Subtle to start.
Oily. Raw.
You are newly-birthed silk,
between these restless fingertips.
I tease you
into something resembling threads
like rosary beads, one prayer a peace.
Discount price
for shortlived relief
and long overdue release.
Syllables tremble,
tangle once they leave these lips,
and another bead down from a knot that grows
with life of its own
leaves me sore
all over,
brings me
closer,
to something holier than
I've ever known.
Tonatzin
I am
so tired and I can't sleep
Because this hollow inside
won't cave into closure
Refuses to live and let live
An ache
for a homeland
for
a place to embrace and be embraced
no questions asked!
I want to danza
To dance,
to tickle Tonatzin with my bare toes
And feel her sigh
inside my heart
inside my womb
To call her and you and I my other eye
Like the Mayans did
I want to be strong
Indestructible
Not to be yet another
successful case of
assimilation
I want to love
and not perpetuate
de-evolution of
my ancestors
The great big US
did not have room for us
for my mother
for my grandmother
Who out of fear
out of love
Stuck a key in their faces
Where a mouth used to be
Quietly turned it so it stuck
And kept secrets inside
From their children,
from me
Before they died
And I'm left motherless
Grandmotherless
Without my rightful herstory
Always
Burning breath, velvet tongue
heavy with cheap beer
aftertaste
and
incessant need,
filling empty spaces I did not know I had.
I, callow, could not always stand to see
hunger
in those eyes,
so I closed mine and
just felt you meld into me
all over,
pulling you into me.
Hands beautiful
for drawing me closer to what I did not think I would
ever have,
did not have
in the end.
Throbbing heat pressed hard to
rhythms
I've never heard before.
Even the afterembrace the next afternoon,
while we were sober, I could have spent the day in,
connected to you
at the solar plexus
and pelvis.
I loved how your energy played with mine
coaxing,
like we were still lying in bed.
Ephemeral love meaning
nothing
and meaning
everything,
not deep enough to drown in
but deep enough
to change this ache
into a
different sort.
Who knew that when you said
"always", you meant it
and didn't?
Automatic typing?
fingers toes hands brazen skill
these are the parts you were given to connect with the one, the supreme all there is. like tadpoles seeking the frogs you are the one to feel us swim by, yearn to leap as we leap and you will, you are, you have. nothing can stop you from being you but you. and even then you will always be. you. don't hesitate with the being. go with the flow and you will know it has always been this way. we want to serve you we want to hold you we want to protect you guide you love you but we will never interfere or challenge. bring us down into your realm and we will always come to your aide. even when your thoughts are elsewhere we come to you watch over you. you are so loved by us and once you reconnect you will see you have always loved us too. this world made you forget but there is no harm done. we'll be the old friend whose name you forgot in MNWAI your amnesia. holding your hand until you wake up talking to YOU through this dream you call waking life. do what needs to be done for you your soul's purpose and we will give you strength. make you aware of your own strength. do not be afraid to live outside of the beekeeepr's cage. there might be stinging but you are sturdy enough to survive it. your were meant to survive it. what you will.
Five syllables
Pentagonal, boxy
Five fingers grasping clay
Misshapen and gray as identity
Kneading dough, needing something to
Hold on to
Five
Sex-u-al-i-ty
One, as in SEX
Two, as in YOU
Three, as in ALL
Four, as in I
Five, as in TEE as in "fits 'you', 'all', and 'I' to a 'tee'"
Bullshit
Fuck your geometry
I don't knead you so don't knead me
I am woman hear me roar while I kiss my wife on the lips
But don't start nodding just yet because
I am not the L of your LGBT
At sixteen, I was the B of your LGBT
Bisexual and then I said call me biaffectional because sex
ain't all us non-heteros have to give
I believe in love, I said, I believe in love
No I am NOT my sexuality
I am me
I am not that lesbian woman
I am not that bisexual woman
I am certainly not that hetero woman
I just am
A woman, biologically as well as in heart
A human in love with another human
A soul in love with another soul
I am a woman who writes, who thinks, who talks,
who bleeds from her CUNT, who scars
I am a woman who loves painting words to fly, who fights for justice, a woman of substance of color of consciousness
I am Chance who is bisexual, no biaffectional, no call me monogamous
Monogamous and in love.
