sit with your sorrow:
it can’t hurt you.
you can.
sit with your fear:
it won’t hurt you.
you can.
sit with yourself.
turn your back?
you’ll stab it.
sit with yourself.
the most basic form of respect:
bearing witness.
sit.
Tag: poem
-
there was a look in your eyes
somehow… dead,
yet more alive
than i thought possible.
it looked like
you stared each of your fears
straight in the eye–
then, snakeskin:
they were shed.
it looked like
all that died
were the bits of you
that kept you from living.
i pray
you’ll keep me around,
if only to teach me how.
-
Sober living: it is about learning all the secret ways that exist to get drunk that they don’t tell you about. Love letters with a sweetheart: there is no greater wine. Breaths timed with the sea’s lazy waves: what intoxication. Dancing without a care, not a drop of alcohol in the veins: it’s a form of nakedness, nothing more liberating. Spirits, spirits, spirits: they are everywhere.
-
you mustn’t ever love
something without claws,
you mustn’t ever love
what cannot bite.
a hand that feeds
should be ready
to bleed.
there’s no such thing
as love
that draws no blood.
only shut mouths
do not bite —
only in silence
are edges smoothed.
honesty: it is serrated.
love too.
there is no other way.
-
so simple.
your kiss is a needle:
my mind is a bubble,
inflated. inflated.
inflated
with nonsense, fodder.
pop:
silence.
bliss.
stole the air right out of me.
-
you branded the inside of my heart
can’t shake the feeling
that anyone I let in
sees you there.
your initials scarred,
emblazoned
on my chest.
you softened my heart,
then shaped the clay
with your hands.
into the crucible:
our flame scorched me into ceramic.
then,
you dropped me.
still am i here,
bloodied knees,
picking up the scattered pieces
of myself.
i wear you:
lesions on the brain,
burns on the heart,
scars on my knees.
i wear you.
-
the promiscuous psyche:
laid bare
for anyone who’d look.
there’s a certain freedom
in saying “to hell with modesty,
to hell
with emotional chastity.”
i don’t think life is exhausting,
i think lying is.
these two things have become
ink splotches,
their vines bleeding into one another,
their tendrils tangled.
our prudish hearts—
their binding.
you alone
hold the shears
you alone
will cut that ribbon.
your ribs,
cell bars—
are we not all born
with caged hearts?
freedom:
a decision.
the crab crawls
from its shell.
exposed.
but there is no sweeter taste
than the kiss of saltwater
on your back.
your pain grows wings,
it evaporates with the water
into the blazing sun:
angels to the heavens.
you’re made clean.
THE CLOSET MYSTIC 