You have two responsibilities:
- Be who you are.
- Never impede on another person’s right to be who they are.
Tag: love
-
I’ve come to worship
at your body’s temple.
I am on my knees
confessing the sin of my desire.
Your curves are scripture—
I touch the divine—
I’m in ecstasy.
Light, white, blinding.
No—
this is false.
I know not anyone
worth bowing to.
I cannot
make you my idol.
I will not.
I’ve had quite enough
of love
that puts me on my knees.
We meet face to face,
or we do not meet at all.
I give—
but I also receive.
No more love
that is a one-way street.
Done am I
placing the divine in another,
as if they, and they alone,
hold
all that is holy,
like I am damned,
and my salvation
is bought
through martyrdom,
dying
for an unfeeling God.
If you are holy, then I am too.
If I am damned, you are too.
Scales of my love: balance.
-
There are some people who will make you feel like a fool
through moving lips, an upturned chin.
Like putting my spirit on its knees, commanding I listen
to all but my heart.
There are some people who, through their deafening, humble silence,
still make me feel like a fool, but only because
they make me hear the message I’ve been ignoring, that quiet but sure one,
a tea light in me, a brazier in them.
That silent teacher said not a thing, but only pointed to that voice
in my breast.
-
my revolutionary ideologies
are capable of utter destruction.
do you know how loud a hushed mouth is?
listen: there is no greater noise.
a hurricane of silence.
I made myself delicate,
public displays of my underbelly.
I dressed a fortress in a house of cards:
meanwhile,
I saw the straw that they called a castle.
silent observation: toppled.
at least to my eyes.
there is no gaze more piercing
than a gentle one.
-
Before I go on, I need to make something very clear: I love her. Deeply. I could list infinitudes of clichés about the ways in which she makes me feel – that she’s the missing puzzle piece I’ve longed for all my life, she made my life go from black and white to technicolor, that I’d give up my soul just for a whiff of her scent – but I fear none of them can adequately explain the intensity of my passion. How can I explain an orchestral symphony to the deaf? How can I explain sunsets to the blind?
How can I explain the depth of my love to anyone?
Alas, I must try. When I tell you that I love her, I mean to tell you that it feels like my entire life was a long process of approaching the great singularity of our meeting, and that all things have been secondary to that one extraordinary moment. I mean to tell you that our hearts are plainly connected by a golden thread, the only source of direction to be found in the labyrinth of the universe. I mean to tell you that she is the end of the labyrinth. I mean to tell you that our spirits were cut from the very same cloth, that our love feels like deep kinship, like a grand homecoming. I mean to tell you that the glory of our union is like the feeling of graduating after many long, grueling years of study, like throwing your cap in the air in sweet triumph. I mean to tell you that it is like a physicist toiling at his desk for many years, his entire life’s work culminating in one grand moment of at last reconciling all variables into one Grand Unified Theory of Everything. I mean to tell you that she is my Grand Unified Theory of Everything, that she is my Everything, and my life had not started until our relationship began.
I didn’t know I was homesick until you held me. I didn’t know I was addicted to you until I had my very first fix. I didn’t know I was freezing until I knew your warmth.
What wasted years! My hands had never done anything worthwhile until they held yours. My eyes had never truly seen until they drank in your bare form. I didn’t know I had a voice until you heard me. I was virgin until you deflowered my heart.
Life before her was not life at all, but a prelude to it, an agonizingly long gestation period where miscarriage was threatened numerous times. The glory of our consummated union was like at last being born and taking my first breath.
…
-
I grieve a nameless loss.
I hold its ash in my hands.
I cannot even say what it was before it burned.
But maybe
it isn’t what happened, but what never was,
what couldn’t be.
No, I cannot lose
what I never had.
I can’t tell what’s worse: having it ripped
from your hands, or always carrying
the heaviest emptiness.
I’m not strong enough to hold
this vacuum.
There’s nothing heavier than empty arms.
-
you filled me to the brim
with emptiness,
stuffed me with blank space—
you even acted surprised
when the hunger
wouldn’t abate.
your opiate didn’t touch
the question
in my bones.
couldn’t quench the flame
consuming
the marrow.
and even if I walked
in fog, I still held
a compass in hand.
and did you not wish
that I’d be scared
of the mist?
that fear would burn
like ice,
hold me frozen
in its grip?
I learned
quick enough, that two people exist:
those who fear
the unseen, and those who it renders
relentlessly curious.
for some,
the unknown is a border—
for others, it is a map
meant to guide
the explorer.
I sought to fill my cup,
but never looked
beyond the rim.
only after leaving home
could I fill the blank space
deep, deep within.
-
The sapling does not tell itself: once I am tall, once I am strong, once I am at last a great oak, then and only then will I be worthy of sunshine.
We so often tell ourselves: once I am great, once I am deserving, then and only then will I love myself, then and only then will I be worthy of love— as if love is not the very sunshine we need to grow tall, grow strong.
-
purified in the stream of hunger, eating the sin off my bones. self-subsistent self-destruction. if less of me exists, maybe I’ll exist less. longing for freedom, for lightness. gravity loses its hold.
will I be made worthy if there is less of me? is the price of love emaciation? flesh falls off the bone. tainted flesh, tainted flesh. find your cell in our red light district, snare a passerby. the less of you there is, the more noticed you will be. you grew in size, began to hide in plain sight. just longing for someone’s eyes to get stuck, to stop their roaming, to decide that in the rough, you are the diamond.
but I was taught it is my own flesh that obscures the diamond. I pursed my lips to expose my own worthiness. I pursed my lips, but starved for love. I pursed my lips because I was starved for love. I pursed my lips and only grew hungrier than I already was. who denies themselves, hoping for the hunger to abate?
make me holy, make me holy. the price of holiness is your own damnation. you long to be the idol, the price is truth. glitter thrown on lead.