Cleopatra to Mark Antony: What I’ve got in store for you baby. Sheaves of golden wheat, honey and dates, a guitar pick made from my bone, the safest tomb.
This town has sixteen bridges
and I’ve scattered the ashes
of failed love affairs
from every one.
Almost six months later
and he keeps trying
to warm his hands
on the bridge
he burnt our love on.
Lick the web of skin between his thumb
and forefinger,
whelm his index finger
in my mouth,
and my heart
stammering love
like a wah-wah pedal.
only one false memory is allocated to each of you, so ask for what you’d want to bury the deepest
I’ve never been happier for a man I love to pack up and move out of my poems.
I want a 24/7 D/S relationship but only so someone can control my diet, exercise and make me go to bed early and get up early.
Someone said to me, “Isn’t that a parent?” My reply was laughter and “My parents stopped bothering to parent me at 13.”
That might explain why I have no discipline, and my desire for it.
I hate my writing and I’d rather be in love
Did I lose pain and the leash I kept it on? The collar of his large hand around my throat as he moved inside me, a low growl “I want to tear you apart” and it wasn’t even full moon. The pain he inflicted running across my muscle and skin like a fault line. Nights he would have bitten my teeth too, just to break any last boundary between us. I’d chafe for his bit—bite me back to the first time.
Sometimes I need to be desired violently or I don’t exist. A porcelain cast of my bite is not the same as casting a spell. My bite in his shoulder: a lightning ridge.
“I want more” he says, and nothing is ever enough for him, not even with his initials carved into my thighs, not even when he’s broken my skin with his teeth, or when he takes me so violently that I cry hot tears of pain and pleasure.
He translated the world into pain for me, under his hands. I still smile with this secret.
I joke with him about the men that might come after him, and how they’ll see what he’s done to me. There was a man after him, and he was very tender. I wanted something good and normal and something like love, and for three days I lay my palm against his hairy chest and felt his heart beat. This new man his opposite, who helped me discover the possibilities of pleasure instead of the limits of pain. I wanted to choose only tenderness, to cancel my treaty with pain. I never get what I want but I live fully in every almost.
Not the same kind of lust, so it should be a relief that there’s only one man I’d crawl naked across broken glass to have. Except I don’t know what relief feels like without either of them yet.
I don’t know how to end it, if every man that comes after him sends me back to him. I don’t know how to stop.
Hips careen across the road like the sail of a ship caught between two air currents. I am adrift in a white ocean when you get out of bed.
Everyone who remembers me so fondly and the time I walked naked out of the sea and left salt all over their sheets.
to exile ourselves from language ; to fell trees but make no paper for writing ; to lose the way to say “there is blood in my mouth”
How do you stop loving someone who hasn’t hurt you, so hard. How do you honour cycles of lives before, and lives ahead.
Bittersweet blessings. I’ll love him for the rest of my life and hope desperately for his happiness and wellbeing. I know that my love served him and my body comforted him, but I still don’t know how to end it.
He said to me once, about our deep karma, “We’ve been doing this for a long time. We could keep doing this forever.” I lay naked and raw in that truth and reached again for his body.
I gave him everything this time, until I was born again.
prayerie dog
wonder what you look like naked in the desert
under an engorged moon
I look naked everywhere
i
This wait makes my teeth ache.
I should have told him not to get reborn on my behalf.
I look like I never touched him, now that I’ve stopped. I look like I’ve been sleeping beside you instead. I sleep through you alone, sleep about missing you. I’m the opposite of hurting. It’s one thing to be happy, but that don’t make it a career. It’s not so bad to be a ship going down.
If I sleep I won’t ever get to the end of my list of sadnesses. In this light, you’re not my lover.
ii
Loved in and out of sleep, loved like my body is kindling. Fucked down to the wire. Fucked into the Middle Ages. I never seem to get on the inside of sleep, even with Pseudoephedream prescriptions. Tearing your pillow with singing, letting you bed my hair down. Marrying my body to the undercarriage of your car. Gathering light years in my arms instead of you, waking dream of kissing stars across your ears and neck. I club the night into partial eclipse. Spit out bullets in my nightmares, wounded with yawned off shotguns. Issue receipts in trust.
You whisper words to me that lick the smallest intimacies. I whisper quiet need to you.
iii
Oh my darling, my murmuring. I couldn’t be sleeping, with the wishes my hipbones make about you. I was there in the dark, then I turned a comet.
I hope when you fell asleep that it was with my song in your mouth.
