i am not in love with you
the birds outside my window are car horns that silver layer coating the desk is not dust my feet aren't cold not even in these shoes that aren't falling apart at the soles this paper has a fingercut term paper was done five days ago i slept dreamlessly last night. when i woke up, i decided to be a pacifist with my past i've forgiven all the people who hurt me it snowed in North Carolina & finals week was canceled; so was the last day of this semester i get to keep this corner dorm room forever, with all the silence of the late night buses i'm not terrified of heights, the dark, or people who try to hug me and i don't miss my grandpa or any of his songs especially since his body still lives at my house and his mind, busy being elsewhere America is the land of the free & the home of marked graves a queer woman is President and she looks like me no one asked her where she was really from when she moved into high office & the White House was painted rainbow this morning someone asked how i was doing today and stayed to hear the truth and most wondrous and splendidly excellent of all i am still not in love with you
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dreamt of old loves,
original songs, crosses & secret languages, fetuses in bags that i cradle and sing to, old men chasing me—wanting to own me, hitting the red panic button by accident, but not really top floor of a crisis center, climbing down a crack in the floor into a damp subway platform, bodies are scattered all over the tracks, their untimely deaths unpeopling their skeletons taking the strain off their tired frames a train pulls into the station and i think about getting onboard i woke up and still felt asleep the morning can be such a nightmare there's a pretty girl in my mirror
she has bed head and two stray pimples one eyebrow on fleek the other can't decide which direction to fly off to for the summer mouth full and flushed with drool and dreams she winks, then tells me, "how glorious it is to be alive." if i were an eraser
i'd be lopsided with good intentions and misguided with guilt i'd praise the blank page the do-evers the rage quits the ghost that once populated your phone with sweet before-bed messages i'd help you forget or pretend to not know those gray smudges that remind you of Billy Joel, scraped knees, belt buckles, unkissed cheeks & unresolved arguments, apologies that choked to death in your throat alongside the corpses of the word, "no" and the word, "yes" and the hope that you'd learn how to let your eyes smile again i'd rub myself raw trying to convince you that the safest place is nowhere not even inside of yourself that perfect takes giving up and looking for an alternative way to fuck up, repeat that uncertainty is a way of life and regret is a body to embrace mistakes only as a chance to play yourself like a game and cheat code your way to victory though, the only way to win is to lose to yourself too so maybe just pause life indefinitely maybe just restart the board scatter the pieces then throw them away faster, faster, repeat, erase i'd leave a trail of blanks behind like a gun that won't stop firing won't stop triggering until i'm empty until i've disappe my grandpa thought my grandma was his mother today
and i wish i could tell you how my grandma used to look at him when eating was so hard that his eyes closed as he chewed but i can't remember it scares me to fall so fast for you
you stole the scream from my lungs my lungs have never been so breathless breathless kisses in the lamplight disappears everything everything i know is spinning away & i don't know when my good sense will be back back then, i never saw you coming either either i'd have backed from the edge or jumped sooner sooner, i'd learn to swim or drown how is it so easy for you to
cut me loose set our love free to be eaten by untamed things at midnight by the hanging tree i thought your eyes were windows to your soul so when they curtained i thought it—your soul—was asleep when in fact it had packed its bags and moved back into his mother's house and when i knocked on the front door the cardboard artifice crumbled and revealed the empty spaces you'd left behind i've searched for you since so that i could return them to you i'm sure you'd want this barrenness back hangovers aren't so bad
i know this because they haven't stopped my friends from drinking i say this because i want to be drunk one day i want to go soft in your arms i want my hair to be everywhere and we're both laughing full of punch lines and mouthfuls of each other not a single moment wasted only the buzz of tension from couch springs wheezing at our stumbling tongues we become inarticulate but the need to stretch this night is clear there may not be another again who knows what the morning will bring all that sunlight might be bright enough to burn our eyes that see each other so honestly the thunder of migraines might shake us awake and dry out our mouths so that nothing comes out right but rain will carry it all away eventually so we risk it |
Kat TanHeartbroken & hungry poet. Feed at your own risk. ArchivesCategories |