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1 year ago
Mantra
i’ve been buzzing under epidermis
stretched too thin to reminisce and
bellow the surface, don’t forget
it’s you i miss, it’s you i miss
it’s you i miss
it’s only you
and even over time your kiss
lingers on my lips, my lips, and
the one sweet kiss you laid upon my wrist
before you placed my hand over your heart
upon your chest
and fell asleep, asleep, asleep
as now my heart grows cold and crisp
filling out this deep abyss
this and this and this and this
i can’t define this silly
far fetched version of the bliss
i’m banking on but must desist
because again and again you resist
and i’m afraid will only leave if i
persist or insist and in the end
i am happy just to know
once upon a night together
we did exist. we did exist. we did exist.
we did exist.
-
2 years ago
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2 years ago
Swingset - Andrea Gibson
“Are you a boy or a girl?” he asks, staring up at me in all three feet of his pudding face grandeur, and I say “Dylan, you’ve been in this class for three years and you still don’t know if I’m a boy or a girl?” And he says “Uh-uh.” And I say “Well, at this point, I don’t really think it matters, do you?” And he says “Uhhhm, no. Can I have a push on the swing?” And this happens every day. It’s a tidal wave of kindergarten curiosity rushing straight for the rocks of me, whatever I am.
And the class, when we discuss the Milky Way galaxy, the orbit of the Sun around the Earth… or whatever. Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, and kids, do you know that some of the stars we see when we look up in the sky are so far away, they’ve already burned out? What do you think of that? Timmy? “Umm… my mom says that even though you got hairs that grow from your legs, and the hairs on your head grow short and poky, and that you smell really bad, like my dad, that you’re a girl.” “Thank you, Timmy.”
And so it goes. On the playground, she peers up at me from behind her pink power puff sunglasses and then asks, “Do you have a boyfriend?” And I say no, and she says “Oh, do you have a girlfriend?” And I say “No, but if by some miracle, twenty years from now, I ever finally do, then I’ll definitely bring her by to meet you. How’s that?” “Okay. Can I have a push on the swing?”
And that’s the thing. They don’t care. They don’t care. Us, on the other hand… My father sitting across the table at Christmas dinner, gritting his teeth over his still-full plate, his appetite raped away by the intrusion of my haircut, “What were you thinking? You used to be such a pretty girl!” Frat boys, drunken, screaming, leaning out of the windows of their daddys’ SUVs, “Hey! Are you a faggot or a dyke?” And I wonder what would happen if I met up with them in the middle of the night.
Then of course there’s always the somehow not-quite-bright enough fluorescent light of the public restroom, “Sir! Sir, do you realize this is the ladies’ room?” “Yes, ma’am, I do, it’s just that I didn’t feel comfortable sticking this tampon up my penis in the men’s room.”
But the best, the best is always the mother at the market, sticking up her nose while pushing aside her daughter’s wide eyes, whispering “Don’t stare, it’s rude.” And I want to say, “Listen, lady, the only rude thing I see is your paranoid parental hand pushing aside the best education on self that little girl’s ever gonna get, living with your Maybelline lipstick after hips and pedi kiwi, vanilla-smelling beauty; so why don’t you take your pinks and blues, your boy-girl rules and shove them in that car with your fucking issue of Cosmo, because tomorrow, I start my day with twenty-eight minds who know a hell of a lot more than you. And if I show up in a pink frilly dress, those kids won’t love me any more, or less.”
“Hey, are you a boy or a — never mind, can I have a push on the swing?” And some day, y’all, when we grow up, it’s all gonna be that simple. -
2 years ago
The Storm
Fingers in her hair, pulling fists of it from her
crown just hard enough so she arches her
back and I see the nape of her neck at
its full, extended length.
I grind against her, pelvis to pelvis,
bruising, hungry,
craving. It’s a quarter past one
and she pulls me forward so I’m
sitting on her stomach. Supple, thin waste.
(beautiful)
My leg passes over hers and she pulls me
further. Her nails are in my back and I’m
on her chest, arching, and my hands
are suddenly full of heaving breasts. Heavy.
There is only sweetness
between my legs now, purrs, lulls, pulses. My eyes
are meeting hers - a pure connection,
turn my head for a second to see her
(beauty) and her hand is between her thighs.
It’s enough to…
I’m sweating. I only notice because –
a drip, cold, running down my
spine matches the sound of rain hitting
the window at my back… a condensation which
until this second was only moist enough to
feel the breeze but has gathered with itself
enough for the clouds to pour… buckets of
sweat seep from high reaches of the sky into the fits
of my mind and uncontrollable pleasure
consumes me.
and her. She’s making thunderous sounds and
I am raining. There is only sweetness in this storm.
In her arms. In my heart. In her eyes.
