i would. forever, a day, a lifetime-- they're all the same without you, so the waiting just all runs together after a while. i find bits and pieces of you in people that i love, want so badly for the arms that hold me to be yours and yours alone.

i'm afraid to keep trying, in truth. afraid that one of these days, i'll look in the wrong place, or look too hard off into the distance and go blind. i suppose the reality is actually more that i've been blind all along, and the vibrant pain is that of my eyes slowly opening, only to find that despite hearing your voice in the darkness, in every failing of light or colour, you're nowhere in my vicinity.

so the search begins. and the search never ends.

as a madman shakes a dead geranium

sometimes i want nothing more in my life than to throw it all away.

standing half dangling over bridges, overpasses. i am caught in this perpetual moment, looking down, feeling the earth begin to quake as cars pass, buses rumble carrying people with purpose somewhere they desperately need to go. i have no real purpose and therefore nowhere that i really want or need to go. this quivering, tumultuous grasp on the present is the only place i am and currently, i know nothing else. it is though ten thousand years of past intentions have slowly fallen away and i am a vane in chaotic winds, spinning blindly and waiting for the moment something breaks and i take flight. i wonder if i will make a dull thud or a clumsy clank when at last i hit the ground.

i feel ill-equipped for life. armed with power over words and a list of wrongs to write, i fail at the simple daily things-- remembering to eat, finding air to breathe, extracting myself completely when the confusion is too much to bear, paying bills, being on time. i could write a sonnet to make you cry, but i can never say "i love you" with the conviction that i mean, or at the right time. i'm one of those people that no one really knows how to love in the right way, disaster walking until at last i walk away. i took something beautiful and inspired it to shut up like a telescope, cloister some part of itself even further away when all i wanted was to hold it closer. strangely like coaxing the first crocus us the season to open, only to find that the stem has snapped in your hand.

and you, with your fabricated accent
running blindly for the door, for the next room
for a one way flight to greener ground.
did you take your shoes off and greet the grass?
was your fate abandoned in respiration
now rowan, now cedar, now barley wild?
sputtering madness took you as its own
(for poetry makes nothing happen)
left you brittle in darkened corner rooms
almost feline you curled about yourself
sighed, and slank away.

you offer me ointment in place of your hand

I cannot read today.
It seems like so insignificant a thing, glancing at words, knowing their beauty and how poetically they must work when all placed together as they are, but not being able to make them make sense, translate into language inside my head, mean something more than individual words placed in a line. Even as I write this, I cannot read it, the words are typed and then disappear from all comprehension or memory of having typed them.
I cannot read today, and it consumes me.

I am waiting on a phone call that has yet to come, some break from this feeling that my mind, for all its worth, has turned brittle and will any day now shiver once and then shatter. I fear losing my mind more than anything else; on days like this, however, it seems almost inevitable.

I want to be able to pick up the phone and say, "I love you, I miss you, and I wish that you were here because maybe you could read this to me, slowly, and maybe then I could appreciate these words." Maybe you could be that fractured part of me, or taking me in your arms, untangle this mess of rapidly firing neurons and frozen synapses, love me long enough and true enough that I would believe it safe to be something other than stoic.

"That's horrible," they say, and you say, and I greet this sympathy with a shrug, as though the action will brush the past off of me and remove it from the present. I am vaguely aware of life erupting forth from a silent place in my chest, and I wish your hand to staunch the flow of blood, even though I would never presume to have you heal the wound. Too many shrugs and I don't remember which weapon pierced there; too many dust-offs and I no longer remember where I fell. Truths cloistered and forgotten and slowly pressing against my organs like bits of cotton or lead, jammed into bodily cavities where room to breathe should be. This is why I am afraid of you, even though I love you. I fear the extraction, the incision, the touch of your hands warm on my too cool skin, a kiss to bring me back from cyanotic, this ghost of me returning from where it has long hidden, crouched, sliding forth into your hands. I am without name in spectre form, but you, I fear, will always know me, can whisper softly some secret birthright; mine or yours, possession nonetheless.