A Necessary Lie

He loves my honesty, or so he says, and I feel his smile in raised hairs on the back of my neck and the freckles that stretch from my hands, shoulders, arms.  Oh, but I've been lying, for a lie can be the absence of truth just as easily as it can be the creation of a falsehood.  As I look at him, away from him, there's truth removed, restrained, relinquished, when instead of reaching and embracing with feeling, I smile sweetly and glance away.  The lie is in my refrain it's in the shadows I watch in the stead of him.  The lie is in what I'd be forced to say if I met his penetrating stare, shallowly.  For how honest I am, rather unintentionally and with slight regret I might add, the withheld truth is far greater.

But, the moment I consider releasing the unsaid, I pass a street with his last name and I remind myself that I care too much to bind him.

Shaking

I wanted him to grab me.  To shake me.  To care.  And he's inside himself.  And he's looking out windows.  And I'm staring at him and admiring without focus, the line of his side profile.  I'm soaking in what I will lose if he does not turn his head back to me.  I know he will not turn.  So I grab him, the middle console denting my hip, my thumbs finding the curve between his ear and jawline, with my lips pressed to his.  And he's laughing, a nervous laugh that terrifies me, makes me want to stop - oh, but I can't stop, I can't stop because --

I wanted him.  I wanted him to want me.  I wanted contact.  I don't know what to do about that.  About wanting contact.

I feel like I'm going crazy.  It's all a huge stutter.  I can't get a thing out.

So, I kiss him, unable to deepen a kiss when he cannot kiss through his nervousness.  I hug him.  I squeeze him.  I'd shake him, but I'm still waiting to be shaken.  As I'm shaking.

I will wait.  He says I can talk until I'm blue in the face.  What matters is what happens from here.  I don't want to use the goodbye I had prepared.  Shake me.

"Sitting, Waiting, Wishing." by Jack Johnson.

Exodus

Now, kept in the mountain
even the angel 
looked consumed
He turned
to see God
and said, Here am I.
and he said, Off, off,
The place is holy ground.
He said
I am the God of God.
and his face was afraid to look.
I have the affliction of sorrows.
And the cry I have seen.
Therefore I will send thee
unto my people and
Who am I?
I will be thee.
And this be I.
God upon this mountain.
When I come unto you
They shall say to me
What is his name?
I am.  I am.
I sent me to you.

Genesis

God
Formless, empty, deep
The Spirit hovering said
darkness was the vault between the waters and sky
Gathered to one place
it was so
good.

According to their various kinds.
According to their kinds.
According to their kinds.
And God saw
signs to sacred times
According to their kinds.
Winged.
According to its kind.
Blessed and fruitful
and God
was so wild.

God saw God.
Our image.
Our likeness.
All the wild creatures.
Male and female.
God.
God on the face of every tree
all the beasts
and all the creatures
everything that has breath

It was so very good.

*Offerings May Be Refused

Fourteenth century definition declares 
that which we make together
this communion of ours
holy by the consecration, 
the sacrament
the oaths, prayers and promises
that you have no idea we're making.
As I pass pneuma from my shell to yours
You stop a kiss with firm closed lips.  
I'm speaking a dead language.

Sacrament, from the late Latin, sacrare.  To consecrate.  Consecrate, or to be dedicated to a sacred purpose.  Synonym: Blessed.  Holy.  Hallowed.  This is what lies between your gaze and mine.  Heated.  Synonym: Sacral.  This is the touch of my fingertips to your skin.  Sanctified.  Synonym: Sacrosanct.  This is the sacrament of our bodies.  This is the communion of our flesh.  To officially make holy.  I was baptized in this too, if you'll recall.

Communion

Posting in the Process of Writing.

Communion, as a child, meant watered grape juice on Sundays, over-crisped saltines and bowing heads in harmony, falsely.  This was religion.  This was sacrament.  But, how many more times did I participate in communion than outside the confines of the first two clear concise definitions?  Communion, by the time you reach the third definition in a handy mobile Merriam-Webster's, is illustrated as an intimate fellowship or rapport.  Communication is considered the key of relationships for a reason.  Between eight and sixteen years old, the real communion - the only time I was connected to another with similar mind and meditation - was sitting with my sister in the afternoon and pretending, imagining, with Barbie dolls and milk crates sat sideways to make apartments and professional offices.  My religion was make-believe.  The ritual with my sister allowed me inspiration for writing when alone.  Prayer, if you will.  Meditation, perhaps.  Eventually, we grew too old to play together.  My sister started a family and I prepared to go on to college.  The crates were tipped to hold the little lives we created, and lost in endless storage shifts or to nieces with an insistence on head removal.  Had the death of this faith been my choice, my sister and I would have smelled the melt of plastic and doll hair.  Ashes would have been all that remained on the earth between us, and the gods would receive the rising smoke that was our childhood.  I suppose it's almost beautiful that we lost our childhoods instead of choosing to destroy them with our own hands.


