Honey ~ Swim Deep
Ah ah ah, don’t blame the time on your wrist
for not doing what makes you tick.
Don’t blame the clock on the wall for running round
with nothing at all
Must be 18 to see. Leave now or you will be corrupted! Mostly sex. Early 30s Wisconsin. Let's fuck.
It was like walking into the sun, being with you, it was like walking into the sun for the first time after a terribly long winter.
When you choose to be a poet,
when you choose to spill like this,
bleed like this, cry like this,
your pain becomes an exhibit.
A place for people to walk through
and then leave when they are ready.
No one ever asks a museum if it’s okay.
Honey ~ Swim Deep
Ah ah ah, don’t blame the time on your wrist
for not doing what makes you tick.
Don’t blame the clock on the wall for running round
with nothing at all
At the thought of
harmony,the oceans cry. Turn into
themselves, breakover islands between lovers,
continents once one body. No one
ever tells you their rip currents are guilty,
and selfish, trying to pull everything
back to the way it used to be. No one longs
for the sea when they aren’t in love
with something.But the sea, broken, the sea, parted
into labeled sections once complete around
one body; one heart, in love with another
it can no longer reach; five oceans, in love with something
they can no longer touch all of, look back at you,they say: if you love, do so always, and always
with an open palm. say: if you ever have known
the tragedy of what is to crave and to lose,
you will taste us in the water.
I WANT YOU
TO UNDRESS ME
TO THE SOUND
OF ALL YOUR
DEFENSES
COLLAPSING.
I want to get in an argument with your mouth
that neither of us can win,
tongues twisted up like roots.
I want to kiss you and feel like I am growing.
excerpt from “Between Your Anxieties And My Pen” by Trista Mateer
from my new book The Dogs I Have Kissed!
(via backshelfpoet)
If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart.
There are more ways to lose someone
than there are to get them back.1. Airport silence.
2. Hospital waiting room nerves.
3. The drive back home from the
best day of your life.In every story,
the moon promises itself to the earth
and stays.
I know men who’ve died for less.
Who’ve prayed for someone to come back for them even if it was to
break their hearts.4. Ghost dust.
5. Sunrise ash.I dreamed you back once,
but it was nothing more than fool’s gold.
A trick of the light.
This heart’s yearning is a dance that
won’t stop stepping on my feet.
Love happens and we spend
all our wishes asking to
become un-ruined.6. Unkind darkness.
7. Sickness in the middle of the night.
8. Bathroom floor grief.When the storm came,
I named it after the person I was.
When the storm came,
I tried my best to catch all the rain.
When you left as promised,
the trees held their breath for me.Are you hearing what I’m saying?
Do you understand?
Even the ones who’d lost it all
turned their heads to the hurt of it.You massacre of memory.
You monster of a dream.
You made my hands so quiet.I understand now.
I’ve seen the bodies ruined by
the hearts inside of them.
I’ve seen love turn stomachs inside out.
You had no choice.Darkness like a river inside of you.
Darkness like the loudest ocean.
What an unsinkable thing.What an impossible wild.
I dreamed of you for months,
trying to make sense of what happened.
Your voice, breaking like waves.Today is just tomorrow’s ghost,
you’d say,
I have no choice but to
mourn it.
The cities around the world
come undone
after you leave the first time.
Manhattan takes off her favorite dress.
Burns it and wears the smoke
as perfume.
Rome weeps from her grave.
Knows what it’s like to watch
the monuments tumble.
The statues resolve to dust.
I gather light for your shadows
to stay dancing.
I write you as a traveler.
Let the ghosts all
know that you’re coming
back.Or else,
I stop waiting for you.
Your doorstep becomes
a graveyard I don’t visit anymore.
Your heart:
a legend I stop telling
the tourists about.
The memory of you becomes quiet,
and I forget to listen for
its voice.Eventually,
the fallen heroes will find me.
The Alexander the Great’s
and the Cleopatra’s.
Tell me it was naive
to think I could have ever kept
that kind of holiness
to myself.
David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing
