body

Trying to find a place to land my mind

Am I a fool for trying to bend the time?

I keep on breaking everything that I have built

I'm eloquent and I am shrouded in my guilt

They say that’s you

We just stay in our boxes

Doing what we do

She says that’s grief

Let it flow through your body

Am I romanticizing a fault?

Hypothesizing it all?

I keep on wanting everything that I don’t have

Inventing new and cruel ways to make myself sad

They say that’s you

We just stay in our boxes

Doing what we do

She says that’s grief

Let it flow through your body

I say that’s me

And I don’t always believe

I say that’s me

And I don’t always believe

So you want an answer

So you want relief

So you want compassion

So you want to be free

So you want an answer

So you want eternity

So you want to be forgiven

So you want to be free

They say that’s you

We just stay in our boxes

Doing what we do

She says that’s grief

Feel it in your bones 

Let it hold your body

Your body

Your body

Your body

Your body

tender

there are certain tendernesses I cannot handle

like the intimacy of a shared clothes rack

underwear and socks hung side by side

in a sort of domestic solidarity that seems to imply

everything and nothing at the same time

the meaning that is embedded in the practicality

of a life lived in the same spaces

the closeness that is inevitable and so precious

as we move through these spaces

breaking apart and trying valiantly

to hold ourselves together we insist to one another

take this here please take this relief

as we cannot offer it to ourselves

not now

everything is growing that is not supposed to

like intrusive thoughts in the recesses of the mind

onions sprouting fingers green and reaching 

from the papery bulb shedding, shedding

can i learn from this fragile breaking apart

I toss them in the compost bag the synthetic green offensive somehow

a heaviness that is permanent

permaness I want to say but that is not a word

it is a made up word in between spanish and english

tangled in a way that I am not often do I have a right to be

this halfness , when I log in to try to right this poem

google asks me for my home address and I click the button

that says not now.

after yesterday, before tomorrow

after yesterday, before tomorrow

will you tell me something?

the secret to not holding my breath

but breathing in the infinitesimal space between

like the gap of two hands pressed tightly together

always holding a space for

solitude.

I will never make a perfect decision

I will never make a perfect decision

each one tainted with the possibility of the other

infinite impossible collages of the mind

no substance but the cyclical pain of fruitless repetition

at the moment of the jump there is no evidence

no argument that will make you see the bad you 

will sustain for the good you have not yet known, to understand your 

own resilience the truth that comes only with time

nothing but a blind faith

or a shred of

reckless optimism

can save you in that moment

logic futile

only now

the letting go

the trusting that

something will hold you.

tender(ness)

this morning I awake from a dream of you

still dripping from the shower

naked and looking down at me with a tenderness

and the shared secret of that mutual excitement

reflected between us like a prism

and the hope of you 

hands on my arms

and the memory that you

did so

I am beginning to understand I think

the way nothing makes sense

the way we can never see what piece it is

we are holding in our hands

we were not children this was a dream

and I lived it and passed out from it

life is a series of awakening from dreams

and I feel that acutely

I am tender

I am tender to that tenderness

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)