etc. on love:

Love is not a feeling I'm completely
comfortable with
yet
I may not get the chance for the
feeling to sink into my jaded, aging
skin
We are too young
Fact
We are in love
Debatable, as there is no
comparable or universal definition of the term
And this stream of consciousness is completely one sided
We care about the state of each other's hearts, even though we both are aware that the heart is not the seat of emotion
That much I am comfortable stating
But there is not much else I can say with impunity
Should I let myself love someone who may never forgive my errors of inexperience?
Should I let anyone love me, when the probability is that I will hurt them and leave them wanting?
Let anyone love me
I have no control over that save running and blatant sabotage


To love
Is to obtain total relaxation with my partner,
And surrender a portion of my heart with which they may do as they wish.
Is there heart left for me to give away while maintaining a strong enough beat to sustain me alone?
I cannot give too much
I do not want to be left stranded on the side of the road when I prove myself to be a faulty model
with holes in her software.


But this
This is all fear
And there can be no love where fear
makes the laws and constructs the moats and walls
Because to give someone access to your soul requires total vulnerability.
I am nowhere near that brave.

Around You . . .

Around you
I feel beautiful and valued,
understood, almost
Around you
I feel small and young, uncultured
and undereducated
My past both forgiven (but not quite) and painfully apparent

I dreamed that my very skin was dead
And when I cut into it
It crumbled
like stale fondant off an unused wedding cake
Leaving nothing but dust
and empty space

We Used To Talk

We used to talk
until the sun rose pink and golden on both sides of the continent
Me praying that my parents didn’t wake up
You taking the occasional smoke break
We cursed our phones and opened our hearts
Because one dropped call
Could be the difference between unveiling the answers to the mysteries of the world
Or falling asleep while wishing I was in your arms
I can still hear Nick Cave turned down really low on my computer
And you sent me links of stuff I’d never listen to otherwise
Sometimes the sexual frustrations bled through
Sometimes you and I were practically one being curled up on a couch having a conversation without the midwest and texas in between us
It’s after midnight now and it feels like I should be talking to you
But I can’t.  I screwed that up. 
Now I watch the sun rise while fighting the thoughts that tempt me seductively down dark roads
I watch Sid & Nancy
I can’t believe that was Gary Oldman and the movie makes me even more depressed
Facebook flickers on a closed tab, taunting me with the possibility that you might respond to my pathetic attempt at a failed apology that wouldn’t do shit anyways
I see you added her
She’s pretty and blond and skinny and happy; everything I am not, at the moment
Here I am, a lead weight hovering at the edge of your conscious mind, forever offering my services
The ghost, my memories of you
They haunt me when everyone else goes to sleep and I run out of things to google or write or read or hear or do
We used to talk
Now I carry on conversations with the psyches in my head
Sure they’re interesting, but they have a flair for the dramatic
And they sure as hell can’t replace you

What is rape?

