You exist on fence posts, sitting cross-legged with a shy smile.
Other times you are destructive, waking up with tangled hair and eyeliner smudges trailing your face like tears, bruises and hickeys lining your breasts and thighs. You expose yourself in bars and let girls fuck you on your bedroom floor.
I bet you didn't know I think of you like this, or at all.
I do my best thinking in the early morning, usually with the sun-drenched mountains as the backdrop, flying down 1-90 with the sun at my back, the jagged green all around and the promise of the city before me.
I do my best loving after a night of slippery bliss, gazing into the morning hours, those nights where we get three hours sleep because we just can't close our eyes yet. Those moments when I imagine you above me, within me, throughout me. . .the delicacy of your shoulders and the softness of your neck the beginning of my constant rapture with you.
I do my best writing when I fear it will make no sense, when bits and pieces invade and force me to pull over, to jot it all down, writing furiously while trying to hold the wheel, seeing every mom-and-pop restaurant from here to the mountains as a challenge, a place to conquer myself. When I allow my thoughts to linger on one tiny aspect - the grey flecks of a stranger's eyes; the images I create based on your words - they unfold like golden butterflies dipped in stardust, an excursion of fantasy, the threat and promise of completion.
I do my best impressions of you when I am bleeding, when my heart overextends itself and light spills forth from my fingertips. Only then can I evoke an ounce of the beauty you maintain within that perfect frame.
Estás aqui comigo à sombra do sol escrevo e oiço certos ruídos domésticos e a luz chega-me humildemente pela janela e dói-me um braço e sei que sou o pior aspecto do que sou Estás aqui comigo e sou sumamente quotidiano e tudo o que faço ou sinto como que me veste de um pijama que uso para ser também isto este bicho de hábitos manias segredos defeitos quase todos desfeitos quando depois lá fora na vida profissional ou social só sou um nome e sabem o que sei o que faço ou então sou eu que julgo que o sabem e sou amável selecciono cuidadosamente os gestos e escolho as palavras e sei que afinal posso ser isso talvez porque aqui sentado dentro de casa sou outra coisa esta coisa que escreve e tem uma nódoa na camisa e só tem de exterior a manifestação desta dor neste braço que afecta tudo o que faço bem entendido o que faço com este braço Estás aqui comigo e à volta são as paredes e posso passar de sala para sala a pensar noutra coisa e dizer aqui é a sala de estar aqui é o quarto aqui é a casa de banho e no fundo escolher cada uma das divisões segundo o que tenho a fazer Estás aqui comigo e sei que só sou este corpo castigado passado nas pernas de sala em sala. Sou só estas salas estas paredes esta profunda vergonha de o ser e não ser apenas a outra coisa essa coisa que sou na estrada onde não estou à sombra do sol Estás aqui e sinto-me absolutamente indefeso diante dos dias. Que ninguém conheça este meu nome este meu verdadeiro nome depois talvez encoberto noutro nome embora no mesmo nome este nome de terra de dor de paredes este nome doméstico Afinal fui isto nada mais do que isto as outras coisas que fiz fi-las para não ser isto ou dissimular isto a que somente não chamo merda porque ao nascer me deram outro nome que não merda e em princípio o nome de cada coisa serve para distinguir uma coisa das outras coisas Estás aqui comigo e tenho pena acredita de ser só isto pena até mesmo de dizer que sou só isto como se fosse também outra coisa uma coisa para além disto que não isto Estás aqui comigo deixa-te estar aqui comigo é das tuas mãos que saem alguns destes ruídos domésticos mas até nos teus gestos domésticos tu és mais que os teus gestos domésticos tu és em cada gesto todos os teus gestos e neste momento eu sei eu sinto ao certo o que significam certas palavras como a palavra paz Deixa-te estar aqui perdoa que o tempo te fique na face na forma de rugas perdoa pagares tão alto preço por estar aqui perdoa eu revelar que há muito pagas tão alto preço por estar aqui prossegue nos gestos não pares procura permanecer sempre presente deixa docemente desvanecerem-se um por um os dias e eu saber que aqui estás de maneira a poder dizer sou isto é certo mas sei que tu estás aqui.
