reflection is not what the mirror provides

in pictures you are a ghost
legs tangled together
a trail of bruises, scratches, unidentified
mishaps line your calves
your thighs disappear beneath the bulk
of your laptop
and a cat stretches his paws
over your kneecap
i can't see your face,
your hands,
not even a torso
to distinguish a beating heart
i deprive you of life
in these shiny rectangles of "memory"
because you can't teach the heart to remember
lies

Blind-sided Highway

Today, I cannot focus. And I am really, really trying.

Because today: I am stuck in yesterday.

I am stuck on your lips- such a gentle, quiet movement- resting on my neck. I am stuck on the feel of your palm drawing lines from my ankles to my hips, and back again, up again, back, up, again.

And your legs pushing against mine. The contrast of your paled skin against my skin that has sat beneath too many rays of sun and seems to be slightly burnished year round.

I used to think I could write you out of me, and that thought consistently collided with a fear that, yes, I'd someday be able to write you out of me- without ever touching you.

Now, I can't feel fear. I can only feel you. Your touch and mine, slinking together. Your hands in my hair- somehow always a surprise sensation. Our hips mashing as one. Those deeply-rooted kisses that come like bolts of lighting in the midst of rainstorms. And I feel the tremble of our thunder just was well as I hear it- low, lulling rolls that engorge with- there's no other word for it- passion.

Is this what it's like to live in the moment, the eternal here & now? Fuck, I have been missing so very much.

I realize that I won't write you out of me because a little over twelve hours later, I can still feel you inside of me.

Repast

Today, you are everywhere.

Actually, if anyone is looking for honesty, it's not just today. It's steady every-almost-day for the last however many days (16 or 4). It's the implanted, vibrating image of your curves. The paling softness of your thighs. The quiet motions, the gasping breath. Your words, even.

But today, right now: I have peeled off the barriers separating your skin from mine. It is winter, of course, and piles of clothing litter the floor around us. My bare feet are pushing against the hardwood floors, the fire is weakening, your breath is quick.

When I arch my hips ever so into yours, I hear your breath catch itself in your throat.

You don't try to hide it.

I am the one hiding things, but the transparency circling around us leads you to your own versions of my truths, anyway.

So unbelievably beautiful, these images I carry with me. Completely alluring.

You've made my thinking crowded.

It's Not About You

I said: It's getting better. Stronger, longer, I feel my edges sparking and the world goes blurry. I'm getting older.

You said: It's not about getting older; it's about who you're with.

I thought: It's not about you.

There was cold air around us, always. My heart was snowed in, plowed into a corner by your stick-shift jerks and shoves. It was always winter. We were winter.

It's still getting better. Stronger, longer, tricked with a short blast followed by a languid, shivering crescendo. My edges are thinned and my world is clear-skies. I've gotten older, again.

And it's still not about you.

Scenes from the foyer

Today you are pressed against my closed front door. I am on you like fire: our bodies pressed furtively against each other, mouths connecting in a spreading spark that floods our senses with long-harbored lust.

We are explosive, today.

You are kissing me, moving between sharpness and air, lacerating my thoughts with each flick of your tongue against my lower lip. And I am kissing you. I am drawing your upper lip into my hungry mouth, teasing the tip of your tongue with my own, moving the emptiness away from us and lulling us into the depths of one soul-haunting kiss.

I can feel your heartbeat pumping through the fabric of your t-shirt -- the one I ache to tug over your head. The one I have seen you in countless times before and always, the same thought: too much fabric.

You slow, I follow. Your breath is rapid. Mine is- is it?- cautious. I realize that my hands are rounding your hips and yours are wrapped around me and your head is tucked between my shoulder and my neck.

Your lips are still moving.

impromptu art

The thoughts that we most want to desert us

are the very thoughts that spin, twist,

warp and presuppose judicial thought:

they are the pieces that wreck loose and

unnecessarily. Sense thrusts

where objection smears, where the endangered foreplay

of awkward moments courses over every

pore, every sharpened breath.

I want you more than lines can conceal

and my mind fails to leave this alone. There are few

reroutes, less than six detours to take

and I am left awash in the swell of wonder:

can you hear me?

But love is an afterthought, I think, it seems.

Spatial attraction rips through these cranial torrents

and I think I cannot speak simply

because simplicity escapes me. Simple is not always

easy.

Of course if you were easy:

I wouldn't want you this way.

Where the brainstorm trails, you wander after

and there is always room for your hand in mine,

or: there would be

if I knew how to tell you.

