December 04, 2013

The Brief Moments Wherein I Might Have Loved You

We became fast friends in one night and as I lay completely clothed between you and our mutual best friend I drunkenly dreamt, “ I could love him.”


I arranged for us to meet to play arcade games once a week. You taught me to shoot deer and as I cocked the plastic gun with one hand I glared, “I could love him.”


We drank into the wee hours of the morning until I fell on your bed and you ran around town with the clink of spray paint and laughter. Though the drunken mistiness I pondered, “I could love him.”


We rolled naked in sheets and thought no one would know that when I looked at you across the kitchen every cell was smiling, “I could love him.”



Adventure after adventure we fell into a common companionship, when I looked you were there, when I needed you were there and when I laughed you were there, but I never let myself love you completely. The arm’s length that I kept you at then pushed you further into, onto someone else stretched us too far. And now I love you and it’s too late.

September 23, 2013

The Shorts and Long Of It

Even in the heat the rain feels cool on my skin, like your touch, it’s a dichotomy. The sky cracks and my shoes squeak, I walk slower. I turn up my face and close my eyes, senselessly I walk through the parking lot. Thoughts of you weigh on my mind lightly, intermittently as warm raindrops

 ------

 I am so close. I feel almost full. Just barely at capacity for love, love of the earth and its many wonders, love of my friends and their endless hope, love for those wretches that I have left and those yet to come, love for all these things and the possibility of a love I know not yet and cannot fathom. This is a teetering on drugless ecstasy and if I can fall forward I will float on clouds.

 -----

 I think about the moment you held my hand under the table and smiled at me. To date I don’t think I’ve ever felt that much electricity, unless I can’t remember touching my tongue to a socket. We ate everything and talked about anything, we drank vodka and I didn’t even remember I had a cell phone much less look at it. I was lost with you and I still am every time I think of this moment. What changed? How did we untangle?

 ------

 There’s something to be said for silence. A thought lingers in silence and changes like wisp of smoke waiting and wanting for the next sound to be made. The thought shifts to contemplate the silence and thus the silence becomes the thought.

July 15, 2013

The Same, More of Exactly the Same

You don’t get to come in here anymore, in fact you should have never been here to begin with, but you pushed in, opened doors with your smile and sweet, albeit few words. I was transfixed and fell under your spell, quickly. You had to have known, had to have seen as I fell, floated beneath you. Everyone said don’t go, it’s slippery down there but I went and I slid and slipped and now, now your smile still transfixes me in a way that makes me cry when I get home. Along the way I lost my power and as I grapple to climb out of this muck, every time I hear from you I fall a little deeper. Sinking slowly into the quicksand of unrequited like. I try to stand on the shoulders of others that mean little to nothing just to feel closer to you. I’m sure you don’t notice, you shouldn’t, for I am not alone in this quest. I am not the first and will certainly not be the last in this abyss of warm memories that you have all but forgotten. I think back to a time where you rested your head on my stomach or stroked my leg as I packed to leave you in the early city fog. You broke me, broke into the chasm that I had kept locked so tightly. I had no intention of any of this to occur and here I use the same words to describe the same thing I said I would forgo weeks ago. Here the very same meanings are mixed and jumbled to describe the simplest of things; mild heartbreak. As if such a thing as heartbreak could ever be mild.

May 30, 2013

White Rabbits Out Of Hats

You just seemed like magic, but if the trick was to leave me covered in egg, you’re a smash. You came out of nowhere with this look of reserved abandon, an animal domesticated to the ways of city life. Something bubbled underneath your skin, rippled even, at the places a body ought ripple, but few words exuded your lips. A touch here, and mild antidote there and you had me falling, following you down to the deepest depths of a fairy tale. You smelled of familiar drugs and I wanted to taste every inch, go back to old memories of losing myself for the sake of finding myself. I thought, “don’t quite let him get the recognition of these words, don’t yet let him get hold my heart, or what’s left of it.” But somehow here we are, just like those long lost wisps of choking smoke, you are at last long gone, feeling further away then you ever were close. And maybe its all made up in my mind, maybe its still sweet but just pulled a bit farther apart, maybe there is a hopefulness in your silence. But it is your silence that breaks me, incites a welling of tears, and in those brief moments I find either composure or soon remember the endless confusions that you have no fingerprint on and I lose. It should have been lighter, should have stayed the way I told everyone it was “just some fun,” but the more you pulled the more I pushed and chased and wanted for more of what you might not have even been giving. In your smile I melt and you give a look as if you know not what you do, and yet you must know, you must have always known that those glistening wild eyes would pull me in, pull me down before I could spin out of your reach and keep hold of my whittled composure.