Emotional Pornography
This is not the post I had originally planned to offer you today, but it's the one you get because life will insist on happening. I've been suffocated by feelings recently in an increasingly untenable way, sad anxious tired alone overwhelmed repeating on an endless loop. The worst kind of grab bag. And, on top of this, I've finally managed to force myself to start working on this house in earnest, which involves so much laundry it should be illegal, sorting, hanging, folding, washing dishes, vacuuming, scrubbing, organizing, ad infinitum.
You see the problem here. If I try to write an actual post, it will just keep devolving into strings of disconnected words because I simply don't have the capacity for anything else. And so, instead of that, I'm going to share with you some poems. I wouldn't say they're my best work, but some of them are so deeply personal that posting them feels almost pornographic. Emotional pornography. They're not all from the same time period, or about the same person, but as you might notice, they roughly follow the same theme. I am nothing if not consistent. And they all share the quality of being work I will likely never get published, which is why they're appearing here instead. I trust the readers of this newsletter to be able to meet me where I'm at, or where I was when I wrote them, and see what I was going for even if the execution is a little messy. Next week I'll write an actual new thing. Thank you for bearing with me.
Without further ado, the poems.
The Beast Wakes Up
I am shaken
By the memory,
Shaking
When I touch you,
Because my hands are unclean,
My mind
Unclouded for the first time
I can remember.
I tell myself a story
Where I wake up
And it’s as if I have been
Transformed,
A woman no longer,
But something
That creeps,
Something ravenous
For your flesh.
What is it
To want?
What am I
To be satisfied?
Who are you
To make me feel this way?
Is it okay,
I want to ask someone,
A mother, perhaps,
Someone with gentle hands.
Is it okay
To long?
I am not
Sleeping Beauty,
You do not need
To kiss me awake.
I have never been
More awake than now,
Kneeling at your feet.
I will be the one
To kiss you,
Because desire makes
Beasts of us all,
And if I am to be
A Beast,
Then fine, let me feed.
Untitled
I am a howl of desperation
wearing human skin,
and when I say please
you can be sure I mean it
more than any broken thing has ever
meant any of the sounds
that fall from its gasping throat.
If you listen closely
you might also hear contained
within that vessel of desire
the words I will never say,
like "I need" and "you are all
that holds me here"
and love me."
They echo in the wasteland
of heartbeat and bloodrush,
they fill up the space
that was left behind
after I scooped out all
that made me human.
I will die before vulnerability
uses my name again,
before softness becomes me.
You will never get the best of me,
but you can have the beast of me,
which is all that counts,
which is all you see
when you peel me apart,
dig your fingers into my ripe fruit
and set to devouring.
It's fine, it's enough,
it's what I want.
I want to be gentled
like the wild animal I know myself to be,
to be soothed and held
and held together,
and I want to be brutalized and bruised
because when it hurts
I know it will heal,
and when you hurt me I know I'm real to you
and when you leave I know I'm no worse off
than when you stayed.
I want you to undo me,
I want to be undone by the work of your hands
and the cruel indifference of your words
and the ache of your heart breaking
more than just my will to resist.
I want to be the treasure you find
at the garage sale
you weren't even going to go to,
but when you did you saw me there
on the table
a half off sticker my only adornment,
and you knew you had to have me,
to call me yours
because you could,
because I couldn't tell you no.
I want to be adorned with your marks
and your vitality,
to feel you on my skin,
in my flesh, the marrow in my bones
after you're gone.
I want to keep you close
and never forget that with you
I was as much as I will ever be,
as much as I could ever be.
I want to remember that when the beam of your laser
focus was directed at me,
we put the sun to shame.
I want to feel no shame
in how you stripped me down to parts
and laid me out before you
and used your precision instruments
to unmake me and remake me in the image
of something you could want.
I Want
I want.
Like the ocean wants the pull of the moon,
like children want to hear the footfalls
and the jingle of bells on Christmas Eve.
