I never knew just how much I would miss the glances we would give each other every now and then as we walked
nor did I expect my hands to feel empty with every move I made
I didn’t realize the things I was taking for granted before he left
but now his eyes are filled with infatuation for another
and I’m still here
ks
Hey, you say,
I just called to tell you that I love you.
Or do I? Do you? Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that.
So I laugh, and hang up, and leave you hanging,
Like you always do to me.
This power dynamic,
It’s sick and it’s twisted and deliciously unbelievable
Like the kind of chemistry that they try to show in those old shitty movies
That you love so much,
You know, the ones that you always go on about
with all of your obscure references
that we all roll our Young and Fresh and Free eyes at
But your own freedom is something you crave
You’ve shown me how lost you’d be without it
Oh, but how you would find yourself if you gave it all away!
To someone you can trust,
To someone you could try to believe would never hurt you
But promises are dangerous things, I know.
Oh trust me, I know!
But I will never give up on showing you
What an amazing person I think you could be
If you would only let yourself become the guy you’ve always wanted
You were always too afraid to even try, you say,
Well, I’m here now.
So don’t you dare take my hand because that’s not the way we do romance.
What we have is dipped in arsenic, in benzene,
Like a shortbread cookie with the chocolate, oh,
The coating melts on my fingers, and my tongue melts in your mouth
It’s so damn easy to ignore the way anyone else has ever tasted inside of me
And I smile when I forget that you liked my friend
And you smile when I forget that I liked yours
And we come together, wrapped up in the salty smell of angst and adoration,
And we know that what we have is real, but that the movies tell us lies.
Hey, you say.
Hey.
His face is sandpaper, his hands a safe-house. he passes by and I fight the urge to put pen to paper then and there. Even if I did, his face shifts this way or the other, avoiding me, my gaze, unable to be captured by something so worldly as a ballpoint. He is a poem, his hands the second stanza- not the kind you’d hold so much as the kind you want on your shoulder, holding you back from harm and pushing you toward opportunity. He is a poem.
Another day passes outside the window of a plane
I cross dusk with 170 strangers who hold each other’s hands or thighs when the clouds quiver.
And I can’t stop thinking about your fingers running through my hair
or the way your eyes knocked into me that July.
You made me feel like feeling itself was cracking from my chest
and hurtling across the universe,
becoming every iron, nitrogen, oxygen, n’ sulfur soul that lost the sunset to the sunrise
in thoughts of “I want you”
Because your lips burn cosmic explosions into my skin:
a creation story.
Now, heads drape over the mountains
like the twinkle lights you hung out on the patio for Christmas–
You tried to play Claire de Lune on your harmonica
and remember that you loved me.
But you left 8 months later
on a Tuesday.
7:53 p.m.
The pool lights stained your words teal
and smeared my eyeliner into a glimmering sort of heavy.
You said “late summer’s nostalgic,”
noticed the fireflies had all gone,
and I could hear crickets whimper to the sun,
“don’t go.”
And I never wanted another falling moon or set of sandpaper hands to hang onto.
You said I felt frail
like a dandelion you were keeping
from the wind.
And then you just let go.
That night, I woke up laughing,
as 1,000 tiny suns sprouted from my lips,
already dreaming of drifting.
Crossing through purple skies
like telephone wires
rushing to the seaside.
Paris stole my lipstick.
smeared it across cheeks
and hostel sheets and wine glasses, Merlot,
turned my teeth violet and my heart
a violent sort
of love you,
maddened by the beauty of it all.
Like I could chase train tracks
into the self I wanted
into Budapest, or Berlin.
A decrepit sort of art,
like you could tear
my heart into dusty fallen parts
and I’d just become more,
and faces and feet would flood through me, paint
bucket lists on my thighs and think of freedom.
I was never meant to be kept from the wind.
We spend a lot of time in our short lives thinking about the long term. What’s going to happen to me in ten years? Fifteen? Thirty, even? In severe cases, we let this presumptuous worries diversely affect our everyday actions and choices. This principle has a number of glaring flaws, but the main one to focus on is that the future hasn’t happened yet. You are writing your own novel; you are the only one with a pen. In other words, it is fully within your capabilities to control most of what happens in your life. However, we fail to understand that not all of it can be controlled. People get in car accidents. People get deathly ill. People are in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Why, then, should you let these worries take hold of how you express yourself if we don’t have absolute control? Sometimes, doing something wrong allows a person to grow, to become stronger, possibly even teach others the right way. The right way, which everyone hungrily seeks, cannot be found without failure. Take a left when you think you’re supposed to take a right, eat raw cookie dough, or even, if you’re feeling really adventurous, stay out an hour later! Fight the norm with all you’ve got, because succumbing to the proper choice makes for a dull, uninspired life. Need I remind you, you only get one of those. I think it’s in your best interest to make it count.
She didn’t move mountains–
I gasped,
Over and over again I gasped.
Maybe he was in my lungs
And that’s why I had such a hard time breathing,
But he wasn’t there-
I know because I’ve always had bad lungs.
Â
Perhaps that’s the reason I haven’t caught him,
My lungs gave out
When he took his leave.
Which I’m okay with-Â
You can’t run very far without a spine.
In the seventh grade I didn’t know I could like boys yet.
So when everyone else started dating
I spent my time idly liking this girl.
I asked her to dance once.
She was much taller than me and this altercation
dangled the notion of beauty overhead in every way like shitty dime store streamers scotch taped around the sistine chapel.
I stared into her eyes as the night fell apart and I was petrified to marble
Because there was pity in their dark recesses and in contrast
I was like
A monumental statue
Designed to fill
the negative space
in the worst possible way.
For the first time I felt ugly.
You never get called fat to your face anymore
it’s just particles of pollution
like acid rain eroding a statue.
So I am less afraid of being fat and more paranoid
because you cannot dodge glances and you cannot dodge concrete floors and statues don’t float
Thus I am not afraid of swimming, but I am afraid of the social implications of swimming pools.
What happened
To the era where “skinny” and “beautiful” were not synonyms
Where people like me were dashing and handsome and
Were depicted as
Grand marble statues that
reached up toward the sky in an air of grandeur
People have always implied
That I should take up less space but there is nothing authentic about me that
is not large and loud and in your face.
My body is no temple
It is a cathedral
Much too large for its initial purpose but it occupies the space it is given and it
extends infinitely toward the sky and
when people gaze upon it they are in awe of its beauty within and without
it occupies
the space
it
is
given.
I am constructed from stained glass and concrete and the bottoms of empty cartons of ice cream.
I don’t know what it’s like to not be fat.
But I do know what it’s like to be beautiful.
Inkling 