I imagine myself as some sort of monster
covered in the digested remnants of cupcakes and sympathy jizz
I see these
clothes
faces
bodies
bonds
that I want so badly
I want that to be me
but/no
none of that ethereal waifish beauty for me
none of that love shit for me
bloody noses bloody apendages bloody bloody
fucking bloody
not alternative enough for the alternatives
not in the right ways
but I don’t want to be right for them
them them what is this them of which we speak so disdainfully
a conglomerate of all we hate and cannot accurately name
it’s them’s fault
stop playing the victim
I’m the one who keeps eating
I’m the one who forgets to reapply sunscreen
I’m the one who got drunk
I’m the one who flirted with you (while drunk)
I’m the one who blacked out (screw the fact that you were supposed to be my friend.  What kind of friend screws a girl who has no idea what she’s doing? What kind of friend violates a woman, no matter how drunk, in a club bathroom?  What kind of friend am I to you for not telling you I was involved with someone before hitting on you when I was so drunk I had no idea where I was or who you were?)
I’m the one at fault
It’s not date rape cuz we weren’t on a date
It’s not rape because I hit on you first (Screw the fact that even the fucking lawyers realize a woman CANNOT FUCKING GIVE CONSENT WHEN SHE’S SHITFACED!  FUCK YOU!)
I ruined everything
Because friends don’t cause drama
Because you were drunk too
Because rape is too strong a word
Because I had to pay the doctor to sew me back up down there because you didn’t care that you were hurting me
Because I’ll never tell you that
Because you’d hate yourself forever
Because you don’t deserve that
I shouldn’t have been drinking
I shouldn’t have taken those beers they handed me
I shouldn’t have blacked out (even though it’s my body’s reaction to the toxins in alcohol and I had no control over it)
I shouldn’t have
I shouldn’t have
I shouldn’t have
It’s all my fault (and no one will ever see it any differently)
I remember a beer and a bonfire and and an artist from Burning Man
And then oblivion
All I remember is you pulling on my hair then black
then you’re helping me buckle my belt back up because I was too drunk (should that have been a clue?)
Then nothing
Then I’m being led outside and I get the vague idea I should be humiliated
Then a waking death/nothing
Then I’m talking to HIM
And it’s all over
Everything I hoped for wished for dreamed for held on for
During two years of captivity
Gone
Thank you.
Because now I know why women don’t talk about these things
Because now I know how it feels to know that if I say even a tiny fraction of what I’m feeling/thinking/knowing I’ll be ostracized/alone/despised even more than HE already does
Because I’m scared
Because I don’t want to hurt you
Because I feel disgusting
Like everyone knows I’m a whore/slut/easy/unfaithful/gullible/weak
Because I think I am
Because I lost the right to be happy/safe/loved/made to feel beautiful
Because I don’t have motivation anymore
I don’t deserve success
I lost the right to dream
I am not a victim
It’s my fault.

A Possible Future

If I can’t be beautiful, I’ll get so smart that no one knows the difference
my sexy brain will lure you in
surely as you need someone to bounce your stoner philosophies off of
I had a man once, who could match me neuron for neuron
But he’s only in my dreams now, but I wake up to you
At least you’re good in bed, cuz you’re sure lacking in the head

Early Grey Tea
    Contentment
    Realization
        Sadness
I caught sight today
        Of myself
            Longways
In the window’s reflection of the
            Dark night
    The face was plain, plump, sad
    An albino apple on a
Dispropotionate dissappointment
    Of a lower half
No shining feature
    Save Otis
    Jolly Old Englishman
    Firmly planted around my middle
White, no, yellow marks
        The only proof that I can
        Bounce back
    From touch
An unspecial embrace
    That he gives to women
        Far more genetically blessed
My head
    My heart
        Must make up for . . .
            Everything else
    I have loved erringly
    And looked longingly
To my credit
    I am a realist
I will never get anything I do not
                Deserve
I tempt no man to distraction
Personality only takes you so far
            In love
I am a realist

Lock
Lock
And lock again
Never safe
Never sound
Speak
Speak
And speak again
Quiet down
Quiet down
Never safe
Never sound
Lock me down
Lock me down

I lean back and watch you
From between my knees,
Your face, barely visible
Above my legs, reflects an
Artist’s strain
    Your pain is beautiful
    In a way
I do not glorify the pain you feel
    I lean back
And admire your long, white fingers
You entrance me, and yet
    You terrify me

I am bound in a paradise
Of skyland
    Andromedas
        Sexless
    Sky goddesses in classical
               Cliché
Remodeling their spines
With paperclips and rubber bands
Who are the codependent Amazons?
    Flipping mattresses in a
        Nuclear winter

You’re a lump of carbon
That got lucky
Some celestial snot rocket
Rained upon the blue planet
And reacted
KAPOOSH!
There you were, in all
Your primitive glory
And then you subdivided
And multiplied
And screwed your way
Up the evolutionary ladder
But you’re still just carbon
Really lucky carbon

