Some mornings you wake up and you don’t care about me or God or anything.

Show me how to do it.
Show me how to do what you are doing to me,
                       the boys all are crying silently, I want your power. 
So, I purse my lips and gasp and calculate vulnerability and while the skyline falls
    I am sinking my teeth deeper into his resolve. I am watching my hands wrapped firmly
around his pulsing throat, my bow aimed at the target, I am relentless and I am also
powerless. 

Everybody’s face looks the same when they are uncomfortable.
I am a shark
I am a nail in the carpet nobody sees
I am a mad woman with burgundy hair in the house by herself.
I read you like a book, like a magazine, like a dictionary for children that is worn
   and rusted away with the stains of father’s whiskey
like 
the way you think you read the waves of my lower body 
           and my begging eyes
not begging but screaming; screaming My power. Give me my power. I need your attention and misery like a nicotine fix.

I didn’t know we had that kind of relationship but we do, we’re really really tragic,
why do you love something that’s broken?
I could tear apart the fabric of my skin with all the questions you won’t have an answer to.

I didn’t tell you to give up on me. I didn’t tell you that the bones inside me were crumbling and bending backwards. I sometimes in secret feel deprecated by your love.
I didn’t tell you I wanted to grow smaller and smaller and that
         I hoped your kisses would suck away the evil little black holes on me
                      the anchors that don’t let me forget the line where want becomes hate
the sadness that’s kept coming every night after midnight
I’m saying prayers to the man in the moon.

He’s smiling at me. It’s the Little Dipper, sweetheart, we forgot each other.
You are the poison to all of the daydreams I haven’t found courage for yet.
I’m going to destroy you. I want to I want to I want.

I remember the only time you looked at me with your eyes instead of your hands.
They were melancholy and terrifying.

I think you’re collecting women that call you things like dear
and honey
and treating them like band-aids, covering up your scars
but keeping them just far enough away that they don’t give you another one

You won’t find better dreams with five nights in the city, you whirlwind.

In the meantime, you turn us into ghosts
and most of us are content as apparitions.
are you haunted enough now, dear?
are you surrounded yet, honey?

Are we showing up in your old sepia photographs, darling, your nightdreams,
are you content, thinking,
“at least I give them something to pray to”?
Sometimes, we are skeletons
and we are addicted to the feeling that we may amount to nothing.

I will keep writing poems
Until all the things you do make sense.

Tell me again the nightmare when you stabbed her throat then chest,
                                   the desperate casualties of your time-stricken mind,
                    and how we ran and fought demons made of invisibility.
        Tell me how you’re always struggling to find your pulse.
(I see you sometimes with your fingers to your neck, counting
                                                                                       onetwothree).

Tell me about the year that winter never came
                                  and you walked on streets made of stone and sand
and the streetlights flickered whenever you stopped looking
               and the glow was blacked out when the memory was too much to bear.

                      Tell me how you thought silence could be a substitute for trying.
How you never saw opportunities to be grateful, and I
                       will tell you about when we wrote what words we didn’t know.

                How our joint force could not create rescue,
                                                             Our hands too weak for resurrection.

Here are your scars.
Here are the constellations on your body
stories drawn from boredom, pictures written from pain
a dictionary: “this is who I am, these are my words,
love me and do not expect me to change.”

I am almost a fool, searching here for myself
when I am a language you do not speak,
and you are a mirror, reflecting only the negative qualities in myself
that I dare not admit. But you are warm.
And before you have moved to leave,

I miss you
with absolute certainty.

This is the moment she always tried to prepare you for.
This is the moon that doesn’t sustain it’s own glow,
and this is the time the horses escaped and walked two feet from your fence.
These are the flames in the trash can rising above your head, and the girl in the corner is saying, Hey, man, what’s left for me? 
Don’t take it personally. Her corruption is no fault of yours. 

     You consider the idea of human paradox and singed rope. 

Nobody is alone, she says, we’re all going down together
and I don’t want to live forever anymore. 
You wonder what the hell she’s looking for.
You consider the idea of suffocation.
You consider the word, ‘too.’ Too lost. Too skinny.
Too scared, and she’s crying, I want to feel more,
and you consider if what she really wants to feel is nothing.  

     These are the stairs you climbed up a million times but fell down now.

You consider the idea of self-betrayal.
She’s looking trapped, the girl in the corner,
in all her leather and heels, too bright in shadows –
Don’t give me another fucking metaphor about the stars.
Don’t take it personally. Sometimes we’re all too dark for pretty words.
You consider the idea of uncontrollable blazes.  

      This is the gasoline you can’t remember if you spilled.

It’s too far. Too lost. Too soon.  Didn’t I know what I wanted once? 
This is the train rattling forward and the vibration inescapably close.
This is the hour you are forced to figure out who you are.
You consider the idea of too much heat.
You consider the idea of burning at both ends. 