Surrounded by artists and creatives for the year I had fled from small town Ohio to downtown city Pittsburgh, I found deeper connection with those of various similarity to myself.  Linked by the agreement that none of us wanted to be linked.  Bonded by our mutual desires to remain apart.  The lonely and depressed were bracketed until they grasped each other, until we loved each other on the foundation of understanding.  We meditated by touch, massaging out the strain of standing, bending, posing, before easels and draft-desks.  We communed.  We ate together, creating concoctions that made the list of ingredients sound like a dare. We consumed.  Our smiles, passed along busy streets,  in the chitchat of class breaks, or upon receival of a well-earned "C" or lower, was the religious experience of eighteen, nineteen, or other.  Eventually, it was time to leave the cocoon, for somewhere along the line, I lost my faith, and no amount of conviction around me could rise the feeling within myself.  

By twenty-one, we alternated between coffee dates and a drink at some local preferred bar.  Solemn and stationary, or possessed and celebratory.  
"I'm getting too old for the bar scene."  
"I work all week, how does next week look for you?" 

Stigmata

I did not save myself for someone to whom I would matter.  For whom my innocence, on technicality, would be valued.  I sought this out on purpose, true, but there is a tiny piece that wonders:

What if I had told the Sisters that I saw blood on the crucifix?  What if I could have crossed myself and had it not feel so much like a lie?  What if I had listened to the beautiful atheist who said the hand of God reached down and stopped him.  He was sorry, but he couldn't.  

I was sorry too.  That tiny piece of me, the one that saw the blood seep from Jesus' wounds, knew that that man would have appreciated what I was giving him.  What I was taking from him.  But, instead, I continued my star-search for Orion, found him by surprise, and decided that I was exhausted and angry from the rejection of before.  One limitation removed, I could call myself what I had been already.  Woman.  And so I do.  And so I ache.  This is the apple I took from the tree.  I know.  I did not sin, it was not wrong, but I lost a bit of naivety that had protected me from these newly discovered wounds.  My own stigmata.  Passion and suffering are the same. Ishtar told me.

Aloe

Seth's snout taps the back of my shoulder before he turns with a grin to Austin.  I follow the grin and try not to get stuck on the scruff covered jawline, the curve of earlobe, ear, temple, forehead, depth of hazel blue green eyes, line of nose and --- I turn before I reach his mouth.  Windows.  
The everyday surreal, as it's nearly half past nine and bright lights wiz past while I'm caught in a car that smells faintly of Springtime but mostly of the aloe he rubbed into my skin before we left.  It's not so sticky anymore, twenty out of fifty minutes into the car ride back from Cleveland to Kent.  I'm satisfied with the day, I realize somewhere between that Sheetz and this one which he stops at to get a refrigeratable Starbucks coffee.  I watch him walk into the gas station, I watch him move past the window toward the back of the store, and I watch him turn and walk in the other direction to reach the cashier and purchase of what he told me earlier on this day was disgusting.  I don't say anything when he gets back in the car.  I restrain Seth's excitement for his return.  I hide my appreciation of Austin's form with another glance away.  I've stopped reaching to him to touch his arm with my fingertips and I resist sitting on my hands.  My self, my dog, my bag, Seth's cage, dog food, and silence are removed from the white car after it pulls in and parks in the driveway of the house I'm still "temporarily" occupying.  "I am not in love," begins to be chanted by the stubborn and knowing voice within me.  I wish he'd silence her with a squeeze, a kiss, a hug, or a look that says he knows.  He says goodbye.  I say goodbye.  He closes the screen door, I close the green painted wood door, and he drives away as I lay on the couch I call a bed.  I wait to hear that he's home safely before I close my eyes and sleep.

My Valentine "poem" from 8th grade.

