Temor

A hammer in your fist
and a palm to my sternum
you guide me back.
You call it a window behind me
cool rock you’ve named glass
and through it you see ground
one floor below
solid ground built for running.
But over my shoulder is the wall
of my prison, polished to a shine,
brittle
cold
safe.
You don’t see the canyon
the high-rise drop
the man with a hammer who
smiles, says it will only hurt a bit.
You don’t know as you
swing for the glass
how many men have smiled
as they take a weapon to my life.

Magnética

Use me for your harbour
see my light in the distance
and call it home
call it yours
call it anything you want
as we rewrite the tide
with a storm of our own,
clumsy it may be,
more collision than dock;
carve your name in my skin with your hull
and my soul with your anchor.
Know the stars will lead you back
through darkness, rain, and wreck.
Know that every map you see
will bear my name.

Hay olvido

There is forgetting.
Names and dates and colours
flavours of sorrow
a place and a chapter
fragments of life yellowing at the edges
each failure of memory is
a hand at my throat
hope falls like feathers
the future collects in my mouth
a shadowed beast
not quite abandoned
the feathers the feathers
the blackness of hope
the torrent of it
and still
still there is forgetting
a name
a detail
history
I wish I could forget
you already are

Prisa

Memory is turning to movement
faster than I can chase.
Moments that once had your starlit eyes
three inches of cotton away
and your skin
oh
your skin
so much less,
are now corners we’re turning,
walking too fast,
traffic too loud,
waiting for you to say
well, this is me
and put a lock between us.
Waiting
for a long walk home,
in a jacket too thin.
The silence of a dark hallway.
Keys melting onto wood.
The rhythmic thrum of your scent
being washed away.

Retiro

Make it up as we go.
Make it up as I run
headlong
into a trap of my own making
the one that gnaws at my ankle
like there’s flesh to be had
because I’m a poet
a filthy, bleeding poet
with teeth for a heart
and claws for eyes.
All I want from you
is fifty years
give or take
and a reason to live.
All I want from you
is a place to rest
and reason not to.

Arder

I don’t know if we have that.
That thing
where I tell you I’m sick
and I’m lonely.
I don’t know if that’s our country,
one of soft touch, of gentle voice,
of warm arms around my exhausted form
as I quietly hate myself for letting you in.
There are things illness teaches.
Patience
lined with the quiet fury of wildfire
consuming a distant hill.
The need to keep tally of your secrets;
cipher of your metaphors.
How to say no when your heart sings yes,
and not burn for it.
How to burn quietly as petrol ignites on your skin.

Disociativo

You’re an out of body experience.
I walk alongside you on the shoreline of my soul
watch you pause
bend
pick up a part of me I’ve never seen before
turn the warm pebble of it under your gaze
set it back on the ground
and step carefully around it.
I want you to take a flying leap,
sledgehammer in hand,
but you won’t.
You toe aside the next pebble of me
and you don’t seem to hate it at all.
Out here the gulls have lost their voices
and hung up their wings,
the salt-licked breeze found feet,
and we all walk with you
on a shallow breath.
Because you’ll find it
soon enough,
the place where the pebbles turn to shit.
I hope you step around it just as gently.

Jaula

The cage was never locked.
The key swinging beyond your grip
just a trick of the light.
I was always here,
always waiting
for you to ease between the bars,
let me lick the vanilla from your skin
as you drink the wine of my tongue.
I watch as your eyes,
the blackened blue of a night
that doesn’t know it’s ending,
adjust to freedom
and I wonder
with a mind I do not trust
if they’ll be drunk for a night
or a month
or the rest of their life.
I wonder
when you’ll tire of bitterness,
and why that feels like a prayer.
I wonder if I’ll ever forget
the sweet drug of your body
before I trained it to hurt.

Non è

It’s madness.
It’s swallowing a wasp whole and expecting honey.
It’s lying naked in the rain until pneumonia sets in
and then it’s laughing as your wrecked body shivers;
it’s cataloguing the peace in bedrest.
It’s the way sunlight hits leaves against a pregnant sky
and the lick that follows the bite
and the bite that has nothing to do with teeth.
It’s the bite you don’t yet know is a kiss.
It’s the way I never can find the edge of your contact lens
and the way I never want to stop searching.
It’s a string of words I cannot mean.
It’s a week, just one, one of thousands,
and somehow
it’s almost true.
It’s the way your eyes narrow as they read my mind.
It’s my mind
naked and laughing
and realising how easy it is.
How easy you are to love.

Debería

I tried. I covered it. I tied the bandage with knots and pins and tape
plastered it down set it hard hard enough to sign your name on hard
enough to engrave with your teeth hard enough to claw and scratch
and chisel and still hard I should have been safe I should have been
but there you were
and the bandage unspooled
light as silk,
and laid over me
in a frieze
is the story we won’t let heal,
the story we can’t help but write
even if not as and it’s just
because number and dream and Yes
and there are days I think I’m safe
days I won’t watch plasma seep
from what should have been
days I think we really are just
and then you snatch up my damn thermometer
switch it from farenheit to celsius
and slip through the door with a smile pulling at the edge of decency.
I shout after you. A scold no warmer than the seventeen degrees in my hand
as I change it back.
Because you hate it when I change it back
and who am I kidding
to hell with healing
I have enough scars.