3/23: Snowy after last call and a night unwound. This is where we learn about destruction. Someone is awake and howling for me, but I used to be a golden thing. Whose hands are these, shy and open and animal, like my fathers? In the breath of an eye roll I am out of the room. I am restless w/ a night tied around so many fingers.
We remember what we want to remember - this is our freedom. Our city holds no grudges. We are all sensitive to each other and figuring out what that means. Honest here, where we have to yell to hear each other. I know Truth because I tear up every time.
Desire sits in all our throats and not everyone swallows so easy, shot back like caramel liquor, sweet and thick. Some of us hold the taste in until we are sure it is poison and some of us chew w/ our mouths open. I drink water all night. My desires stay liquid. I sip unattached.
Open eyes at the watering hole, hunting and haunted. I think my friends are on one. I think I am watching my parents fall in love. I think a dream of mine is changing. My love is a golden thing for whoever wants it but I am here too. No cages, no mazes, no expectations.
I grew up watching closely, my family and all their real time love. We know complicated is nothing to be afraid of. We know how to laugh loud in every room and how to pull the moon closer to the shore. We say this is for you. We set off fireworks. We protect what we love w/ everything we have. I grew up watching and filling in gaps. I could always feel when someone was missing or something had shifted. I learned to read discomfort in my mother’s body like a spy. I learned regret in every tongue. I learned that missing is something you do forever, that flowers die and dry and hang over our beds, that the only foolish thing you can do is hide your love away and pretend you have captured it, conquered it. Love, the only wild thing.
I love all that makes me growl and grow, all that allows hands to relax & eyes to open, both flecked w/ gold. I see more than I care to know, can feel the wind all the way over here - the world changing, the chains pulled tight and wound around love. Do you suffer it? Does it feel good? If I pulled the chains tighter, would you look at me? If I freed you, would you stay?
I sit too long on the corner of the bar, belt buckle and cowboy boots and I radiate, all electric as the world short circuits. I will be w/ my friends at the end of time, yelling above the music, honest in that way that changes nothing. Our bodies are already in on the secrets of the world. Nothing is perfect and love is eternal. What else do you need to know? You will not break the world and it will not break you, not if I have anything to say about it. Nothing certain, nothing impossible.
The lights go up and my dad's favorite song plays - my hands are his hands and I keep them to myself - arms out and open like daring the wind to change, to pick us up and put it where it wants us. We are small shadows under streetlight in the snow, no stars except the dust of us. I want to read every poem ever written about me and I want my questions answered by the ones who gave up on me. I dream of risk and revolt, of first and last times, of a realm w/ no secrets or disappointment.
The snow comes down desperate like the last kiss when it knows it is the last. I think of all the bus stop goodbyes that had me like Pavlov’s dog and all the times we came back together, always making the summers count. Winter is for longing and Spring is for mud, for gas stations, for getting up early and seeing all you can. I count my endings, outweighed by eggshells in the dirt. I am held at home like the real thing I am - tarnished and precious.
I dream of being known and wake up afraid. I dream of being held and wake up unconvinced. My friends hold my hands at the bar when the song plays and when my eyes search for anywhere else to look. My friends screaming, screaming still, overflowing and wet w/ a love they can't name. I am a pillar of salt here, in the red lights. I am the keeper of Desire, knowing how to sit w/ it the longest, knowing everyone's shadows, absorbed through the skin and hey! It's my night out too! Do I smell good to you? Do you know there is always room for you? There is nothing to forgive but I forgive you.
I am marble overlooked and my friends, my friends, all fireworks on the beach - like magic, like illegal, like Fourth of July when my dad and I hopped the fence w/ a boxful, aiming those little rockets at the moon. I remember my father talking his way out of arrest, pointing to me all pink in the sand. I wasn’t nervous until I had to be, so in love w/ the world in his hands.
A page I dog-eared from my Nightmares & Morning Pages series ~ thank you for reading