This, I Did Not Choose

This, I did not choose,

though had someone offered,

this is the fruit I would have eaten.

You do not choose to fall,

only to make your home at the bottom

(the bottom being the top to the love sick,

the world being round, naturally).

What I do looks strange to those at the other pole,

lovers here understand me, though.

The top became the bottom,

the bottom the top.

Nonsense turned to poetry,

religion to a falsity,

and love became truth,

the only fucking absolute.

I did not choose him,

though if I could have I would have,

we chose each other I believe lifetimes and fucking eons ago.

If you don’t believe in reincarnation,

you haven’t met us.

He did not choose me,

but daily now we stay alive for this. We trust the hearts that have

betrayed us

every other time

and believe the eyes that have

fooled us

more than once before

and make promises with lips

that have lied

and hands

that have brought grief

but his fingerprints have been

branded into my skin,

I know he is true because I am true and we are

each other.

If I am wrong I’ll die.

You’ll see me but as a shell.

Luckily I can’t be wrong

this time.

This, I did not choose.

I believe it because

it chose me.

"I Wasn't Built for Safety"

I told myself I would never live for safety. I got it tattooed on my body. I wanted danger. I called it my “Danger-girl tattoo.” I wanted to be unconventional. I wanted exposed brick walls and hardwood floors. I wanted a typewriter, Marlboros, whiskey. I wanted to be a tortured artist, writhing in pain, pain registering as ecstasy. I wanted addiction, my demons, depression. I remember telling my first love that when we lived together someday, I wouldn’t need to take my medication anymore. He always knew how to talk me out of killing myself.

I was fifteen.

And I told myself a million times that I would never take the safe route. Fuck you, white-picket-fence American dream. I told myself that stability meant the death of my artist soul. A healthy love story demands stability and so I infused all mine with poison. Children demand stability so I swore I’d never have them.

I’m eating so many words I may as well swallow my tongue.

But now I see what I was for what she is; the Shelby I wanted to be and nearly was thought that she was living on the edge, but she was safer than her safe sex. She was the pussy. I am the brave one.

She hid behind the guise of drugs and alcohol so that she never had to deal with her problems. Her white picket fence was made of tramadol. Her American dream was avant-garde and so very Kerouac but it was still someone else’s dream for her. It was still a lie.

How much more dangerous is it to be used to erraticism, to use darkness as a comfort blanket, and then to cast those things off and refuse to be anything less than functional? I am afraid of functionality.

But I always wanted to go where I was afraid to go.

I wasn’t built for safety, and so I will be unsafe. Loving deeply is unsafe. Marriage is a gamble where you’re fifty two percent likely to lose everything. Having a child is dangerous as hell. Don’t tell me that hopping Greyhounds is more difficult. I’m taking on the most dangerous goddamn undertaking I ever thought I would take. It’s a danger involving plaster, carpet, baby gates, salaries, and fuck the part of me that tells me this means I’m a sellout, because if I can still bring forth explosive art from a serene, loving environment, then I’m less safe than I ever would have been doing what artists “just do.”

If I can bring tortured words from a happy soul, then I will have broken the code.

And that isn’t safe in the slightest.

I don’t feel safe at all.

Lemon Juice&You

I accidentally squeezed lemon juice on my left-hand seemingly stigmata-reminiscent wound that I received at the aggression of a rough pistol, I was learning to load it, only now in citric-acid pain do I remember that my desire for you transcends all other feelings, even pain and fear make me want you, in the heat of the moment I muttered not a curse but your name, and I savored it on my tongue before licking the cut on my palm.

It healed within hours.

Let Me Learn You

Let me find you, let me take a class in You-101, let me learn you, blindfolded, let me read the Braille on your body as it rises to the occasion, I’m already blind with love, I’ve looked at the sun too long. Let me listen to your soul like music, let me taste you like the meals you bring home at night, you are a sensory experience, you are a sensual experience, I feel like I know you but there lies the danger. How can you know a person? How can you know a soul? Your spirit is infinite. Self blends to Source in a slippery slope domino chain of the cosmos. To say that I know you is to say I know every star in the universe and its workings. To say I know myself is one and the same. I feel so close to you but never too close for comfort, fitting you inside of me but only pieces, never the whole. I will not claim you, only love you, and in love always ask you to be free.

I Have a lot of Stories

Let’s make a list of our insecurities, introduce our imaginary enemies to each other. Let’s invite all of our demons to a cocktail party. I can’t drink right now but they always put that whiskey away. Let’s play a game of “I’ll show you mine if…” Let’s talk about all the things we don’t know. Let’s turn the lights on. I’ll wince at the view of those corners, maybe you will too, this is the kind of private tour I am too afraid to give, so show yourself around, make yourself at home. Let’s lay back on these leather recliners like crazies and speak our pasts like music, let’s bathe each other in our stories, I have a lot of stories, baby, I have a lot of stories.

The Most Meaningful Two Sentences That Have Ever Come Out of Me

You make me feel so real, like the rest of the world is a cardboard cutout and we could just push it all over and be what's left and be happy anyway. You scare me like drugs scare me, the side effects could be dire and my life could never go back to the way it was a few weeks ago, but if I wanted normalcy I wouldn't have chosen you, and it wasn't me that chose you, it was the God in my fucking soul.

Inner Sanctuary

My heart feels holy with you rattling around inside of it, like it suddenly became an inner sanctuary of the loudest kind. You would be considered a horrible tenant to a landlord like this; you refuse to lose my attention for longer than wait I wonder what he’s doing right now? You are a fire in my imagination, once a comfortable little smolder, a memory to sit in front of and smile. I poked at the embers with acute curiosity and oh shit, you became a blaze, almost hell-reminiscent, uncontrollable but beautiful, I stepped back from you hesitantly because what I wanted in my delirious passion was for you to swallow me whole.

            Here in my inner sanctuary, a burnt offering has been made. There goes my ego, my guise of control, my hesitancy, my jealousy, my past. A sweet smell of sacrifice to our God, my body was engulfed by you as well, and on the other side of the carnage, you were contained on the hearth, but every inch of my heart smells like you and I’m afraid (or grateful) it may never be the same.

Invincible

Love makes you so invincible.

I walk through walls with you in my head.

I defy death and all its cousins.

I am powerful, not in spite of me,

But because of me…

Because of you.

Ask Me to Fall in Love with You

Ask me to fall in love with you. I will. Not a hint of hesitation. Keep tabs on me. Get jealous. Strap me to your broken psychology and all the things you’ve never believed about women. Give me presents and then suddenly stop doing so for years. Try my patience. I couldn’t give a shit less. Ask me to fall in love with you, make it as difficult as you want, if you want, but the truth about me falling in love with you, darling, is that I already did.

"Should I Start the Car?"

You are too tempting and I am too vulnerable. My makeup is too dark and I had a horrible day. But I’m still driving to you, every mile a new anticipation. I want a kiss. I want all your attention. I’m hoarding these small moments. I want it all, YOU, everything I don’t feel like I can have. Keys in the ignition. Here it goes.