The places I feel it when you're gone.
I didn't know you could.
It's like vertigo,
Like that sensation when your chair tips,
Only in the oddest places.
In my hands, and they go a bit limp,
Unable to hold things like they should
As if they've forgotten how.
Sometimes my teeth ache, like I've just eaten something sweet and cold, and it spreads down my jaw and makes my head spin.
Things that shouldn't have vertigo- my bones,
My feet,
My lungs.
It's disorienting. It's a little scary.
But at the same time I hold onto it,
Proof that you mean something,
Proof that you have changed me inside
So drastically
That nothing knows how to work quite right anymore.
I have rarely ever needed comforting like I need it now
But how to ask...
And so I sit within my strange new body
That seems to be rediscovering the entire world
At a pace a bit too slow
To seem normal
And I wait for you
And I know that the second I see you
I will be on solid ground again.

I didn't want to take the Waterloo train.
I had gone everywhere we went, but it was done, and somehow I just couldn't do it
I had to diverge.
Had to go somewhere else.
So I started walking. Over the bridge.
The other bridge.
That one was closer but I didn't want to walk where we had walked anymore.
I think I knew I had just said goodbye to Waterloo.
I didn't want to say goodbye to anywhere else
Not tonight.
So I walked back through everything you'd shown me
Looking down.
I wanted to listen to a sad song
But I knew I wouldn't make it if I did.
So I put on my book.
A deep sonorous voice to tell me a story that didn't exist,
So that maybe I could stop existing
For a moment.
I really thought
It'd be like usual when I am sad in public.
It's part of why I walk.
I don't cry in front of people.
Especially not strangers.
Don't trust them--
Why would I?
And so I thought
If I were to take the long way home
Maybe it'd seep out of me into the cobblestones
And mingle with the stale water and bits of forgotten litter
And leave me
Be.
As I crossed the bridge, the water beckoned coldly.
I looked away
Cringed
Away.
A man pulled a woman into a kiss.
They were framed by the lights of the buildings across the water.
The intimacy of it
Cut
Me
And I began to stare at the ground again.
But the feeling
Didn't leave.
And I thought
Just get home so you can cry.
Just get back
Just hold off until you're alone.
But I thought of it-
Me
Like usual
On a bathroom floor beneath harsh lights
Muffling sobs and clutching the empty part of my chest
The one that never complains
Until it is comforted
And then
Never seems to get over such
Novel kindness.
I pictured it and I remembered
When I cried in the stall of the price chopper bathroom
In February
Sliding down the grimy wall
Trying so hard to be silent
Because there was a woman fixing her hair in the mirror.
I remembered her breathing
Listening to it and trying
To disappear into the tiles
Trying to keep quiet.
I remembered
Kneeling in my shower in the dark
Back home
I remembered letting the hot water smother my mouth and nose and I remembered
The moment I realized that I was all I had
The moment I whispered to myself- so viciously!-
Get up.
Get up or die here.
Nobody is coming.
NOBODY
IS
COMING.
I remembered and
All that grief
Swelled inside of me
And an idea started.
Small, but insidious.
An idea an echo
What if
What if I just let them all see?
And of course my first reaction was an inner derisive snort,
A quick dismissal.
Ridiculous.
But the idea wouldn't leave.
Tears had been clawing at my throat all night.
All day, really.
Two days, if I was to be honest.
I'd probably known before she'd even decided.
I kept walking, fast,
Head down
Don't look at me
But that idea
Something about the sincerity of it
The freedom
Tugged at me.
There was a moment when I decided to let it happen.
A few times, waiting at the stoplight, seeing nothing, walking when the crowd did, trusting them to keep me alive by accident,
Tears had welled.
A few times before I decided.
And my first thought then was
If you start you won't stop.
What will stop you if not shame?
How many years of tears do you have within you?
Do you
Really
Want to
Know?
I cowered from that question but then
Then there it was again
Show them
Show them all
In a world of people who refuse to feel
Feel.
Be real.
Be the only one.
Be brave enough to accept your pain
And to show it
Or it will boil you alive.
I fought it.
I fought but suddenly I thought why?
A flash of a memory, TOO fresh, slid across my vision and this time
I let my tears fall.
I was in the middle of a split street
With people on either side of me
Waiting for the light to tell us
We could flee
And I felt them slip hot and silent down my cheeks.
I didn't look to see if people noticed.
I didn't want to know.
Their gazes weren't
My problem
Not tonight.
I notched my chin a bit higher
And walked tall
Tears
Pouring down my face and trickling cold into the collar of my coat.
I walked and I thought I'd let go.
I could hear, though...
I could hear a man under the eaves of the building ahead.
He was playing guitar.
I couldn't hear what he was playing over my book.
I was glad.
I didn't want to.
I ignored him.
But as I walked by, I glanced at him, iresistably.
He was smiling
And through the din I'd tried to cocoon myself in
I heard him sing "every little thing, is gonna be alright"
And I felt for no apparent reason
My face
Just crumble.
My steps faltered and I tried to breathe
But this was real
And this was happening
And I realized quickly and gave myself to it
Resigned.
I sobbed
Silently
As I kept walking.
He saw me.
He is the only person I saw see me.
His smile
Froze
And his eyes widened just a little.
I fled
But not before I'd seen him see.
Now I am walking still
And it is cold
And the storm passed moments ago with a death rattle and a shudder,
And now I am slowly congealing,
Slowly the tears in me
Are becoming sludge.
I wonder if they will be stone
Or ice
Or maybe
Just dirt
The better to shrivel and blow away.
Right now I am walking
And I don't know what to think of what I've done tonight
I just know
That when I wake up inside again
I will want the art that came of it to have been preserved.
I will want proof,
Any proof
That this excruciating
Aching suffering
Was FOR something.
So I wrote this.
So you could know
So maybe you could make it mean something
So that when I have healed from this wound
I will have even the barest reason
To believe I should try again.

