I choose to be free (2)

I choose to be free

It is a difficult decision

My fingers still scrabble at the ledge even as I 

speak these words

going back against my resonant certainty

a betrayal a mixed message a last ditch attempt 

to save myself from drowning but

I choose to be free

to not fight battles I will never win for prizes I 

would never ask for blinded by the sharpness of my own pain

I choose to see that pain and to be free

I choose to rid myself of second chances of second guesses of second thoughts

to know everything I am doing I am doing because I am trying I am trying god am I trying

I choose to know that to love myself for all my destructive tendencies

For all my messiness (sitting at the dining table Sophia says, no one is every too much) maybe

I am too much and even so I choose to love myself even though 

I did not put the smiley face at the end of the text or the exclamation point and maybe it was a form

of withholding or maybe it was (and it was) an act of protection and I choose to love myself in that

protection and not plague myself with doubt for not performing

I choose to love myself even while I hope to be free of that 

To speak my mind in the winding path between appeasing and withholding 

To find the truth

I choose to be free 

even in the process of it

I choose to be free of that which I am holding on to like a life preserver

when it is nothing but a dirty plastic bag

I choose to love myself for holding that dirty plastic bag

for hugging it to my chest, I choose to say, oh baby and I choose to hug myself

to pull myself out of the water

to sit on the edge with my feet in the pool

and to look over the ocean

and to breathe

and to choose

to choose

to goddamn choose

to be 

free.

I choose to be free (1)

we went to buy shirts that were too small

and try on perfumes that we did not like

and we bought nothing, but the glimpse

of a different self in the mirror

walked away with only the heaviness

of the real self, but the thing is

I choose to be free (and I choose

to love the part of me that wants not to let me)

incomple

I never finish things,

it is one thing that I worry about

about myself - the not finishing

the always fixing the anxiety cycles

came later but the principle of the thing

was the fact now that creatively it feels

like I never find the period

today sitting on the toilet

I offered myself a moment of compassion

is life not in itself the greatest creative act

with an ever prolonged

completion

maybe it is just because I have been on instagram

reading poems by someone I went to college with

and feeling jealous that she is becoming somebody and

I sat on a step last night and cried to my mother after I could not

muster up the courage to ask a set hand on a film set how he had gotten

his job, begging the universe for someone to give me a

chance and I was just like the cocaine addicted roommate

my friend told me about who doubted his own potential 

and cursed the success of his friends. except I did not curse the success

of my friends just of the friends of my friends who were never

that nice to me at parties. and now I sit here

writing a poem in the style of theirs which I have never quite liked

for its confessional nature that shoves life's edges at you in your face

edgy in its ugliness and I make it about me even though I know it is not about me

and yet the only way to live life is to think it is about you

and I am an artist and I want to make things and I am a poet and I want meaning

and I am a musician and I want to say things without words and I am human

and I want to be held and to be told I am understood

in my dream 

he admits to being sad

and I reach up

and rub his back

as a fogged up window

the clouding returning

almost instantly

but comfort still

in the motion

the point not 

to make it stop

we reach 

his door and 

we pause

I have not

been in since

I say

the sentence

unfinished and lingering

what do we do

with our sadness?

when I wake up

I am not sad exactly

more burdened

lightly with

the feeling of

knowing

of having

lived.

praise for imperfection

And thank god.

I have found my imperfections again.

And they are what make me human.

And I am so glad

I am human.

lasagne

the lasagne looks almost indecent

in its insistence on abundance

oozing ricotta into the plastic tupperware

glaring at me

and writing this poem I am sure

this place never finished my sentences

but nothing is lost these days

everything is found the answer is laid out for you

without you knowing what question you were asking

(in all likelihood a different one)

why do I want to kill something.

the cleansing wave of destruction

an alternative to perpetual anxiety

and anger at things I cannot change,

I would take some abundance now.

I would take some, and then some more,

and then some more,

and then some

more.

little things

i.

do you remember then?

those viennese mornings

light and airy in the living room

reading poems to each other

as if to wipe away the dust of sadness

that accumulates in sleep

to hear you laugh or better

to try, a thing I could not fail to fall in love with

showing someone you love something you love

feeling they may one day love it too

feeling they may already do

and us just two americans

as the austrian sunlight filtered in through the double paned windows

first cold then unbearably hot

the trams incessant on the street below after the midnight pause

and a poem like an anchor

a gift given at the same time to each other

a little thing

and life is made of little things.

ii.

now I wake from dreams of you

where we never quite kiss on the mouth

and my eyes half-open come to the daylight

hungry for the fantasy of your body

for the fantasy of your mind knowing reality

never has and will live up to this

the true knowing of the dream kiss.

iii.

and you want it to be you don't you?

you had asked me

looking back on that moment 

I feel such full astonishment

even then I knew I was living

something.

And I stormed from the room and refused

to give you what you were asking for:

an admission of guilt

goaded out of me with jealousy

poking the bear that slept between us

that held us each in one heavy lidded paw.

vi.

there is no answer

but I think of you now

as I write a poem and now

that everything is broken

and will not be fixed and

yet amid the angles

the jutted body-like bones of broken limbs

the glinting of 

little things.

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