The girl in the corner exhales slowly with resignation and immortality.
You consider the idea of rescue.

        Don’t take it personally, but you can’t tie down fire. 

In the morning, you’re talking about October. “I’ll be out of school,” he says.
“And I’ll be in it.”

You’re ready, he says. You argue about it a bit. Then you agree. You want to mean something to the world.

“I want something to point to,” you say, “Something I can look at and say, this is different and better because of me.”
“I am.”

You cry but you don’t tell him. You talk about sitting in New York drinking coffee at bistros and watching people.

In the afternoon you mean to go to a cheap hair place and walk into a spa completely accidentally - the kind of place where every wall is a different color and they give you soda in wine glasses. You feel bad about not holding a conversation with the nice girl that is asking you what tv shows you watch, but you really don’t give a fuck. You’re watching yourself grow new height and edges. You aren’t sure what you’re doing with your day. They overcharge you.

You say you’re tired of poetry and prose, but you’re writing in it and thinking in it and keeping a notebook because you keep finding new lines in the concrete and in his text messages and in mirrors. He asked you what was different yesterday, and you said you didn’t know, it’s just different. He asked what you were. You wanted to write back, we’re in love and why the hell do we need any other name or rules for it? You said you didn’t know, instead. You’re tired of living your life this way but a way out seems so far and so difficult.

He notices you changed the relationship on facebook, and he removes his but he doesn’t remove his picture. You figure he will, soon. You want to be done hoping. You want a clean break. You want him. You don’t know what you want. He’s not responding to you since he noticed the change, and you’ve come home to find you have been rejected from the school in New York and will not be sitting drinking coffee at bistros, and he’s not responding, and it’s time to learn to heal yourself anyways.

Not miles nor months, you said.
We murmur full names and words
like ‘unequivocally,’ finding the elegance 

and searching for the truth.
Learning to breathe. I am aware
that you are my lullaby and that I come unraveled
and that with every moment I am yours.

Without doubts. Without pains.
Knowing here; I fit unlike anywhere else. 

Where will these whispers be when I need them most?
Memorization falls short of this.
Of how my collarbones felt
 
When early Saturday morning,
you kissed a question,
and I nodded my head, “yes.”

We’re walking.
We haven’t stopped shining for four days, twelve hours, nine minutes, and we’re walking,
talking about the bombs in Sderot.

“I can’t dance.” We’re running.
Our fingertips work - building traps every second.
“Step over the hole in the ground, and under the nail in the door.
Someone died here.” Kiss me, exorcise my ghosts.
We’re dancing. Come here, I want to spin. 

We’re pulsing.
Forced silences are testing our wills, screaming obscenities into your lips.
You’re swearing I’m yours, but I give my heart to no one.

If last year were today, I’d whisper, I’m not yours.
My hips are yours, my rhythms are yours,
my outline and breathing and ghost are yours,
but I  - I am not a product of you. I am us
rolling screaming flipping following whispering
losing track of time and we’re driving. 

It’s six weeks left and
we’re driving through brown grass with the windows down.

The actions of water have a direct effect on the weather; more specifically, how the wind blows. If the lake is being violent, you can avoid it, but you will still feel the effects. We consider this as we turn around and try to drown in our own stillness. I am focusing on the sky. Similarly, your voice is directly related to my pulse. I do not have to understand the words you are saying for them to spark something that is nothing short from disaster. Some call this effect, ignition: the exact second when you know something is happening, the energy is there, you press down and what was air becomes luminous. I really loved the moment when you started to whisper.

I’m not sure that I know enough languages to tell you what’s on my mind, but it’s something along the lines of measuring my own clairvoyance. It wouldn’t do, I think, for me to be the one to break my own prophecies. You got lucky with that thing with the snow. I got lucky with that thing with the rain. It’s always still for a little bit before it isn’t. I want you the way the lightning turns sand into glass - immediate. I think I didn’t spend enough time trying to memorize. And you don’t ask questions if you don’t want answers - unless of course you do want answers, and then you only ask questions. Will you tell me something in Spanish, again? 

I think that our hearts are racing the same way. 

In the relationship I wish I was having, I drove you home in the storm today. We sat in my living room with the blinds open while my mom was still at work, and wrapped my blanket around us, and made hot chocolate and tea. I played John Mayer in the background, and we laughed when I caught you humming along. We watched the sky light up and talked about nuclear warfare, and you explained to me the mechanics of a bomb while we made a survival plan for a post-apocalyptic world. And then, under rhythm of raindrops, we rediscovered each other’s bodies - not frantically, not violently, not routine - but in complete silence, we conducted experiments with lips and with fingertips. 

But I am not in that world, and you are not here for me to kiss when I want (“too much, you’d probably get tired,” I tell you. “Not possible.” ), and the rain is over too quickly anyways. So instead I drive home after dance and pray the mincha on my own, and I mourn the life where I was doing things for my present, and not to prepare for one day.