01/20 Library

I would love to be alone,

would love to be alone

in the library

and not lost in the library,

alone in the library 

with Foucault

and Croissant

and Breakfast tea

and Night

in the library alone willing myself

to read more and think less

of my romantic aloneness 

And I would be alone,

loving being alone,

and not lonely,

and not lost but alone

not staring into the eyelids

of the friends I haven't made

as they walk the other way,

not lost in the library,

but alone when I could be anything else

and not lonely for lack of options

and not lost for lack of knowledge

of a space and a community

that have no need for me

and I could concentrate on the book

I was reading

if I could find my place

or the place where I was sitting

We're too young-
it's done,
you said,
like to podium in competition-
break my heart in five words or less,
fourth and fifth put you through
two and three made you best- you won,
said young, done.

I felt so Eve,
felt ripped into chest like rib retrieved,
I felt you took all of me.

Love- you didn't make it easy.

I learned to carry the weight
of restrained "hello"s in the bags under my eyes,
until my head was too heavy to look at you-
learned to forget how your sandpaper thighs made me smooth,

I wrote you a two word love letter

I don't know when you met her-
Kristen, but it only took a month for y'all to get together
and I wondered how you could sleep at night,
Like if you're gonna find yourself some new woman
at least have the decency to pick one that isn't my type-
I wasn't sure who to be more jealous of.

Love- you didn't make it easy.

I really came to resent you
for a two word love letter I never sent you,
for not one last chance,
"you loved" -- past tense-
I scissor-scribed that into my hip
made dialogue with my feet, thighs, and wrist
sometimes we're too fragile to love
and too alive to resist-

Don't tell me I'm too young,
I'm the oldest I've ever been.

Hey-
I can hear your name now
without the rattle of pulse against skin,
I can listen to The Shins again,
I can look at you, not entirely out
but not in, love-

Don't tell me I'm too young,
I'm the oldest I've ever been.

I never stopped calling you friend.

I am lying

I am lying
covered in the dust
our past makes
to remind us of how far
we've not gone,
asking you to [lay] [lie]
with me with the
strength left in my brow-

I'll be then what I was now,
longing for the future
and thinking of forgiveness.

you cannot convince me that people are unlike a drug.

XIII

It's

the

semblance

of

belonging-

that 

gets

me

every

time.

Semester's Alarms

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Monday
4:46 pm
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11:00 pm

I should have been more like Amanda Palmer.

They don't sell fruit here anymore

They don't sell fruit here anymore,
There's nothing citrus
to callous the sore-

Like two married people
too proud for divorce.

What you told me
I'd never have to believe
When I was four

Flash-forward several states
and it doesn't look like war.

Just two married people
wrapped in the same wet blanket

not growing together,
just old.

What if you could lose your nose?

What if
you could
lose your nose
if you

stopped thinking
about it for
long enough?

That's sometimes
how I feel.

It's a shame
that the way we create
is not a part
of our bodies.

I was only ever
as big as the spaces between your fingers-

I think that's what
scared me the most.

dictionary.com

home

   [hohm]  Show IPA noun, adjective, adverb, verb,homed, hom·ing.

noun

1.

a house, apartment, or other shelter that is the usualresidence of a person, family, or household.

2.

the place in which one's domestic affections are centered.

3.

an institution for the homeless, sick, etc.: a nursing home.

4.

the dwelling place or retreat of an animal.

5.

the place or region where something is native or most common.

Love and Home and Dreams

I've always told myself
that I'd never let loving someone
be more important than my dreams,

then I started to dream of you
and that complicated things.

I started breaking at the knees,
became threadbare at the seams
you know I used to believe
that sometimes skin needs scars
to hold it together when it
starts to pull apart,

my heart, my mind
on the edge of my body
asking you what you call home,

I am a person without a home
but with somewhere to sleep,
and you to love and that's good I think,

I want to take you to every place
I've read about in books
so I can say that I've been in love with you
everywhere that someone calls home

because home is a beautiful concept
and you are a beautiful human being
and that fucking scares me, but I like it,
most days I really do, and when it's not terrifying
I think that's beautiful, too.

I won't ask you to make home,
but I'd love to see you be home-
I can't even imagine how beautiful that must be.

"I'm like the man who carried a brick with him
to show the world just what his home looked like."

-Bertolt Brecht

A Reoccurring Reality

Here we are
wearing our bulbous,
placental gloves

trying to crochet
a better world.

Unable to put down the hook
at the risk of losing
validation for attempted
craftsmanship,

we do not ask ourselves
who we are trying
to keep warm.

You, like I,
are convinced that
a blind man will see
red if he tries hard enough.

If he breaks bread
with the red-seers.

If he gives them his time
(while he takes theirs),
wrapping them in texture.

When did they teach us
what we could not learn?

XII

it can't exist.

I didn't give you my heart

I didn't give you my heart
I didn't give you
my heart I didn't
give you my heart
I think I think I

gave you I think
I gave you my
foot and since I
gave you my foot

it has been much
worse much worse
than if I gave you
if I gave you my

heart it has been much
worse much worse
than if I gave you
my heart

Home XI: 114 Days Ago

Home
may be
where
you go,
after
tip-toeing
around
the world,
to walk
on your
bare feet.

Time, Home

I thought for a second
that your fifteen minutes
was an hour,
figured if I gave it a week
you'd stay a day
or two,

then a month went by
and it was a year,
October-o'clock
but that's just semantics-

golden hours copper
sunset silver spoon
make new friends
and keep them new
sun, weary moon
will grab the tide,

and we'll watch, intently,
because everybody
wants to make somebody move.

I thought I saw you.
Maybe it was May,
maybe winter breeze
through Pasadena June-

for every minute you slept
I lived two.

I spent three, four, six seconds
staring at your lips
and it was six o'clock-
the sun was cold, like we like it

and you made me breakfast-
I didn't know you could do that
in the time it takes
for me to bat my eyelashes once.

Then a week past
and I had to wait a month,
a month made of months
I waited, to touch your neck and jaw
to rest my hands around your face,
to say nothing

and to think, I think I'm home now-
but I'm not quite sure,

in that moment
I was ready to die of old age.

Home X (ten)

Leave home

to come home

but it (perhaps)
was not-home

and this is not

home-

these are elsewheres

that are heres

these theres

depend on

where you

lay your head at night-

not right
for left or wrong
but left, then
gone and
not home,

the un-home
the no-home,
the unknown-

it vibrates
inside my fingertips
and I am
terrified.

If you asked me (and perhaps you did)

If you
asked me

(and
perhaps
you
did)

when love
stopped
being the
greatest thing
on earth,

I must
have
said

it didn't--

no,
it never
did.