I have a dream that I have a daughter and have not lost the pregnancy weight.  I stare at my reflection on the side of a building and try not to throw up.  I stare at my daughter's strawberry-blonde framed face and try to accept that she's mine.  Surely, she belongs to my sister.  My brother.  Or maybe, since this is a dream and I know that, she's me.  I lose the pregnancy weight just in time for the dream to tell me that my body is the vessel for baby two, and hazel blue eyes of my unclaimed daughter continue to stare back at me.  She doesn't call me mom, but she won't be calling me anything else either.  I wake.

My little sister tells me I'd regret running.  I remind myself I'm not in love.  Amendment: I tell myself I'm not in love.  I wonder how long I'll wish he'd hug me and whisper that it'd be okay if I were.  But, I'm not, right?  No wishing here.  Between you and me, rewriting the myth of Artemis and Orion isn't going so well.  Traditionally, Artemis is tricked into killing Orion and he is reborn amongst the stars.  In my version, Orion is tricked into destroying Artemis so that she can be reborn as something more than innocent.  Austin pointed to the sky last week, "Look how close he is to her tonight."  I couldn't look overlong at the stars and moon, my eyes drifted back to him in awe.

Crows spray painted at Zephyr.

I saw a crow yesterday, and smiled.  That isn't connected to Apollo, but it'd be funny if it were. 
I'm procrastinating the shower that will wash away the aloe I can no longer smell.  He had been so gentle.  I think I closed my eyes and dreamed it.  Perhaps he is destroying her.



Samuel Markus and the Only Ones, "Miles Away."

In Process of Merger

I am not so naive as to claim it love, this raw and tender vibration between us.  We are not so serious, nor are we mutually in any sort of intensity that either of us could claim that this combining is the making of.  We are not so gentle nor do we take our time.  But, the embrace, when we are not parted only so far as to grin at each other's grin, is tighter than any hug.  One of us, not saying it's me, might be afraid we're falling.  One of us, though I'm not saying it's me, might be baptizing themselves in our union, in the sweat between.  I'm not saying it's me, but I'm not saying it's not me.  It may be me: surrendering to the feel of you.  And though I cannot claim we're making love, I can't find this in the definition following "sex".  You call it fucking, but I call it skin, and soul, and a reclaiming and joy.  Let it be violent or rough, let it leave bruises and bitemarks, even a tender sting or swell.  Reminders of fusion.  For even the smallest amount of time, you were a part of me, and no matter what you call it, I'm translating it to a synonym I can admire with rose hued vision.  While I am not so naive as to claim that what we have is love, I am still ingenuous enough to aim for something like it.

Like, Versus Blank

I am in likeness:

The limbo between notice and longing.

A purgatory stitches from claims of always 

and forever; 

I cannot be prayed out of or forward in 

the process of Like.

Like, pressure. Like, flying.  Like, dreaming.

And I -

I'm frozen.  Like stillness.  Like soundlessness.  Like water, but colder, much, much colder.
And hot.

And dripping.

With the possibility

Of like

Ascending.

A Wounded Doe

The butterflies have yet to dissipate

Echoes of haunting trace

Like ice held against the cuts and scrapes

Of a road-rashed then steam-cleaned core

And somehow, it’s pleasant, this ache;

this promise of pain yet to come.
A certainty I can lean on
when "gentle" is not a word
his tongue can wrap around
or teeth sink into.
When the black and blue and yellow
cannot convey to his eyes
that it hurts.
That he's struck me.
But then, 
he cannot see what skin hides.

Windows

Orion and Sirius, I.

I have come to appreciate the bravery of sunlight as it breaks through his window in mid morning.  There is nothing worth noting outside the window, really.  A street and an across-the-street, where houses were planted one after the other, nearly identical.  Commonwealth emphasizes the deadness of Winter with excess emptiness.  Maybe it's the extended Winter.  Maybe it's the factory family town, oh so very reminiscent of the Hoover days.  I miss trees, when I come here.  I'm lonely without them.
Still, and though I avoid the window myself because it's better not to look for what one knows they will not find, I cannot help but hold my breath each time he approaches the space where the light stretches.  Eventually, I look away from him as well, so like the window, and I so like a tree.
It seems to me that there's only a matter of time left.  Before I run as I'm so tempted to, or before he begins to realize what kind of creature I am.  Now and then, I'm nearly positive he already knows, but Sunday comes before I can be certain, and it's five more days before I'll see him again.  The itch to run gets stronger the more easily my eyes linger on his smile and I realize that I want to be able to stay.  No matter how many times he has to heat my toes with his warm feet, it doesn't seem as though he's caught on to the problem.  I stay quiet about it though, because I have a tiny sunlight hope that one of these days my feet will be warm against his and I will be accepted as the affection-seeking, cautious creature that I am.  Nick chuckles, "Careful now, wouldn't want your boyfriend to know you have a soul."  I'm a bit more worried he'll notice my heart has started beating faster in an attempt to find the rhythm in his chest when he holds me.

