Posts tagged distance

It was winter where I was, and the snow was in its hugeness.

You were the air and I was the bird. I danced around you and you bent for me.
You were the land and I was the bird, and I’d follow your skin home.

I woke up as a bird.
I flew.

I took the southern way.

And now, halfway home - halfway to you - I realize you may not want me anymore.
You may have unhung the birdhouse and taken in the seed.

So, did you? 

There is a cold and blowing wetness all down the main street, blanketing concrete in a sheath of shine. The chills dance like girls that I can’t see, their invisible hands around my arm and around my spine. The cold outside pools and floods all the open spaces and tries to fill in the cracks.

Teenaged girls quickly walk tall in their heeled boots and wet clothes, and women run hunched in their wools. The man in the gallery across the street runs out the door and hesitates under the awning before repositioning the fallen sign.

I’m standing at the glass door, arms crossed and eyes unfocussed.

This is my spring.

goodnight doesn’t sound anything
like what I wish it did

it sounds too much like a one-person bed
that wants only to be filled up by two.

Spring is wearing the white dress
of my country
that’s slipping at the shoulders.
She’s of the times, her heels high and skin tattooed like melting roadways.
She’s harmed by no one.

I look at her like I look at you

through screens
through lighted squares

But one day she’ll die and so will everything else.
The electricity will stop humming. The screens that lit us blue will be dark and deep.
And I hope when everything stops being and the lights unlight

that there will still be a place for me. 

It snowed here today, all wet and heavy. Thought about you in pregnant pauses. Thought about quilt covers and brick walls.

Lifted snow and threw it to the side and covered old wounds. Josh Ritter and Neko Case and I clearing the way for new things. Thought about chiseled cheekbones and gentle accents. Your head on my chest.

No more snow, May. I’m going somewhere without snow.

This is the slime of life, you told me. Or would have, I’m sure, if we would have been near enough to talk about our closeness. I licked up all the thickness and rot that you left outside our bodies and I sickened myself. Your stomach couldn’t handle it, your heart couldn’t either. But the rest of your body could. The rest of your body hunted for it.

Sitting solidly on couches and our hands rolling down like empty streets in the night. My hopes were those lights that your darkness put out. We’re borders away.

Look at your cheekbones, coming from their hiding spots. Look at your jaw broadening. Look at your shoulders and hands. Look at my hands, making mistakes that get me close to you and far from you. I want commitment. I want to get across everything between us, all the simple things and all the widespread things.

You’re what I’m not, other half, or half of something, or something entirely of your own. Maybe you don’t belong with me at all. Maybe I wasted all the time and all of the chances. Being youngconfusedterrifiedwrappedup.

I can’t ask anything of you. I can’t say anything to you. I’m less than you. Under you. Shadow and thinness, all eyes and heart. You have a life that’s full of water and teeth and tongue. I have fallen trees that are all torn up and crushed berries and that used to be enough. I’m pitted and hollowed out, or built around nothing.

So invite me to your land and I’ll make you a flag and a castle and a king.

This is the slime of life, all these words and unsent sentiments and looks of love and longing. This is the slime of life, where I start and where I end.

Southern Boy is a Northern Boy to everyone but me.
There’s Eastern Boy and Western Boy but they don’t compare. Southern Boy has got it. Tough and polite and charming. A gentleman.

I am thin like rice paper and feathers, and you have concrete fingers that roll closer to me. I can’t run. I try to hide, become invisible. I try to push the wind through my paper person. I draw on myself to sink in. I write on myself to trick you.

But in the end you touch me. You break the shell. You touch me and you’re in.

Southern Boy, walker of walks, lighter of lights, nothing can be done.