I am a magnificent, fucked up universe.

I am a body of extremes. Too hot to eat, too happy to write. Too tired to sleep. Hunger/nausea, sobriety/intoxication, exhaustion/mania. Teach me the meaning of moderation; this dictionary excluded it.

Tonight: sinking into my bed, with the fresh sheets, and the pillows stacked justso, and the heat that keeps skin from touching skin from touching. Sink into this bed. Sink into that space where the words live. Somewhere behind my throat. I unfold into this pulse. Into this taut and scraped body. Into these knees; into pain like a knife’s edge under the throbbing spider web nerve endings. I have been knitting new skeins of scar tissue, slowing the mechanism.

Entropy (entrəpē) noun:  lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder. See also: the way shadows drape across playgrounds. Our bodies clothed in moonlight, sunlight, the dirty crumbling streetlights. I never trust white sheets. I mean I never trust myself to be clean.

I want to write a poem about your hands, but every word sounds so trite. Teach me to transcribe the language of your forehead. The way your eyebrows says Come hither like my hips (shoulder width and thrust forward, chin to sky and eyes unfocused, kissing horizons.) The river divulging gifts as the sun sank behind my consciousness. 

There’s this thing I do lately where I’m talking. I feel my tongue moving. The vocal cords create a series of vibrations that resonate. Tongue, lips, teeth. The ears register resonations, forming coherent combinations of speech. The brain slips, disengaged, and I don’t know what’s coming out of my mouth until it’s said. Two nights ago the full moon leaned close to hear me say I’m scared. To hear me say I need. Or maybe I didn’t say those things at all. But we left anyways, bare skin and a stolen flower. Remembering daisies, the way bears sneeze, and sneeze, and sneeze. But I held it to my face like oxygen, walking the blocks that seem so long in the dark.

Then your kitchen. Then bones propped against counters and hard wood. Mouths, and hands, and words, and I don’t know how to explain what you mean to me. Let’s disregard chronology because it just makes us crazy. Or sad. And by us I mean me. Three days prior I tell a friend She is a good person to We with. You can wordify anything if you verb it. Friday night: Strawberry Wine and a slow-motion spin. Lessons in physics. Lessons in geometry. Straddling the tire swing, world careening, and entropy taking the backseat to centripetal force. The physics of our bodies stacked together under moonlight.

It’s easier when there are no boundaries, I said. I said, When there are no lines I can’t cross them. The slant of Katherine's mouth calls me chickenshit and I know she’s probably right. I pay her to call me out. I move in circles, and circles, and circles. I don't want to fuck this up. A yellow legal pad, and the words I’ll never see.

But there. Acknowledging the We of us in your kitchen, propped against cupboards and hardwood. Eventually, morning. Eventually wake up, wake up, and Did you know? you say. You say, They call it the thunder moon, while the horizon chafes and I wonder about rain. Memorize the ways yellow light and grey sheets cling to your body. What if you didn’t know what wind was? you say. You say How would you explain the way trees move? A green expanse of trunk shimmies over your neighbor’s rooftop, unexplained.

This is how I say I love you. Sprawled across the tabletop, hands outstretched thinking Hold this, hold this, hold this. Hold the Me of me. Sometimes I am terrified and small, and sorry. I hope you know that some days I have to be invisible. Or a bear. I guess that’s at the heart of this. I was worried that if I started needing you I’d never stop. I don't want to stop. Please, cradle me gracefully. Pour over me like moonlight on a tire swing.

I want to make a meal of your kneecaps. And I don’t know how to write, don’t know how to write, don’t know how to write this out. Or write about kissing hard lines and rigidity. A wrenching in the angle of the jaw. Between us: nothing rigid. Everything animal, somehow soft. Even when you sink your teeth into the meat of me. Fold me into the den of your ribcage. Claim my neck with your side-to-side wobble. Please fill this body’s empty space.

I’ll find words for your hands eventually.

xoxo

-b