This is our earthquake

Today, you are on my bed. Your shirt is a river drowning my fingers. Your body is moving above me- unusual- and your breath is quick, your lips and tongue snug and searching with mine. I am splayed beneath you, urgent with my own desires.

I want you naked, I know this. I still do not know what remains to be discovered beneath these protective layers: I have seen glimpses, flashes of skin, suggestions, and implications. I have seen the desire trapped between my ribs, sparking from my eyes, masked in curious fear in your belabored glances. I have felt the tremors of touch- and it has never been enough.

I want to ravish you. I want you to come back for more. Again, again, again.

The words & images are so thick today. I can't concentrate. There are thirty-two other things I should be doing right now, but instead I am sitting at my desk, wrapped in visions of no one but you.

...can you hear me?

This picture

Sketch the walls first:

the slates of color washed about strips of blank

canvas, unburdened by what may lie in this past

and shielded from what may yet come.

My heart is not like that. It never

has been.

But the walls streamline the scatter of my life

within these boundaries- the flourish of self

locked down by expectations and qualifications.

It doesn't ever matter

because my mind flails like a squid thrown from home.

Space divided by time and conflict; sometimes

I'm glad you're not here.

this is the way I want it:

Today, the scene is a kitchen.

Obviously, there's a level of irony here (where I've come from / where I'm going, if you will-- but also you: you in the wintry kitchen). There's also, you should know, a certain level of unbridled passion hanging over and fueling through this scene.

We are there, alone. Whoever was with us has left. It's dark, late, the season has changed and the warmth around us is a combination of words unspoken and kitchen mechanics.

I don't know who shifts, I don't know which one of us turns.

All I see is the blurred composition of our heads bending into one. Mouths locked, lips intertwined. My hands running the length of your back over and over again; your arms encircling my body with a sear of tentative fire.

It is so vivid today, I can nearly taste it. You. I can nearly taste you.

I'm a storyteller but I'm the worst kind

My muse has escaped me.

It struck me today- midday- because today was Talk About Poetry Finding You day, and there was Neruda with his infinitesimal pinpricks and Giovanni with her no-limits poetic explosion, and there I was: empty-minded.

I wrote because I told myself I had to, because I am trying to be more disciplined with my writing, and mostly because I always promise my poetry class that I will write every time they write. It's a fancy trick, that class. Last fall, I couldn't stop writing. Stanzas were thundering off the margins of my notebook. Theme, purpose, creativity itself deserted me: often, I was more a student than a teacher. I sat in the thick of creation.

But now. Muse? Whipped right out of me. I don't know when/how/why she left me. Maybe she's hiding. Maybe I've accidentally smothered her. Maybe I'm not suppose to know.

(Honestly: I think my muse collapsed into my Obscure Object, which undoubtedly caused some creative complications, and I'm not exactly willing to speak further on that at this moment.)

But a word (or many) about writing + me. I don't know when it began; it has simply always been there. It started full-force circa the age of 12 with highly improbably-set "novels" that I never finished. Then entered the journals, all but one of which are still hiding out in my closet, that captured an unbelievable amount of daily- though never mundane- details. [I forget the simplest things, but my memory is tightly wound and I never forget the things I want to remember.] Somewhere in the last two years of high school, I discovered blogging. My first blog (still alive, at times completely embarrassing, but ultimately totally entertaining- maybe just for me) carries on the tradition of the paper journals: detail after detail after detail. Some coding exists in place of real names, and I confess that I can't decipher all of it. When LiveJournal became "all the rage," I got one. Then a second. Then a third. Over the last eight years, I've opened at least 6 LiveJournals; today just three remain; one is infrequently updated.

Something happened in my transition from blogging to LJ-ing. I lost a part of my writer's voice in the shuffle. It took a couple of years for me to realize this, but I never did anything about it until two summers ago. I then returned to my original blog and brought a modified voice to it: that of someone who had learned the fine art of ambiguity.

But again, something was off. I needed that sensationalized clean slate, so I started fresh with a new blogspot (hello, clean slate). After a significant transfer of posts, the writing started to come back to me. The ambiguity hit a new all-time high, and the coding began again. I took this blog underground last winter or spring, but have since gone "live" once more. I'm still not sure how I feel about that, but I was tired of being undercover. I was tired of letting loose only to pull everything back in.

You can trace all of this ambiguity and vagueness to my Obscure Object- which, admittedly, has taken on a few different forms over the last 10 years. But this is another story for another (blog)post.