The poetry is in the sunlight that greets him like hope.  I can't write that, yet.

Perspective

Up my arms.  

Down my back.  

Around my legs.

I hold my breath so that I can feel

with all of my pale, porcelain skin

Crawled and marched and tickled

whispers of "I'm right here," and "I see you," and "you belong to me."

The screen door creaks and rattles and slams 

and Mom steps out with a high-pitched, oh-gosh, eek.

So thrilled was I of the attention and acceptance and awe-some that I did not, could not, consider

what Mom would think, or say, or do.

She leaves me alone with them only long enough

for me to bask in a thousand pinprick kisses, 

and she returns with a protective purposeful plan.

The woman cries as she sprays with the bottle of cleaner or hairspray or whatever it was that her hand found first as she dashed in and out of the apartment to reach her four year old daughter, covered and dotted and ---- ---  --- - ----- -

Porcelain skin, a canvas or temple or mass graveyard for   -- - -- - 

and fresh freckles - the memorial to the souls of a thousand loving-biting-deceased 

ants.

To Burn a Bridge, and Build One

The remarkably cold Winter has made this place the City of Dead Trees, but there are hints now and then that life is coming back to the land.  Every now and then Spring dances through, brief nymph glimpses of what we are likely to miss entirely this year.  Freezing Winter straight to steaming Summer is my guess.  I've been here since August, snow came in mid November, but the cold has lasted two years in my bones.  It has been so long since I've felt warmth that I'm not sure I'll know what to do with it if sunlight tries to penetrate.  Maybe I should take Seth as an example and see if I can shed a layer, maybe two. 

Though instincts and biology allow him a smooth transition, I'm not sure he remembers what it's like to be warm either, but he's anxious to find out.  Each walk we take he seems to be rushing toward something.  Maybe he thinks that if he runs swiftly enough across ice patches and melting snow he'll take us both to somewhere warmer.  In truth, we're both preparing to run free, glancing at one another with nods of go- ahead-approval.
It was 71 and sunny in Ohio today.  The Seasons conspired for an April Fool's joke like no other, and I'm dreading tomorrow with such ferocity that I refuse to check to see what the weather is believed to be even as one in the morning approaches and I know I must catch some Z's, snores, and dream phantoms before six.  I cannot say I'm excited for tomorrow's work day, or this coming Friday which will prove to be yet another Beginning of an End, but like the cold outside and the chill inside, I'll learn to deal with it as I breathe through and imagine warmth.

A Valentine's Day yellow rose that  I ink scrolled.

Spring brings a lot of questions with the returning birds and bud blossoms.  As conversation arises on relationships, commitment, running, pasts, futures, and space -- I wonder if I will ever be able to settle, comfortably.  Not just with a person, or in a particular way of living, but yes - those too.  It's just, as I think of removing myself from one person's life and adding pieces of me to another's, all I seem to actually want to do is place a bookshelf against a wall and unpack boxes of books no one else wanted.  Then I laugh, of course, because it's nearly one in the morning and I'm speaking in symbols and metaphors that mean nothing, and everything.  On cue, to finish my thoughts for the evening, "Islands" by the Xx.  

Thorns and Burr Bushes

When I show you my scars

and using fear-gnawed-fingernails

open them to your inspection

promise to forget

where these dents and scrapes exist

so that you will not be tempted as those before

to dig, burrow, and tear

even in the name of healing.

I've daydreamed and journeyed

I've followed and leaded

along new trails and worn ones.

I've paused.

Concluding, with only slight tremble, 

that I’d rather make

new marks with you

than retravel the same paths

I once stumbled

Without you.

Seth and I are taking a lot of walks as Spring finally arrives.