daily volumes, lost. upon postal waves, upon landslides of feeling and my own inability to hold onto anything for longer than i absolutely must. there's the rub, perhaps. perhaps i am completely unprepared to hold on to anything, unskilled in the art of acquisition.

i am so much to you already, and i see you everywhere. in post offices, behind liquor stores, when i am wide-eyed and ready for the world and when i am crouching half-hidden because i have already seen too much. i have no faith in the world, but i believe in you. it would never occur to me to do otherwise.

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.

i think that the curve of your shoulderblade saved me. i know that it's too much to expect this love of ours to be transcendent somehow, but it is; every day that passes with you makes of me someone completely new than the person i was before, somehow stronger, somehow wiser, somehow more resolved.

i write you a million love letters that i will never send, though you would probably find redemptive peace in having them. i have lost myself for days in the feel of my lips upon your freckled shoulder, my hands across your back, your cool skin against mine, stifling a fever unbeknownst to us both. something within me aches and you are the only remedy.

i think a lot of things, but it's nothing that i'd mention

Twelve hours wrapped in your arms, and I now feel as though something is missing, now that you're away. What is this state I'm in, such that I feel almost foreign in my skin without you to keep me in it?

My head is adrift in words you spoke half asleep, half-drunk (on the alcohol or your time with me, I'm not really sure, but I suspect it was both), when you murmured how happy you were to have me with you. You confessed your secret plans to keep me forever and gave yourself away, but I don't mind, and I don't mention it. Here are the words that I am terrified to say-- after you'd fallen asleep, your arms wrapped tightly around me, I memorized the rise and fall of your chest and promised my life to you.

This is the end of so much, and yet it feels so very much like a beginning.

maybe they waked and called it a dream.

i watch you holding onto every tenuous strand of us with both hands, like a baby, or someone drowning. this is why we are forever together, never completely apart. it is as though tumbling from the womb i grasped for some safe space, some tremulous hold onto the familiar, and reaching back through space and time and into another life, i found you and grabbed on, and our hands clenched tightly, we slept.

all of life outside the now has been the dream of two children forever holding hands, through darkness and into oblivion-- why would we dream such things? i don't know and can only imagine, but i lied before when i said that it was silent prayers issued to stars that gave me faith and courage to go on, for it was the knowledge of the dream. i slept through shouting matches and houses that shook, through bits of plaster raining down like tears from an uninformed god, slept clutching your hand every step of the way, eyes closing, returning to your side, where there was green and warmth and the feel of your skin pressed against my back and the hushed sound of your breaths, as i would count them one by one the way mortal men count sheep.

you spoke in your sleep even then, silken and filled with promises. you are the only one i have ever known with the power or conviction to swear oaths to another while half-asleep, and i rejoice inside on a daily basis to know that it is for me that you have done this. shall we pack up our lives and run away, then, finding some place that can grant us the calm and the safety that we grant one another? i fear that this world, for all its beauty, will always fall desperately short of that which we create for each other, so instead of worldly offers, i give to you myself instead, which to you will seem like everything, and this is but another reason why i love you.

i have always had your name imprinted somewhere deep beneath my flesh, boiling there like a cry desperately waiting to escape. in that living dream of us together, perhaps you left it there while tracing runes across my back with fingers drenched in magic, making me forever yours, or perhaps while i slept securely wrapped up in you, something birthed from deep within you lodged itself in me, a taste of the future that we would have together. i long ago accepted that you have within you the strength to dismantle the universe.