Maybe I don't need my Obscure Object-corrupted muse. I generally don't believe that I have one, and truthfully, I'm currently using it as an excuse for my lack of word-flow. Or maybe this is just a concrete representation of how much has changed in my life from this point one, two, even three years ago ----> to how my life exists today. Maybe I need to make more mix cds because I tell the best stories with other people's music and words. Maybe none of this makes sense.

Years ago, at what I now realize was an incredibly important and life-shaping proverbial fork-in-the-road, I wrote this: "...because everything here has been so 'almost.'"

It's true: almost.

inside

i could spin you indecent rhymes, the kind riddled
with haunts and maybes, the kind you don't leave behind
but take with you, carry like a second beat in your heart. i want to know
if i dissolve you. unscripted, uncoded-- tell where it is
that i moved effortlessly into you because every time i shut my eyes
all i see is the glistening movement of realizing
i don't know how to walk away.

I bet she wanted you all this time

Tonight, I got as far as opening a blank Word Document. The thoughts were there, tangled with the metaphors and deeply imbedded symbolism- all neatly arranged in my head. I already knew, opening the document, what I wanted the first sentence to be.

And then it snapped out of my head. As soon as I typed ", it was all gone. I think that's someone's way of telling me that I shouldn't open this thing, this monolith of "unrequited love", with dialogue. I can accept that; I just didn't have/inspire another idea.

Instead of writing something new, I flipped through some things that I wrote back in 2004, and then started working on again last summer. In that, I found the beginning of a short story that was detailing the state of my relationship last July. & in reading that for the first time since July 2007, I was horrified, scared, and saddended.

Sometimes being strong is overrated. Sometimes accepting defeat is the best thing a person can do.

I think I'm getting closer to figuring these things out.

if you could only see the way she __________ me

I realized several minutes ago that I'm not writing because I don't want to put this lingering story into words-- words spread across my computer screen, winding through the intense desire and mind-bending relative impossibility of a love so carefully/unconsciously grown, a love that rips through the most monotonous of every day tasks; the words will draw out the most shadowed recesses of my imagination (which is totally overactive despite this infatuation) and reveal entirely unfamiliar levels of yes/no.

I don't want to write it, because once I do, that'll be reality. The words, wound and bound. Black and white fiction. Fiction. When I write it, I'll have to face the reality that while the feelings are sometimes too real, the hypothetical and tangible situation is nonexistent (outside of the drawn-from-real-life seriously open-ended real-life experiences involving these feelings for this person). It'll be fiction, for real, but just fiction. & I guess there is a part of me that is unwilling to face that.

I was also browsing on Amazon earlier, ISO good reads (and what did I purchase? Cupcake, of course, because I need to know what CC is up to in NYC), and I got a little nervous that my eventual writing is going to be cliche. I don't want to be cliche. I don't want to write another typical lesbian love story. Uh uh, no sir, not my goal. But it's not as if I'm being proactive in any sense of the word. Me and my lofty goals of being a writer slam to the floor when I realize that in the language of a novella, I have to be real. I'm going to have to unearth the demons of unrequited love, because there is still a part of me that believes one writes best about the things one knows... intimately. So maybe it's not all fiction, for me. Fiction interspersed with the nonfiction of the heart.

In fact, speaking of proactive, which I am not, I am sitting here with two browsers open, totaling four tabs and one additional browser window for Solitaire. I also just im'd a friend to point out that simplicity can be lame, "However, I think complexity is sometimes overrated." Which's pretty amusing considering all the talking I've been doing about how a relationship with el sótano would never work because anything between us is completely superficial. Total lack of depth (which, alright, I think I could appreciate for maybe a handful of months at this point because I am exhausted with Deep Connections that only serve to fuck with my mind). Tiresome. All this talk about relationships/love/bullshit is so tiresome. & not a priority, not anymore.

I thought I'd see the Obscure Object today, but I didn't, and part of me was relieved. I never know at which angle my stomach is going to jump, if we'll even acknowledge each other, if my smile/eyes will betray me, or if she'd even notice.

If I write it down, it can be real for someone else's eyes, and maybe, I think, that's real enough.

/ sans title /

I don't want to write you rhymes,
metaphors stuck in trip-hop scheme--
haiku and sonnets fucking free verse
on an analogy of sweat to breath.
I wrote you in shadows, the day's dusk
falling circles over your desk.
Maybe you stole my air, pilfered
my nightmares and replaced them with burlesque
daydreams-tangent swirls of your limbo-tango
flash-forward smiles junked beneath
protective aloof facades. I do it, too;
hide, formulate, fear.
I fuck you through lyrics and equations,
your cosine supersedes my hyperbole,
and your touch multiplies just beyond my personification.