I want to locate a bit of you, cradle it,
say: this, there is no word for this.

I have no wealth to speak of
other than this,
all this, just to praise the dry grasses
and their color that can’t be spoken
in words.

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices

I’m never going to get this right.

And I can’t go on forming
and tasting your name
or biting down in blinding pain
forever—no;

from now on I have entered
and live in our unspoken words.

And the space I took up in the world scarlessly closes like water.

The long silences need to be loved, perhaps
more than the words
which arrive
to describe them
in time.

Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we
lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell
and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud.
Especially that, but I should have known.
You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together
to make a creature that will do what I say
or love me back.

The year you thought you were dying
was a really great year.

You ate licorice on the beach in January,
swam rum sauced in the icy Pacific
wearing only blue rubber flippers
and your grandfather’s dog tags
and for the first time, it felt good to be cold,
it felt good to be so cold it hurt.

You doted on pigeons and stray cats.
You ate honey peanuts in the park
and re-watched every movie that ever made you
cry, including Steve Martin’s The Jerk.
You tattooed your entire body in Pablo Neruda
translations and cherry blossoms.

You blew all your money on comfortable shoes
and one of those mattresses made from NASA space foam.
You slept the sleep of assassins and kings—remorseless.

You bought chocolate bars from all the kids who came
to your door and stock-piled them in your broom closet.
You left them in your will to THE SECRETARIES,
every last one of them.

You volunteered at the local senior center playing bingo.
When you won you forced to whole room to take shots of
Welch’s grape juice and sing the national anthem.

And you spent time with your favorite lover.
You let him get close.
Secret suicide note, nonsense alibi close.
shampoo scent dissection close.

Close enough to memorize your tells,
hand you your ass at pillow poker,
make your defenses look like the silly decoupage
of paper angels and Victorian roses that they were.
Close enough that your laughter
punched him with mint gum puffs.
Close enough that his sighs drove circles
in the parking lots of your sighs,
close enough to measure your ribcage
in wrists, your palms in lips.

So close, you didn’t even notice
your heart speed up, then stop,
when he kissed you so hard,
when the New Year’s ball dropped down.

(via fleurishes)

I was teaching you the difference between I miss you
and you are missing from me
when a bomb went off

no one was harmed—
you had it in you this whole time

I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.

We’re the risks we take
but even more than that, we’re
the ones we didn’t.

You do not always know what I am feeling.
Last night in the warm spring air while I was
blazing my tirade against someone who doesn’t interest
me, it was love for you that set me
afire,

and isn’t it odd? for in rooms full of
strangers my most tender feelings
writhe and
bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand,
isn’t there
an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside
the bed? And someone you love enters the room
and says wouldn’t
you like the eggs a little

different today?
And when they arrive they are
just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather
is holding.

I miss you because memory
is a kind editor.
The past is a long scroll and
in it is the story of us,
told with gentle metaphor, and
words that bring
you back and back, even as you
lie there, lying.

He’s not a poet, but
I can tell from the way that he
traced the curve of my spine with his fingertips
that he thinks like one.

Because I could never fall in love with a man
who didn’t know
that the most tender thing
he could possibly do
was send me a poem by Baudelaire
and tell me, “I think you might possibly like this.”

Because fuck if that’s not one of my favorites.

And all I ever wanted was to fold myself into someone
who heralded unspoken thoughts and was a messenger
of words without words
of a kiss broken by silence,
of silence, broken by a kiss.

Because all of the men I’ve ever fallen for
weren’t really poets.

They just held secrets
like gold teeth in the back of their mouths,

and they just kissed me,
like I was the last poem in the world.