Imprints

Sometimes regret and growth and time
Lead you to the same place - back where you were,
Or, maybe it doesn't, but the imprints,
The indentations, never leave, and you're sometimes
Caught contemplating the weight of him in your arms
For no reason at all. Or, at least, you won't pretend
There is a reason for contemplation, because
You just can't take the feeling of disappointment
All over again.

The Negotiation of Brokenness

The negotiation of brokenness.
How does it go? How does it begin? What does it look like?
It's not the seamless gluing together of shards of ceramic plates -
It's not the side-stepping of glass smashed across the street.
It's not these bruises, or these cuts, or the damaged branches
of the dead tree accosted with that baseball bat.
It's not the knot in the chest that took so long to go away.
These are merely the signs of brokenness.
The symptoms of the shattering.
No, the negotiation lies in the subtle thank yous,
the quiet forgiveness, the cautious painful choice of words
to carefully tread on the thin ice that has finally
blanketed the tempestuous seas of emotion that rocked
so precariously only moments before.
It's the not-falling through the ice, not breaking that layer
of glass that separates us from the turmoil of where we were.
It's acknowledging that the brokenness happened.
It's cleaning up the mess, not with a weapon, but with words
and a soft-bristled broom, keeping clear the window beneath you.
Knowing where you were, but seeing where you're going, moving forward.
It's gingerly carrying that tiny bundle of love
across that quiet, frozen chasm,
dancing with a muted choreography that you hope
will turn into something bigger than yourself
when the glass hardens beneath you
and you are sturdy once more,
and more yourself, with all the cracks and crevices
beneath your feet and across your body
now merely proving that you survived the drowning.

Palimpsest

You are a new(er) body in my arms,
or at least are new to my arms, but the marks you make
across my skin reveal the marks beneath, before you,
marks erased, or covered up, or wept out of my body
until you walked up and, wrapping your arms around me,
left your mark, your scent, upon my skin.
And while you are a new body, I've learned that
"You," the word, is a subtle palimpsest of
so many bodies before you -
and on parchment, papyrus, paper, chisel and stone,
as on skin, "You" is erased and rewritten,
erased and rewritten,
until it becomes almost unrecognizable,
and the edges of each letter fray and bend,
here a spider crack traveling to the corners of the page,
here the "O" stretching, elongating, swallowing -
developing a picture of something larger than you,
yourself, ever could have been alone.
Of course you haven't changed. Or you, or you, or you,
but the "you" I see, the "you" I read,
the "you" I write, is overlain with a new and separate
power, embodying the force of the you that is new to me.
Coming to the text, to the word, as a scholar approaches
an ancient scroll, uncovering layer upon layer of meaning,
I can extract all the meaning I imbued into the very word
I began uttering, truly, for the first time, only a
few short years ago. And in layer upon layer of meaning,
I find my identity, my skin, carved with the words
I allow you to become, that the person I am is made
up of so many "you"s. How many more words,
how many more layers, until the "I" is fully constructed
and finds itself within the final painting of you,
and how and when will I be able to show your portrait,
displayed upon my body, for all the world to see,
that "you" is you, and only you, and you are here, with only me?

Patchwork Doll

I remember the tedious feeling
of the almost coming-apart. How sitting
there, beneath you, I felt a put-togetheredness
that bordered on the sense of falling,
and it only took me hours to realize that
the seams that held my insides in,
my outsides out, had slowly been unraveling,
and that the spools of thread that wind around
and build my heart with strings
were in your hands, and as I walked away,
or as you led me to the door, the threads began
to come apart, pulling at seams within seams
until one long strand was pulling taught between
us - you holding the ends of my being
and me huddled in a puddle of fabric on my bed,
my insides vacant and strewn between the
time and distance that we had created for ourselves.
Try as you might, I won't believe you tossed
those strings aside because, as they are those
inner parts of me, I still feel the vibrations
of your presence running through and exciting them,
which is perhaps why I cannot leave your face
so quickly, or why I'm still unable to wrap myself back
up the way I was before. For now I am
a patchwork doll, a makeshift man of haunted
dreams of love and bittersweet emotion.
For now the heart strings still glow,
Only now it's easier to see them
through the gaps in my seams that haven't quite
healed, because you're still holding
my needle and thread.