poems | july 2021

I dreamt you called me in German last night,
Sat up with a start because I knew you were right there next to me,
and sure enough, you turned to me, eyes closed, and said something unintelligible that ended with
“bitte”
please
Please stay
Please hold on
Please don’t wake up
Bitte, don’t let me leave without loving me
Don’t take me for granted or I’ll be gone.
“You’re amazing,” you said, and you kissed me on the cheek
Because I remember what you need and like
And you remember that I like to be held down.
Do you think about the end? Of this, of life, of all things?
Impermanence is permanent.
I let you go over and over again, each morning
You came back this time, or I did.
I’m thinking of getting you a plant, but you’ll kill it like the last one,
You’d forget it waited for water, to blossom for you.
I won’t wait for anyone,
I blossom on my own terms and my own time.
Time, like an everflowing stream. Time, like an everspinning wheel.
When does it end? Does it?
Part of being human is knowing all things end, but never wanting them to anyway.

I get bored so easily when things are easy.
I want to run away, get in the car and drive to Mexico
wake up on a beach somewhere with someone else
and never come back.
I’m in love with a fantasy of family and domesticity and a man who will never be part of me.
is that avoidance too?
running from the reality of love and commitment
to commit to running forever?
I feel so alone and yet I’m never alone
like I’m the only one who lives in this perpetual state of limbo
of wanting to be alive but wanting to run away
ruin everything,
this constant shadow that if I don’t run or find another outlet, another way to go, that i’ll go back to really wanting to go and I’ll fall in.

I don’t know how you can’t tell
that I’m in love with you.
come heaven or hell,
Your birth my birth,
your death my death.
It doesn’t matter,
This in-love feeling will pass,
The love will last.

when do you know you’re in love with an idea and not a firm and earthbound flesh and blood being?
I don’t know how to separate the person i love from my idea of who they are.
with you it’s different with you i simply love and ask nothing in return.
I love only because of who you are, not who you are to ME.
I don’t understand it
but I can’t imagine being without you.
or do you give up on real love too
because all things are impermanent?
I feel my heart, beating raw inside my chest with you.
normally it’s hard, but you amplify it.
What does it mean that you make me want to dive into the deepest ocean
Inspired, make me want to create, strew the brightest colors, cocreate a life?you will never feel this way about me.
I’m an object to you, useful
because I give you myself without asking for you in return.
I feel replaceable
I used to think about dying every day
and how i could find a way to go
without everyone around me hating me.
turns out that anxiety saved me
and I’m here now, kicking and screaming
because I love people who don’t even like me
whose words are empty
who turn around and forget me.
But I don’t want to die.
So I guess I’ve healed a little bit.
no matter how hard I can try to get rid of these emotions,
nothing has held up to the safety I feel being unsafe with you
when you cross the street without looking both ways
try to make security guards your friends.
you are the universe in ecstatic motion
and I’m one of many waves on the ocean,
the next one will come and sweep me away.
I don’t think about choices when you ask me to make them.
I don’t think we were meant to be islands,
to find everything in ourselves.
we need people around us, to love us, to hold us, to show us.
I love me and I’ve found what I need in myself.
Can’t I be allowed to need you too?
Can’t I find more with you?
I’m scared we will both get lost, addicts of the new and exciting,
You live with a messy house, messy heart, but you’re my home.
I simply can’t think about me without thinking about you.

When the truth turns out to be lies
And the hope within you dies
Do you keep on going without that hope, a hole inside?
When you realize all the meaning you thought things had
was a two-millennium-long illusion build on neglect and oppression
How do you carry on?
Or do you?
How do you keep plodding on, working to death or retirement,
whichever comes first,
Hoping for a new end that never comes?
Life is what you make it.
Absence is presence of absence.
Someone I once loved called it cheerful nihilism.
A hole is black, dark, but free.

there is something about fresh laundry
on a clothesline that makes me feel alive.
even better when it is surrounded by green growth of new life.
two birds flew down from the rooftop
smiled at me
said, “do you want to be free like us?
no roots to call our nest
until we collect, little by little, pieces
of everywhere we have been
and everywhere we want to be?”
I want to make a nest, a life,
but I don’t want to pay the fee.