you will be out with friends when the news of her existence will be accidentally spilled all over your bar stool. respond calmly as if it was only a change in weather, a punch line you saw coming. after your fourth shot of cheap liquor, leave the image of him kissing another woman in the toilet. in the morning, her name will be in every headline: car crash, robbery, flood. when he calls you, ignore the hundreds of ropes untangling themselves in your stomach. you are the best friend again. he invites you over for dinner and you say yes too easily. remind yourself this isn’t special, it’s only dinner, everyone has to eat. when he greets you at the door, do not think for one second you are the reason he wore cologne tonight.
in his kitchen, he will hand-feed you a piece of red pepper. his laugh will be low and warm and it will make you feel like candlelight. do not think this is special. do not count on your fingers the number of freckles you could kiss too easily. try to think of pilot lights and olive oil, not everything you have ever loved about him, or it will suddenly feel boiling and possible and so close. you will find her bobby pins laying innocently on his bathroom sink. her bobby pins. they look like the wiry legs of spiders, splinters of her undressing in his bed. Do not say anything. think of stealing them, wearing them home in your hair. when he hugs you goodbye, let him kiss you on the forehead. settle for target practice.
at home, you will picture her across town pressing her fingers into his back like wet cement. you will wonder if she looks like you, if you are two bedrooms in the same house. did he fall for her features like rearranged furniture? when he kisses her, does she taste like wet paint?
you will want to call him. you will go as far as holding the phone in your hand, imagine telling him unimaginable things like “you are always ticking inside of me and i dream of you more often than i don’t. my body is a dead language and you pronounce each word perfectly.”
do not call him. fall asleep to the hum of the VCR. she must make him happy. she must be his favorite place in minneapolis.
you are a souvenir shop, where he goes to remember how much people miss him when he is gone.”
1. Offer the wolves your arm only from the elbow down. Leave tourniquet space. Do not offer them your calves. Do not offer them your side. Do not let them near your femoral artery, your jugular. Give them only your arm.
2. Wear chapstick when kissing the bomb.
3. Pretend you don’t know English.
4. Pretend you never met her.
5. Offer the bomb to the wolves. Offer the wolves to the zombies.
6. Only insert a clean knife into your chest. Rusty ones will cause tetanus. Or infection.
7. Don’t inhale.
8. Realize that this love was not your trainwreck, was not the truck that flattened you, was not your Waterloo, did not cause massive hemorrhaging from a rusty knife. That love is still to come.
9. Use a rusty knife to cut through most of the noose in a strategic place so that it breaks when your weight is on it.
10. Practice desperate pleas for attention, louder calls for help. Learn them in English, French, Spanish: May Day, Aidez-Moi, Ayúdeme.
11. Don’t kiss trainwrecks. Don’t kiss knives. Don’t kiss.
12. Pretend you made up the zombies, and only superheroes exist.
13. Pretend there is no kryptonite.
14. Pretend there was no love so sweet that you would have died for it, pretend that it does not belong to someone else now, pretend like your heart depends on it because it does. Pretend there is no wreck — you watched the train go by and felt the air brush your face and that was it. Another train passing. You do not need trains. You can fly. You are a superhero. And there is no kryptonite.
Here is the skin that you said you loved draped over the back of the chair in the kitchen. Here are the teeth. Here is the sternum, the clavicle, the fibula. Here are the angel bones laid out on top of the dresser like antique jewelry. Here are the earlobes, the knobbly elbows, the beauty mark near my temple that always got a moan out of you. Here are my thighs, my femur. All ten toes, all ten fingers. My pubic bone, preserved and wrapped in a velvet bag. Your name on the tag. Your name on everything. Here is the body that loved you. Here is the heart, bloodied and wanting. Here are those drunk voice mails, the sober texts. Here is your promise of staying. Here is the lonely hum in my brain where your name used to be. Here is my spine. Here is all the hollow. Here is all the longing. Here is the heavy tongue, the scratchy vocal chords. Here are all of the I love you’s. Here is the shocking wreck of it all. Here is how you were closer to me than my bones, my skin. Here is the quiet city, your empty side of the bed. Here is the empty. Here is not knowing whether you loved me or not. Here is the poem that can’t save us. Here.
As tuas palavras não têm braços e fui deixando de ouvir o canário que morava no meu coração. E assim contaste, não sei se a mim, se a ele, das noites em que as horas eram mais quietas. Como as minhas mãos quando dormia. Agora, quando dormes, ficam também quietas as asas de um pássaro de que não soube cuidar.
