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

This morning

This morning

I feel stoic and serious

weighted by the wisdom

by the questions large and small of

how one might live one's life, or more

specifically––how might I live mine?

and all the little questions and

worries are like dust motes in the air

because we will die and this is true

and James Baldwin said it was so and it will be

in the same way that he is so beautiful and so wise

and no longer treads in leather soled shoes on the

sidewalks of this earth (I want to tread in leather soled

shoes on the sidewalks of this earth, to have that earthly

heavenly pleasure). 

                                And the thing is, 

life keeps going. Keeps tumbling over itself until the ending, 

and even then who knows? I am beginning to realize this;

phase after phase like beads on a string how many lives a life

can contain and how many I want it to (many, many, many)

even as each one breaks me––and in this way shows itself to be glass:

that which lets the light in and that which draws the deep red beneath our skin.

They say you cannot choose who you love, but what if right now I am not

loving, I am just trying it out. It being anything that I have made fully and completely

with my own two hands. And surely I am doing it wrong, but the secret is

there is no wrong or right. This morning I see this self assurance, a grey stone

in my eyes in the mirror, looking back at myself, hair pulled back tight into a bun,

a Renaissance painting, stoic, and not accepting, but seeing, but heavy,

and clear.

can I not let it hurt me?

your insufficiency

I tried to look away

worked so hard to ignore

the breeze through the closed window

the rain on the floor

the fact that this just doesn't

work anymore

Is it worth the disappointment?

the heartbreak?

fighting over what it is and what it isn't

temporary and longer pains

so many things that will never be named

love laying in a pool of shame

what remains?

so I love you

and it rises again to the surface

a milky truth, like hot breath

on glass

or a plant floating up to the surface

something released

something buoyant no longer

tied down.

the problem is

the problem is

everytime you poke your head above the surface

my panic sets in

it's incredibly personal, but I'll own its not your fault

it may feel like I am avoiding you, because I am

it may seem as if I am sending you mixed signals, because I do happen to be emitting them

it might read like a contradiction, because I constantly change my mind

I try to stay above the water

and your mere presence, existence, makes me drown

makes me remember why it is

I can no longer swim.