Because I believe in love
Because I refuse to let bi label polarity limit all the love I have to give
to two sexes,
to two genders
to "either or," to "this or that,"
two measley out of so many delectable choices,
countless humans with identities defying gravity
Defying polarity
Defying pentagonal boxes with five syllables, two genders and a handful of choices that weigh in clay, comfortably in grasping hand, palattable to most tongues
Like I said, fuck that geometry
I am me and tripping over pre-made labels imprisons me to vernacular
So when you ask me about my sexuality
When you ask me about my sexual preference, preference as if it were some masochistic choice
I will respond, "Hello, my name is Chance. I believe in love and I am monogamous."
The first time
That night our fingers grazed forbidden skins. Creeping as silk over these surfaces and then piercing deep, deep down into some shivery, dark, warm, wet, throbbing place, like strung darts.
You wove through me. It was your web and I span and undulated with it. Rising and falling, each passing car in the night rocking us gently like waves. This was our ship and we were floating somewhere in the cosmos. Your breathing, heavier and scratchy in the silence of the car, echoing over and over inside my head. So slow, so careful, nothing could break it now. I wanted you. You wanted me. I'd seen you look at me like that before as though your eyes were magnets and my movements some polar attraction for them. I couldn't figure it out at the time, why you followed me with those eyes, why you were the first to respond to whatever I'd say, why you were so concerned, so intent on making me laugh.
But it clicked that night. That was love. Desire. Adoration. Heat. And here I was cuddled up at your right side as you looked down on me with an expression seeming a slight smile but too easily covering up something running deep, organically sprawled as a galaxy or a neural network and, just as complex. Blinking up at you and afraid at every flick of eyelash you'd disappear----or that you'd still be there and this was real. So wet down there, so swollen, heart in every part of my body because it was too soon afterward but somehow too long in the making. Nervous, excited, scared, sad, happy, guilty. Guilty guilty guilty.
Did you want to kiss me? Oh yes. Tattooed all over your face, in the hands you kept trickling over me in so many aching streams of want. Knowing it left me parched and dizzy, a sudden flare....down there and then massaging squeeze to keep the flood to a minimum. Over and over, the "noyesnoyesnoyes" drum hitting me from inside, bruising me and all I needed was that kiss to take the pain away and replace it with another, much more delicious sort of pain.
I shifted close with your breath fanning my face, your torso expanding into me, contracting and pulling me into you, further, further. Nuzzling my ear into your heartbeat that said "yesyesyesyesyesitsokaybecauseiloveyouan
It was like a loud whisper becoming a steady moan. You were the brave one. Electric, yes. Silk, yes. YOU, yes! Lips wrapping around each others' and velvet tongues moving, roaming, reminding us of other velvety places now open to touch, to keep, to taste, to kiss like this, to love.
I long for you to kiss me like that again. For you to touch me as you did that night. To look at me like I was the gift you'd been waiting for but never thought you'd get in a million years.
I still want you, baby. I'm just waiting....waiting for you to want me back again.
Marshmallow eyes
Marshmallow eyes, too swollen and soft to do anything.
Melt, maybe.
Poetry saws back and forth between millions of synapses and all I can do is lay here, listening to purple and black bruises pump out of the speakers. I'd rather just straddle her paintbrush lyrics than move from this dent. I let my own severed words trickle like blood all down the stairs of my mind in exchange for floating away on someone else's sung ones. It's easier that way but I imagine I have the energy to write it all down anyway. I don't, so I wallow in the pool I've created instead.
This bed is caving in slow motion. The sawing continues, I can't cry. More poetry falls off and melts, I don't understand. What am I supposed to do with this cut up alphabet? I'm confused and I just don't know. The letters fall through my fingers like sand, gritty and salty like the tears that never come, a worn metaphor that beckons me closer.
Maybe I cry in my sleep. Maybe that's why I have marshmallow eyes today. Maybe that's why I have no memory of it. I dreamt of coughing up a yellow pool of phlegmn into the sink. It only felt like a teaspoon's worth, if that, but when I coughed it up, it was enough to fill a medium soup bowl.
Love, love, love that's why I throw things around the house today. It's a silly thing. No, I didn't really throw things around the house today, but at the time, the idea sounded like it would relieve it. But I know: it would have made me feel worse.
POP
The world is strange.
Borders are dishsoap bubbles at a glancing touch.
Daynight slithers through my fingers
in ribbons,
nuzzling, licking the crooks
between digits, sinuous.
Transition, glisten.
Just...
listen.
One pulse.
