a moment to believe

Worse than a fever thoughts of you in my mind
Like it could be fixed if I prove that I’m right
Broken like the limbs on the trees
Nothing special, just time, that familiar disease
It takes a moment to believe

You say you think of us the same and don’t see me flinch
To me one of a kind is the only thing worth being
The closed bathroom door like a knife in the chest
A symbol of your eternal unreachableness
When all I asked was to be held

Whipping past half promises I cannot keep
If I do they’ll destroy me
So used to holding on so tightly
Didn’t want to see what it does to me
What it’s doing

[found on the back of a painting from the spring]

There is such a strong silence here today
It takes over my room
My jackets on the hook
My pictures on the wall
It says everything without words
It holds everything without words

I am not simple
I never promised to be

The danger of intimacy
is the pain of misunderstanding
and that is such a 
cutting wound

healing does not happen
quickly
and it will not happen
all at once
Fear is the enemy
of all resolution

Please I am begging
you in the only
way I know how
To try

amager fælled

How do I feel like myself?

It seems to require isolation.

This morning I cycle through the woods,

things I see:

fuzzy cows with long horns on each side

moving—in my eyes they look like machines, robot creatures

almost, and it takes me telling myself again to remember 

they, too, are alive (what does this say except perhaps

I have been spending too much time in the city);

also a pheasant crossing the path, then fluttering away,

I apologize for the disturbance, a "beautiful" loosing my lips

at its colored feathers, maroon, brown, green, ruffled, unruffling;

also soft hairy spheres—witch hazel? my mind offers up, I am not sure

softness along the brown branches on the path;

and things I hear: is it the wind or is it the snowflakes

falling lightly, constant,

all around me.

Bad Words

Running over barbs in my mind

Things you said once I repeat to myself many times

Pain is quick, bodily, unkind

Harder to feel alright

Say I deserve better

But you’re talking to yourself

Not about my needs

About wishing you were someone else

Don’t you think I know self loathing?

Insufficiency an ocean

Criticisms cycle on the shore

Easier to say you want less than you want more

And I don’t need more half truths

Wasted time or you

Misconfigured and uneasy

Saying what you can’t not what you could be

how do you love people for who they are?

for everything they cannot give you?

the imperfect answer to a question that seems so simple

yet is it not beautiful that you can never know the answer?

would it not be boring to be given the same answer you had imagined?

everything is slightly off kilter and I find myself

shaking my head as though I might be able to right it

in that simple movement of my chin up and down

as though rotation were easy enough

I am changing and you are changing

and it is at different speeds and we try to hold our changing together

in the intersections of shared glances, analyzing other couples

half bottles of wine and music and the heavy breath before you finish.

all endings and beginnings and you tell me you cannot be what you think it is 

that I want that I need but that is so limiting and boring and

what are we building, your apology incomplete

not what I would have said, but voiced in your own way

and I see, at least now, in this moment: you trying.

I remember you

implacable in the face of my anger

my technical difficulties

fixed by your steady fingers

tying and retying the knot with such gentle patience

even as I yelled and cried, threw things, disintegrated myself

and rebuilt myself in sequence three times, four times, banged my head

against a wall, and you saying take a breath, trust

my impatience a swarm of bees of wasps mosquitoes and you saying did you try this

and my rage like a fire catching and directing itself at you and your

thumb and pointer fingers on the shoelaces and there,

somehow,

it was released,

it was mended.

Nantucket

You took me to the island
And each day we went to a new beach
Kissing on the marble countertop
Skinny dipping in the sea

Showers in the ocean air
Mug in my palm
Eerily quiet, look over the beach pines
Search for calm

Bike out in the morning
Watching passing cars
Nothing but my breath
And seagull calls

Nothing but my breath
And seagull calls

Maybe I’m not the one you’d fall in love with
But I’m standing in front of you now
My ego like a bird
You’ve wounded with your words somehow

Do you resent me for knowing the end?
Do you find me boring, notice your own unwanting?
I know you’re no supreme judge that we all see things through our own shit
But I am so vain and that makes me full of it

It’s a lost battle against time against change
It’s a war never won to keep feelings the same
Is this a truth you are still birthing?
And I too empathetic a midwife, hold all your hurting