Twenty-nine years of fervor. Three months of diplomacy.
I used to push you away Just to breathe I feared suffocation When we were together I feared consumption Or death by desire When we were together I had to hold you back Just to exist alongside Your fervor Or to contain Pieces of myself In the right order Now Your head remains In the room That refuses to fight forward Your mouth does not stir Or power the appropriate muscles To get even Your hands no longer flinch When I stick them on a hot stove Like they used to Draw back Or scold me Pin my shoulders to the floor And now I wrestle walls Ache white all over Covet the hours I spent running From you And not struggling To convince your body Of revenge against mine Or To bleed When I cut you Or the beauty In tyranny.
In which I try to extract words from a flailing
instrument
Like closing in on a melody with a butterfly trap
Or dirt with a water funnel
There was a time when I knew what to say to you
How to communicate with an audience
Now I flounder in a world that both satisfies and starves my garden
And my pen is stifled beneath the two
I once had expressions at my disposal
Undeniably trite yet honest songs
Tokens I could pull out of my head to throw at you
To pace you
To appease you
But I am older and I have lost the dexterity to withdraw meaning
And the patience to unearth
Or to translate my bones
My fingers are fat and they linger over paragraphs
With only the strength to recognize one shape from another
and no language to describe the differences
They bury themselves under thick shells of confusion
Or protection from a slowing mind
Eyes that have grown so accustomed to watching it all leave
And they haven’t the concern to fight
When silence tugs mercilessly at their interpretations.
Your lips crave applesauce Or the texture of something smooth and sweet One such thing that requires no fight As it slides down your throat or into your being Like a silk bathrobe or the perfect compliment I bring unripe blueberries in a jar And drop each one in your mouth As your lips cringe against the tart rocks And your teeth press relectantly into the marbles Exposing their poison and unwelcome mouth dressing You swallow the barbed fruit like swollen babies Bear down on their flesh like sick explosions In your chest Watching my eyes unmoved You suck on black circles As your harbor yearns for a delicacy It cannot uncover.
The morning housed a thousand secrets In a bright red envelope at the foot of our bed Questions to answers I did not want to identify Resentment in the shape of a crisp dollar bill Or a folding chair in a corner of our house Ones that would never be spent or sat upon But possessed for good measure I brought out the china But I never set the table And we passed the salt and read the paper And ate with our sticky fingers Pressed against the mahogany I cleared the pulpit by throwing it on its side And by scraping the food onto the floor I painted my face as the cat licked the aftermath And pulled thick red gloves over my skin We kissed in the doorway and I felt only the outline of your tracks across my layers As I placed my coffee mug on the counter Toward piles of unopened mail.
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