and i was brave / but you didn't know

weeks ago, i went to see melissa ferrick.
and i feel in love with her opening act. it was easy
because she was self-deprecating and had a beautiful voice, lyrics
that flittered past skin-deep, penetrating pieces of fragments of my shattered
everything where nothing
could make sense but sense itself.

tonight is a night, for me, full of riesling and xanax
because i cannot clear my mind but more importantly
my jaw is throbbing and there is no escape
because every time i stop myself from clenching my teeth
i think of you
and then i clench again
and the pattern continues, unlocking all my memories
and all the could-bes and maybe might still becomes.
but i know you don't want me as i want you
and even if you do
the way you hide it could shake me for years (as i guess it
already has), decimate my every caustic sense, the things that
work and the ideas that float. and my skin
floats, my hands are full of helium and i have misplaced
my legs. i don't care past the image of you and me,
the rattled, makeshift escalated chorus of coulds and woulds.

and this is my right now.
this perpetual itching ache, the daggers deflecting my heart,
and the unsteady waiver of my hands, hours later.
because they shook for forty-three minutes after i told you
that we were writing poems in class, and it would be quiet. you were hiding (my
face to yours, our palms barely reaching- we are
so terrifyingly alike that it breaks me apart and rips me into shape-shifting
glued shards of you[me] who this is and who we want to be) and your presence
was visceral, tangible, a veritable shake
to the core, i cannot stop drinking this wine even though
my heart
has returned to my chest's cavity, to its rightful place,
limping back from its sometime residence near my toes.
i cannot tell if my heart:
does it soar or does it fall,
dilating and storming through my body at the mere shock
of seeing you before me.

i do not yet understand
what exactly it is about you-
if it IS something or if this is a magical prelude
i have designed in my psyche, an occupation away
from the dismantling servitude of reality. maybe i write
best when i am drunk on riesling and high on xanax, and maybe i write
just as terribly well when i am trembling in syntax
of maybe-love and could-be more than lust.

i have the right idea
but i cannot whisper its fragments into your ear
because we cannot get close enough to see
what all there is we harbor.

my boat is sanctioned in the deepest of lakes;
your yacht sings solo softly in the saturated sea.
we could meet in the middle, not your ground nor
mine. we could spin, there, ribbons of fairytale
and dip our toes into the dazzling wisps of water.
i could swim in you for days.

you startle my senses.
i have broken pens and letters over this deaf infatuation.
i was told to exorcise you from me. exorcise the demons, you wicked
angel. i laughed today.
and my god, your body. your rounding, warming, malleable form.

i cannot recall my first name because this person at the keyboard
is not who i think i ever am.

i said today that i would make you a powerpoint:
"reasons why you should love me." but love is deceit.
love you, i would. adore you, i would.
the powerpoint would have pictures, and i would write you
a poem.
because the obvious amount of poems that i have already crafted
for you is not obvious, because you don't know of them.
which, i guess, is why i told you today:
"come down. it's quiet. we write."
you didn't come down, and i knew you wouldn't, but it's for the best
because forty-three minutes later:
my hands still shook and my breath still evaded me
as my heart thumped into my ankles
and i wish i could tell you.