Sunday, July 14, 2013

Commitment-phobia

I now know how alone a Burmese python feels
Stranded in the Florida Everglades after consuming a senior citizen’s pet Pekinese 
Sated but alone
A little itchy on the inside
Feeling the need to escape and then realizing you have no feet and
You’re in a food coma
Granted, the python didn’t just friends-with-benefits-zone someone because they were only 5’9”
Among other reasons
Such as lack of education and making racist jokes
Being height-ist is better than admitting you had sex with someone who is an active reddit user

It is a cruel rule of time that
When a young woman is not interested in being emotionally intimate with the person she is physically intimate with will be
The exact moment in time when all the men in the greater San Francisco Bay Area decide they want to settle down . . . with their ex . . . or the girl who brought the keg . . . or their friend’s sister . . .
Or maybe even the damned Pekinese if it was interested in hearing how their day went.

The safety of denying intimacy is
Negated once the unloved lovers find braver souls
They cannot leave me if there is nothing to leave and I cannot lose if I give nothing away
I cannot be ugly if I never ask to be called beautiful
I cannot be missing what I never wanted to begin with.

Maybe that last one is a lie
Promiscuity is only fulfilling until your harem of caressers wanders into commitment
With other people
One by one
Until I am left sitting on my bed

Just my boundaries and me.

Untitled July 2013



My lover is my first case subject
We psychoanalyze each other over coffee, casually
I want to see your brain in an EEG, I say
Ask you questions, see what lights up,
Compare it to baseline test subjects 
He laughs at me, while I imagine

Illuminated modules explaining his idiosyncrasies

Forever

I was suffocating
If you must know
Underneath memories of who we were

I was sixteen riding shotgun in your jeep
The stars were so huge at midnight in summer
Somehow I knew you were forever
Somehow I knew I wasn’t

I was nineteen and on my back
Your warmth within and around me put icicles in my heart
It hurt that you couldn’t be forever
It hurt that you couldn’t even manage now for yourself

I’m twenty, just twenty
I keep lovers just long enough to lose myself
It works better this way
No one asks me to stop dreaming

I am terrifyingly free

If you must know

Grieving

What life would I be living now
Had I let you into my heart
Rather than been duped by pseudo-intelligence
And a challenge

You would have been kinder to my soul

What life would I be living now
Had I allowed you to taste me
And risked the chance of you not remembering in the morning
I wanted to make sure you really wanted me

I didn’t let you
You remembered
It’s been years since we spoke

You didn’t like what you saw while I was looking for myself

She’s probably really smart
I hope she tastes like strawberries and the future

You deserve someone you can hold forever

Friday, February 8, 2013

Wilderness II


There is a mountain in front of me
I set a traps and snares by the glassy river
Hoping to catch a step closer to home

My life is on my back
It comes with me wherever I go
There’s not much of it
But it takes care of itself

Brush off the brambles stick everywhere
My juniper bow gets caught on the wild roses
They and the stream are already beginning to freeze

We will drink with the cattle and the mustangs
Until the snow comes
And we melt the sky to parch our icy throats

You return to your base components
When the spirit has gone
Cast out, despondent in a frozen desert

Monday, February 4, 2013

Wilderness I


Rain on my window sounds like fat snowflakes
Smacking a blue tarp

The sky stretches towards freedom in every direction
Including down

How do I capture the feeling of being a free prisoner?
Walking across entire worlds before I may sleep

Today I carry water
Tomorrow I will dig a fire pit
only to cover it up and move on
again

Would you believe me if I said this blizzard
was the warmest I’ve felt in months?

I am freezing and sodden and being buried alive
The ice rises up to meet the snow pressing down
Will my shelter hold tonight?

Silent echoes might be the ghosts of wind
Passing through this worn canyon

I stopped dreaming of home
after the sky filled with shooting stars
and I couldn’t remember what it was
to not make flame between my hands

Space and solitude and silence
The only barrier between the heavens and me
Is the snow