I want like Doubting Thomas wanted
to put his hand into Jesus' wound,
to be up close with the gore and the glory.
I want like mourners at a funeral want
to be told that the pain will dull,
the open bloody wound that is the heart will heal.
But no.
I want.
Like I want this poem to be bigger than its language,
an incantation to call you from your bed
and into mine, a spell too powerful to resist.
I want like I want to say something
that can't be said, something that strains at the borders
of the common tongue. Something like the way you taste,
something like the smell of my sheets one month after you've gone.
Alone. Something like if I could kiss you right now
I think I could transcend the bounds of my human flesh.
I want.
Like the ravenous beasts that chase you
through your nightmares, forgotten as soon as your eyes open,
always waiting. Always watching. Always a split second away
from devouring. I want like devouring, like gorging myself
on the bitter sweet decadence of you, my mouth filled with saliva
to prepare my palate for your taste.
I want like an animal, dumb and desperate for the slightest glimpse
of your face. Like panting, like barking, like howling at the moon.
I want like instinct, that nameless beacon guiding me home.
I want.
Like all the sound in the world has been turned up
to a hundred, like your fingers on my hypersensitive skin,
playing me like the smoothest piano, or the tightest violin.
I want like a conflagration, an explosion, choose your simile and insert it here.
I want like there are no words, like a cry
one throat can't contain. I am feverish and aching for you,
sweat slick and pink flushed and suffocating under the weight
of my own untapped desire. To hold your hand would be pleasure enough,
to lie in your arms an ecstasy god themself couldn't equal.
Bodymap
When did you last touch your body
like a healing, laying on of hands,
offering, as communion, yourself to yourself?
When did you last look at yourself
in the mirror and whisper sweet nothings
to the glass, knowing, as you did,
that you were worth every breath?
Every ridge of your spine,
every peak and every valley of your flesh,
the bodymap that exists to show
the worthy how to traverse you.
You are the most magnificent land,
the bluest sky and the clearest lakes,
fertile ground, and from your soil
miracles will grow.
Think of yourself as holy.
Anointed with beauty, baptized in love,
glowing from the inside out. Sanctified.
Touch your forehead to the ground and chant
prayers to your fingernails, your eyelashes.
Every part of you that has ever been
overlooked. Let yourself know that you know
you are a spell too powerful to be cast.
Greet every false prophet with a
full-throated roar of power, confident that you are
what is true. Never let them say that you
yielded before anyone but yourself, never let them
speak your true name if they haven't
studied you like the most devoted accolite.
Make them sweat. Make them swear
allegiance to the movement of your chest when you breathe.
When did you last love your body?
Not the love of distance and platitudes,
the shallow adoration of men who could never
handle you. When was the last time
you loved yourself like a lover,
and, in the deepest hours of the night,
rediscovered the flex of muscle and the fullness
of your bloody, beautiful, beating heart?
Don't forget. Hold it tight. Wield it.
Dear Moon
Tonight I stared up
at your face, shining
onto my face and I thought,
if this is all I ever have,
it will be enough.
Last night you were full,
pregnant with power and swollen
with possibility, and I, a lone
speck on a rock too far away
to comprehend, fell to my knees
in awe, thinking if you would give me this,
all of you, unashamed and unafraid,
who am I to keep the same to myself?
When you were new, glimmering
with your own secret joy at being allowed
to exist, to wax and wane,
to be born again and again,
I lay on the grass and I felt
an exquisite sadness, but,
in that sadness, peace,
thinking to myself that if you endure,
if you keep recreating yourself every month,
refusing to hide your face away for long,
then I can meet the world with mine, open
and shining and hopeful.
When I feel the tug inside me,
blood calling to blood
as tides call to tides, I try
not to resist, but to yield, soft
and flexible and willing to be broken
open, again and again,
to shed my lining as I wish
to shed my skin, allowing
the revolution within my body to propel me
forward into a world I have always
been hesitant to greet.