Yes, yes, yes, my heart? What is it now?
After so long silencing you, I will answer your call forevermore.
I had so much to account for:
voicemails my heart left me throughout my youth.
I played them back and wept
Tag: poet
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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.
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Some of us would rather die slowly than all at once. Like denying yourself the mercy of the end’s sweet embrace— instead of falling off the cliff face, you take the slowest descent down suffering’s spiral staircase. The destination’s the same— but you take the scenic route.
You can kill a flame by throwing water on it, stealing the air from its lungs. It coughs, it sputters, it dies before your eyes. Or, you can steal the logs from under, one by one— you can watch it cling to what fuel remains. You can watch it emaciate itself until all that’s left is bone. You can watch it crumble.
I took a log from under myself so life couldn’t. I stole the breath from my own lungs, refusing to let someone who filled them walk away, leaving me gasping. It was the chemotherapy of the spirit, the indiscriminate erasure of all that I was, if only to escape that place of pain.
Self-harm, it takes casualties: innocents taken in the line of fire. You raise the blade, you hope to excavate the virus. Healthy tissue’s taken with, civilians slain— all the while, the enemies replicate.
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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.
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But I try to remind myself,
none of this is real, no, none of it is real—
like I am the cliff face
losing itself
to the battering sea.
Wave after wave—
how, pray tell, am I to hold my shape?
Insanity happens slowly,
then all at once: like two tectonic plates
done holding it together, done sparing the world
their earthquake.
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you become the adage: form is emptiness, emptiness is form. You become the emptiness of form, but without spirit to fill it. You don’t know when your spirit was emptied out, nor who emptied it out. You don’t know if it was poured intentionally, or if life poked so many holes in your constitution that it leaked out over time, unbeknownst to you. All you know is that you are emptiness. Anonymous. What should bring joy does not, what should bring rage cannot. You mourn these losses with a quiet half-sadness— it’s as much as you can muster.
Depression is emptiness. Learned helplessness. As much as it robs your ability to feel, it robs your very voice.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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won’t you take off my adipose cloak of invisibility?
stripped to the bone, I might be noticed— might be known.
analog self-worth: the two move in opposition.
transcendent is the feeling. gravity loses its hold. this is sainthood.
worthiness is the tightest corset. I will fit.
somebody help me. falling am I, deep into the pit
what a fallacy, to think self-hatred is the path to self-love. like waging war in the name of peace.
THE CLOSET MYSTIC 