oh, to be unconsumed by you.
and float the rivers of identity, understand, know, mend.
to glue myself back together (burning plastic, doll-yarn hair).
but then, ah, the ecstasy of shattering in your presence,
swept away, like glass shards.
you wouldn’t put me back together;
but you, you would take the glass pieces of me,
lick them with your tongue and the soft edges of your fingers,
bleeding until you soak into my pores,
an endlessness of you that overwhelms me.
shall i become as the sea?
rounded, blunt edges, opaque from salt lashings,
colored the muted tints of a deep, slow river.
there is much to be lost in you, i think, much that i will never know.
to suppress you,
to turn your current back,
moon and wind against the earth and sea.
we are not fire, you and i.
we do not spark, or crack,
or light the presence of those around us.
no, we linger like the moon in daylight,
half-full, waxing and waning as we orbit,
coming together oh-so-subtly,
until beyond a thousand years i lose my own gravity
and there, you, tempting (we become).
grief, the river, melancholy. thus, what we find.
there is a species of later,
the silence of two weeks, two hours, too long without words.
my shoulders bow like the willow over the river,
horses grazing between my breasts,
ducks nesting on the stretch of my stomach,
shadowed by you above me.
who am i to say where these things shall go,
where you shall find me, (where the parasites shall live)?
am i alone according to the lives of those who’ve lived before me?
– a blue period, name-tattoos; i know so little.