All I've ever gotten in love
Is can't.
"I can't be your lover."
"You can't just say that."
"You can't
Be like this."
"You can't
Love me."

Be my yes.
Be my of COURSE.

I have a dream
A very dear dream.
I've written of it for years
Over and over.
My dream
Is that someday
I will be sitting by a dim window
Looking down
On a city street in the rain
Cupping a mug of hot, sweet tea in my palms
And thinking how perfect everything is.
And someone
Someone lovely
Someone warm and safe and beautiful
She will rise from our sheets- ours,
And put her arms around me,
Say
"Come back to bed, love."
And I will lean into her and she will smile and life
Will finally be the way I always wished it could.
I dream
That someday
I will be making breakfast at the stove with a soft cat winding between my ankles
And from behind she will hug my waist, kiss my neck, steal a bite of food and make me forget
To take the kettle off the heat
And it will sing shrilly while we kiss
Good morning.
I want her voice to be what I fall asleep to,
Velvety in my mind and soft in my ear,
Her fingers tracing my collarbones and my arms draped around her hips.
I want
To get lost with her
In every foreign city
And laugh because nowhere is lost
And everywhere is home
Because we are each other's port in every storm
And each other's lighthouse to find our way back to safe waters.
My dream is to smile my life away
And spend my seconds not like hard earned dollars but like pennies tossed into fountains- every one a wish, a promise, a celebration.
Be my yes.
Be my home.
Be the first person
To tell me I am allowed to dream
To wish
To be
Everything I am.
Be the first
To want it,
And I will give you the entire world.
I will write your name on every napkin corner poem I leave in every cozy cafe,
I will carve it into every park bench I read on in the summer sun,
I will whisper it
To every star I see in the night sky.
Please,
I'm inviting you-
Be my home. Be my hope.
Be
My
Dream.

I can feel it.
You'll be the person I wake up about
At 2 am.
The feeling that forces me out and onto the darkened streets
To wander in search of something I can't define.
I will know this city by your name.
I will find its joy and its melancholy because those feelings in me will bay like wolves until I let them lead me home.
Home...
Home is not inside of me, where it should be.
It is someone's eyes, someone's arms,
It could be
Yours
And THAT is the thought that will pull me along the shadowy paths that line the Thames
And through the forgotten alleyways that twist and tangle in the heart of this place.
I will love this city by your name, I know it.
Already I cannot sit still for it.
Already I can feel the mad urge to go, to search, to scour the night for reminders of you
For answers to impossible questions.
It is not an unpleasant darkness that tickles the edges of my mind
But it is
An insistent one.
I know I will not sleep when I am home
But rather follow this craving to some new, lonely place
And fill it with the expansion of my soul that comes with passion.
I need these empty places when I feel the echoes of love swell within me
Because I no longer seem to fit into the world
There no longer seems to be enough space for me.
Questing inside as I am
For evidences of love
Of safety
Of home,
The ache in me soon and easily becomes
Just too vast to sit with
Too full of motion to remain still around.

Lead me somewhere tonight.

Lead me to a temporary home
And let me breathe in cold, dark air as I try to sate my need for comfort
For contact
Help me find the roughness of stone beneath my fingers
And the kisses of the wind on my cheeks--
I want to touch the whole world.

There will be
No sleeping with this feeling tonight
And I couldn't
Even tell you why.
I couldn't even give you a reason
Except perhaps
That you have eyes
I could love.

The train is bright and empty
And it should be lonely, sitting here, hurtling through darkness, but I
Am in no state for people.
I am too far away.
Something is new in me.
Something is starting.
I move through the world every day
And I love it all, I do,
Love it to distraction, love it painfully, even
But
Distantly.
There is always something thin but impenetrable
Between me and all that I want to touch
To hold
To let crawl inside me and expand
So that maybe I'd be vast enough to hold this soul.
But tonight
That veil has peeled away-
No, it has fallen away
Like a sheet of fine silk, and I am
Raw
And new
And blinking in the light and everything
Is so saturated with color
And music
Thrums beneath the grinding of the rails.
It has been so long since everything could touch me.
I sit here and soak it in, a lover who has found everything to love
All of a sudden
And can do nothing but gaze.
All this
All this from someone,
And this is why
I just can't quit love.
This is why I try over and over,
Why I stay up nights wandering the darkened streets,
Why the hunger in my chest is something I treasure so excruciatingly.
Because the world is waiting
For you to find a reason to touch it,
And tonight I want my fingers to find every sidewalk crack and blade of grass,
Seek them like the skin of a lover in the dark- that gentle and that urgent-
And fill them all with silver light
And watch the world catch fire with what lives beneath my skin-
What lives here and has been sleeping
But is now suddenly, terrifyingly, gloriously
Awake.

It's funny how you meet someone
And suddenly
You like blondes.
I never used to like blondes.
Not particularly.
And suddenly,
I just do.
It's funny
How the imprints of certain souls just
Stay
With you,
Behind your eyes.
How they color the world.
As if the thought
Just bends you toward a stranger
Just the thought
That they look or sound
Or move
Like somebody else,
Somebody
Special.
Why special?
Why her?
Why any of them?
And yet
Even as I try to look elsewhere...
Suddenly
I like blondes.