After I die
I will continue to dream
Long, harrowing, vivid dreams
I will see worlds collapse
And starving children die,
I will see a pale woman
Bathing in her own blood,
Her glassy eyes looking
So peaceful
Almost happy
But still very dead
She looks prettier dead
No more pain
Or self-conscious self-criticism
She floats unafraid
And perfectly nude
Drained skin softened by
The bath and turned to stone by rigor mortis
Each toe a perfectly wrinkled date
Each finger a delicately puffed sausage
Purple lips part slightly
With the memory of her last
Breath
In my dream I sit cross-legged
On a blood soaked shag bath rug
My arms resting on the porcelain
Side.
I tell her all this while
Straining my eyes for
Ripples in the water.
There are no ripples.
She is perfectly dead. 

My heart called in sick today
Because my soul
    And tolerance
Carpool with it, they are not here either
Do not speak without intention
God forbid you’re rude
I will stare into you
    With all the heat of
Fist breaking the sound barrier

Mired in toxic waste
    Cain courts Ophelia
    En pointe
    She must float above the
            Flowering lances
        And lowly toadstools
Doomed Ophelia
    Follows the wind into the glass wall
Losing elevation
    As the forest fire consumes
    From the knees down
Defective appendages
        Weak and pitiful
    Powerless as the contents of a
            Crysallis
    Given time
    The metamorphasizing mass
Of carbon atoms and luck
    Will discover that its wings
Can lift it
    Where its knees cannot

Do not wait, young man
    You are too young
To sleep next to the snow queen.
Can’t you see?
    You are melting her!  She goes
From crystal palace to crystal palace.
The reindeer do not like you.  You
    Should not pet them.  They bite.
She does too, for that matter.
Young man; you are too young
    To bed eternity.  Can’t you see this?

No luck
    Gravitational pull too strong
    Down we go
        To our knees
    So close
        So far
            How does this work?
Again?
    Principles of uncertainty
Stupid swollen
    Grapefruit appendage!
Burritoed alien child
    My heart may not be fine
IforgiveIforgivemeforgivemeI

Question

What is the protocol for posting poems inspired by ex-lovers?  Is it ok as long as you don't mention them by name?  Or does it violate some code of conduct; somehow breaking the privacy, the intimacy?  Does it somehow immortalize that connection between two hearts, the one that no amount of time makes any less painful to dwell on?  Are poems of devotion like love letters?  Elizabeth Barret Browning wrote Sonnets From The Portuguese, which I consider to be one of the most beautiful compilations of human emotion from that time period.  Maybe it was different in that it was published during a very different era?  And she eventually married the man.  But I digress.  What are your thoughts on the topic?  Would it be wrong of me to post these poems?

Goddess' Failing

This woman is no goddess
She has faults and pride and sin
Betrayal taints her blood
As she continues to cry for him
Weakness, unforgivable
No future entwined within
Her walls keep growing higher
Now the he’s not trying to get in

Waves crest a little less spectacularly
When the goddess becomes mortal
When there is no philosopher/seafarer waiting
It was a misunderstanding
Like reading too much into mediocre poetry
Only a mortal can destroy a something that never was
Only a mortal is blind enough
To hope.

Resistance

Pulls pull pulling
The poison is pulling pulling
Tempting to write a sequel to a movie that tanked in theaters
But no
Waking nightmares
Flashbacks to an event that wasn’t remembered to begin with
Torturing the inside of each eyelid
Whenever they are closed
This is the antidote to desire
This is the cure for the pull
The pain of a Heart pulling itself into infinitely smaller pieces for eternity
That will do it

There Is No Void

There is no void
I do not need to be filled
By something outside myself
Not smoke not drink or some random seed
You can’t fill an invisible hole with the ephemeral
The more shit you stuff in the more poisoned you are
Hearts can only suffer so much to pass through them before they surrender
I need a clear head and a pure heart but that takes some detoxing
All the falseness and cheapness I stuffed in my system takes some time and help to clear
I can’t cut and scrub all at the same time!
But every time I check
My soul looks a little less diseased
Someday I can purge this evil weakness out of me