to suck the poison out
you must wrap your mouth over the wound
encircle your lips around the broken skin,
pull hard –
and feel the sting as you nearly swallow
and poison yourself all over again
this is the hard work of un-doing –
creating a space for healing
oft requires a taste of your own medicine.
i saw your ghost the other day
i might have missed you, you blended in so!
and i smiled;
because you are beautiful.
and i wondered if,
perhaps we both have halos now.
when you begin to wander across my mind –
as you are wont to do, from time to time,
i will send you love and
i will send you light
for i have found the old ways must be made new,
and being kind makes the heart hurt less
than being cruel.
i smiled because your ghost was beautiful
and to send you love and light,
so that all of it,
the glorious whole,
would kiss your soul
as i was wont to do.
if a tree in a forest
forgives itself,
with no one else around to hear it
does it still count?
i, my darling, have spread myself too thin,
wandered perhaps too far.
i know, i know.
saying yes to everything tends to take its toll.
i found myself surprised, however –
it has been many years
since we were strangers.
i have poured my soul into your open hands.
i have watched it run through your fingers like water
colors changing like gasoline
and you quenched my fire and my flame with
your soft spoken words into my hair.
(we have lived lifetimes in airports)
i wish you could know the quiet beauty of seattle tonight,
we would walk in tandem to Kerry park,
our shoes would be wet like concrete,
and perhaps i would wear your clothes
(they always did look better on me)
we would sit, and i would want to smoke
(but i never really smoke – i would just want the aesthetic)
you would understand this and offer me nothing
except the distance between our shoulders
and i would feel my heart knitting to yours.
in this post-collegiate haze that we are navigating
one thing burns bright –
I have my brother’s love.
We are inexorably linked, you see
sacred in our sharedness.
Sending tendrils of thoughts into the deep elsewhere;
across the sea,
into space,
in the hushed foam of beaches we once knew.
Somehow, somehow, when I think of you –
I know you are thinking of me.
Knowledge unexplainable that I hold in my very blood,
this unmatched synchronicity.
Today I felt you
so acutely,
your heart thrumming inside my chest
like a second pulse.
The muscle memory of your embrace
and the scent of your skin against my cheek.
This is not the first time,
nor will it be the last.
And sometimes, just sometimes
I let your memory take over
and inhabit the space that you have carved inside of me.
You are my empty bowl,
which I continually have to fill.
The plan was to play hard to get, that’s right-
I wasn’t just gonna go given’ myself away
I’m no easy catch,
can you really see me in fishnets?
No.
I always find myself slippin’ out the holes, swimmin’ back out to sea.
I’d never been anybody’s sushi roll.
But she, has lips like wasabi,
my eyes water every time we kiss,
makes me wish we had a porch swing and a little home.
Makes me wish I could right wrongs, instead of poems.
The heart is a bullet that’s terrified of blood.
Love is a windshield wiper in a hurricane; nothing is ever clear.
You mistake her name for the moon, mistake porchlights for the stars and sometimes,
They are.
Her constalliations lead me home, ten thousand shades of open.
And if there’s one thing in this world I’ve ever known for sure is that this girl is gonna crush me like a small bug.
Leave me so frickin’ broken there’ll be body bags beneath my eyes from nights I cried so hard the stars died,
But I’m like, go ahead,
I’m all yours.
I would kiss you in the middle of the ocean during a lightning storm ‘cause I’d rather be left for dead than left to wonder what thunder sounds like.
I’m not lookin’ for someone who can save me.
Liferafts might keep you afloat but they rarely get you anywhere and I’ve got places I wanna go,
So break me in two, peel back my rib cage and cover every page of my heart with love poems
you will burn someday.
The most fertile lands were built by the hands of volcanoes,
and I wanna know what grows beneath the drone of Hallmark and roses,
I want your goodbye to feel like explosives,
Your lips, a burning building without fire escapes,
Your hips, the gates of hell if I know if heaven exists,
But this will do just fine,
I wanna feel you like lifelines on the palms of Jesus when the nails went through.
Is that really, really creepy?
Just in case it is, let me also say I want you sleepy-eyed in the morning,
Waking at my side like a warm summer sky born from so much softness the horizon cries every time nightfall comes to take you.
Let me also say I wanna make you sandwhiches,
And soup,
And peanut butter cookies,
Though, the truth is peanut butter is actually really bad for you ‘cause they grow peanuts in old cotton fields to clean the toxins out of the soil,
But hey, you like peanut butter and I like you.
Let me also say I’ve never seen anything more gorgeous than you were that night.
The moon, bending through the window blinds, I told time by the light casting shadows across your face while you told me this story,
“My grandparents were married for 63 years. On the day my grandfather died he laid in bed and said nothing but “love, love, love love” then he puckered his lips and kissed my grandmother for the last time.”
Love, love, love, love is like sunshine:
Sometimes you have to get burned to know you were there.