Thunder subsiding, we melt with
the storm and become again, what we have been
so many times before… a puddle in the sheets. -
3 years ago
DNR
When she smiles, her only two front teeth makes an appearance. The only other time this happens is when she raises the corner of her lip in a grimace. I’m never quite sure why. A floof of hair behind her right ear sticks straight out from the side of her head under the gray of her plastic, padded helmet. The surface is dull and wraps around the back of her head, under her chin, and across her forehead. It comes down low over her eyebrows and she has to tilt slightly back to see me properly.
Her eyes are kind, so often alternating between absence and presence, knowing, blank. Nose, broken countless times from seizures and falling, arches downwards, just meeting her upper lip, which rests softly against its lower protruding counterpart, swollen with layers of scars. They are wet with saliva she doesn’t think to swallow. From the corners of her mouth stream trickles that dry in the long, blond hairs that grow sparsely under her chin.
Her head swings towards me and she meets my eye briefly before the blank dead look comes over her again. It breaks when she recognizes me (?) and smiles, falters, and stares, unnervingly. She’s got a playful cycle of repetitive motions going now. From a sitting position, lean forward, touch the floor, push herself back into the couch, it lurches, even with my weight, she lifts her foot and stomps. Repeat. Sometimes she accents the motions with sharp vocalization, looks at me and smiles. Contagious are her smiles.
She is in a pajama shirt and short pants. It’s the weekend.
Her cheeks are hard looking, and scarred. Spending forty-eight years seizing and falling will do more to you than you’d think. She was severely mentally delayed by concussions before she even got off the ground. Loves texture, running her hands over the couch, ripping newspaper into shreds, and playing with toys. She’ll intently pick up an item, turn it over, look at it, and putting it down in the pile ..or throw it on the floor. She sleeps a lot and her helmet is covered in old stickers: decoration by past and present adoring staff.
Sometimes she shows affection, pushing you gently - which distinctly differs from the push she gives so you’ll leave her alone. She cries often, sometimes it’s because she needs a change. In this case the cry may be accompanied by ambling into her room and waving her hands around in confusion or discomfort. Sometimes she is tired, and sometimes the only thing that will calm her down is sitting with her and empathizing. She can see empathy more than anything else and in this situation is the only time I have kept her focus, kept her present. After so long she trusts me, somehow, and feeling her eyes bore into mine as I speak to her softly, is a connection so rarely felt with anyone of even “normal(?)” understanding. Leaving her room, I know she’ll sleep soundly when I remove her ungainly helmet and tune into the melancholy comfort that is the PDX radio’s country station.
In the morning, she quite literally giggles herself awake, an experience you have to see to believe the magic.
Her ears are adorable and delicate. Her skin would be flawless but for her face and the bruises left from falling. Big eyes, beautiful.
I wish I knew what she was thinking. Bec has no family who comes to see her but her mother, once a year, who sits and talks politics with the staff and looks sadly at her daughter with a weight that fills the room. Her medical papers list her DNR and sometimes she looks so scared. Her beautiful soul deserves better than the flesh she was given. At this very moment, she reaches towards me and looks me square in the eye, like she knows of whom I write.
When the day comes that we part ways, I will be sad.
Will she remember me? -
3 years ago
Falling as a lifestyle
A drop of water, falling from the clouds has only one natural course of action. In the most basic form - gravity says, “fall.”
Once landing, the process becomes more complicated. It could have fallen, for example, onto a rooftop in a country town, gathered with other raindrops, gradually making its way towards the ground where it soaks into an underground stream, joining and dividing with water from other sources, live there for two and a half months before arriving in a bucket pulled up from a well, given to the goats in the barn, making a grand journey through the digestive track to land back on the ground outside and evaporate on a particularly hot day back to the sky from whenst it existed at the beginning of the particular scenario.
However, the action I would like to focus on now - is the falling. Gravity says, fall.
“Fall” is a metaphor, of course, for the natural course of action. Natural law governs natural forces and most animals and insects follow instinct while the big all end all decider and fate of the universe deemed it thus that humans possess “choice.”
Throughout my life, my laziness has wished for more simplicity. Where is my gravity and why must I deliberate endlessly as a human instead of having been born a pup, so I could just allowing myself to follow instinct?
Recently, however, it has come to my attention, that following the natural course of action, for a person, could easily be a metaphor for following one’s heart. In our language, this is human instinct: do what you know is right, and make choices that feel fulfilling. We have experience to add to our basic instincts, we have analytical minds, and we have the capacity to learn from our own mistakes as well as those others have made throughout history. Human, experiential, analytical, revisionary instinct gives one control over one’s life and just because you’re born a whale, doesn’t mean you have to eat fish and live in the ocean.
I can do whatever I want, trying really hard not to hurt anyone in the process (tune in next week for “Communication and how it usually allows you to live anyway you like”), and as long as I “fall like a human” I should probably end up where I want to be. Letting go of the stress of “choice” is letting me see the freedom I possess and how instead of a weight, it is, indeed, a privilege.
I no longer wish to die and come back as a puppy.
Although it would be a pretty cushy life..