I wanna know that I’m here, every single part of me,
My heart, open as the river’s eyes the first time it sees the ocean,
My god, look at those waves!
Listen to that thundering tide!
Can you imagine anything more frightening?
Can you imagine anything,
more,
alive?
– Andrea Gibson.
– poem by Anis Mojgani
gentlemen have you forgotten your god?
He weeps out loud
waiting for our dreams to grow like ears
while you are making ghosts out of people
making ghosts from your torah
your koran
your bibles
we have shaved our books down
swallowed them
so that the word of God
might flow through us
but the pages just sit in our bellies
speaking to us in dull murmurs as we sleep
we wonder what to do
make me understand
we wish to become one with our Lord
we hear the voices and think we know what they say
this
is the word of God
i hear this i heard this correctly
so we rise and try to translate this word
with the work
with the heart
we search the bed
through thighs
the blanket the leg the needle twist
fuck and the fuck you
curse of the moon
to find our Lord
and listen more proper-like
but our ears are too small
for our hearts to understand the humming of these sentences inside of us
we are trying to decipher the bang buck braille of Your silent throat Lord
but the voices grow and grow just as fuzzy
so we stand and go to the kitchen
and pick up knives to cut these voices out from inside
we stab ourselves
i must hear You
cutting the flap of our skins
the words twist on the floor of our homes
mixing their sounds with our blood
they drown
but it does not stop
i must hear you
we hear the same songs singing in the stomachs of others
so we grab more knives to cut those out
but there are more and more stomachs
—we need
bigger knives
we need soldiers tanks and missiles
but we still cannot make out the words
we need dead mothers
and children raped from searching
the hospitals are full and overflowing
from us trying to cut our God from our gut
with the blade the pipe
the fingernail twist of the drug
pushed and poked through the arm to the belly
to throw Him up
in the bang of the scream
we find our savior
the shell in the chamber
is a quiet plea to a distant God
asking for us to be remembered by Him
through the tire tread
through the smoke of the tank
the crunch of the skull
through the babies we bury beneath us
we empty their tiny limbs to see if a scrap of our Lord still lingered
somewhere inside there
we clutch throats pistols and palms in the same two handed clasp of prayer
staring into the mirror
we see crypts
fondling the marble of our hearts like they were mausoleums
we are ghosts hungry
for something bigger then what our mouths are kissing
let me see You
let me see You Lord
i have balanced in the middle of the question
black as my eye
beaten by Your hymn
i am holding still
so
go ahead
you gentle
men of God
you tender sinners
take your rifles
raise to my gut and fire on
hear the song more clearly
it does not sing what you wish it did
it is too big for us to see a letter of it
so do not even try
cut Him from me
i wish to drape His face with my kisses
and finally sleep softly
i am more prodigal son than wandering sheep –
a more self-inflicting creature
and less one who takes wrong turns
short-sighted, impulsive,
self-reliant on my own resources of which
i have none.
but you always saw me as
a lost coin
and i wanted so badly to be that valuable.
i wanted to gleam that newly minted
golden glow of perfection,
to possess for myself
an innocence that i can’t remember having.
but, i must have
for don’t we all begin that way?
don’t we all begin with soft skin,
mouths unaccustomed to
forming heartbreak words
scattering across the ground like glass beads
from a broken necklace?
Tell me how i can get back to the beginning
where i could gleam like a minnow
against rain spattered currents
all light and love and breath,
to be pure like cheeks flushed from snow
or gentle like midmorning.
this is the shape of the God hole
its contours like child’s hands
that cannot clean themselves.
This week, I’ve seen two videos encouraging the idea of cultivating peaceful solitude.
The first, a TED Talk about social media, false connectedness, and what we really need (courtesy of Mike Zosel)
The second,a soft spoken video of encouragement from poet/singer/songwriter Tanya Davis.
I am thankful for these small, bold voices reminding me that it really is okay to be alone sometimes. I don’t prefer it, but I do need to be okay with it.
Though these words are few and somewhat lost in the clamor of daily needs, anxieties, and demands, I hope they whisper to your heart as they did mine.
i have learned this week
two home remedies for a cold;
a drink with whiskey, honey, lemon, orange and hot water
the alcohol kills the bacteria, you see
and the honey makes it sweet
also you need vitamin c.
The other
with turmeric powder and hot milk,
like a bitter curry cocoa
that faraway family members of a friend swear by
your great aunt asks for it each time she is sick!
Turmeric is haldi in hindi
a divine allitereration,
a more beautiful word than its taste would suggest
gingery bitter with the ability to turn your
whole mouth yellow
and perhaps your stomach.
Neither of these i will likely try,
but I like the idea of
swallowing something bitter
to heal from the inside
I think I could use a little more
haldi in hot milk
than getting tipsy enough to fall asleep
year of the disappearing sun 