You feel different under my hands, your muscles are knotted together in a different way. Even your hands feel stronger, running up and down my thighs as if they belong to you. Your body says more than your words do, we weave in and out of conversation,  yelling over the top of each other in smoke filled rooms, alcohol on our breath as we try to make too-loud sense of hazy thoughts. We whisper at night when we lie tangled in damp sheets, as if everything is secret, lips touching my earlobe as you tell me things that may or may not be true. We weave in and out of conversation,  meshing lies and truths in one breath, jumping through hoops, looping around specifics, interlacing the words with hollow silences. Words are dangerous and should be used sparingly, your body is more honest. You feel different under my hands, your muscles are knotted together in a different way. You need me less, now.

coffeewithme:

corners. edges. i want to write about those junctions that hold our lives together.

loseyourpride:(by parceled◬)

Exile | Jeffrey Mcdaniel

Mathematicians still don’t understand
the ball our hands made, or how

your electrocuted grandparents made it possible
for you to light my cigarettes with your eyes.

It isn’t as simple as me climbing into the window
to leave six ounces of orange juice

and a doughnut by the bed, or me becoming
the sand you dug your toes in,

on the beach, when you wished
to hide them from the sun and the fixed eyes

of strangers, and your breath broke in waves
over my earlobe, splashing through my head, spilling out

over the opposite lobe, and my first poems
under your door in the unshaven light of dawn:

Your eyes remind me of a brick wall
about to be hammered by a drunk
driver. I’m that driver. All night
I’ve swallowed you in the bar.

Once I kissed the scar, stretching its sealed
eyelid along your inner arm, dried

raining strands of hair, full of pheromones, discovered
all your idiosyncratic passageways, so I’d know

where to run when the cops came.
Your body is the country I’ll never return to.

The man in charge of what crosses my mind
will lose fingernails, for not turning you

away at the border. But at this moment
when sweat tingles from me, and

blame is as meaningless as shooting up a cow with milk,
I realise my kisses filled the halls of your body

with smoke, and the lies came
like a season. Most drunks don’t die in accidents

they orchestrate, and I swallowed
a hand grenade that never stops exploding

poem, sort of

i don’t believe in fate, i believe only in
circumstance and happy mistakes
how can you tell what is real and what is merely 
manifest dreaming
i imagined us and then you were there
standing in front of me
saying ‘is this it?’ 

you wanted to know me and i 
put myself in your hands
you wanted to know 
my mind
and hold everything
in your fingers
was it good enough? 

a part of a story i never finished and don’t particularly want to now…

And the allure of escape constantly overrides the pull of nostalgia and familiarity, flames licking at my heels as I run, leaving fallen vestiges of a past life in my wake. I do think of you sometimes, so close but so out of reach. I think of you standing in front of your mirror, with narrowed eyes and a disapproving frown as you look at yourself, of that spidery scar that runs from the underside of your jaw near your left ear, of your painted toes and small hands. It is with affection, certainly, but mostly it is with detachment and melancholy nostalgia, as if you were a character in a book I had loved as a child, now lost but remembered with alarming accuracy. This is the only way I allow myself to think of you, for fear of slipping into wanting you. Tentatively, I think of you with other men, the hands of someone else on you, but I don’t allow myself the masochistic pleasure of constructing detailed imaginings. I know too well the danger that lies in obsession.

some people think they're always right →

iwasateenageunicorn:

I am not complete enough.
Show me equality and I will
nod and smile despite knowing that

I might never love you more than I did the night
when you tore your lip fighting with your brother
and then sat in the car with your knuckles bleeding
and the radio on. I do not know what makes a man a man.
I guess I used to believe that it wasn’t important.

Now I struggle to reconcile the politics of our bodies:
you have your fists, and I have notebooks
pens and ink. The instruments of love and war.

The bus pulls in at seven-fifteen. I shove my case
onto the luggage rack and shiver.
Dawn breaks over yellowed lake islands, drowsy farms,
and you unravel your headphones, even though
it’s hardly morning yet.

(Source: nineteencigarettes)

i remember that night, the first night, when we walked to my apartment and the city was glossy with rain, and we stepped across shimmering reflections of neon lights, and you looked at me with those frosted green eyes and said that the future scared you. i remember arriving at my front door, tumbling into one another and everything smelt of rain and gin and i tasted salty skin and flicked my tongue across porcelain teeth. what did you see in me? you told me once that when we met you found me terrifying – beautiful but intimidating, glamorous and hyper-intelligent, i don’t remember being any of those things, although i tried my hardest. you must have been disappointed, when you took me home, when my hands shook and I mixed up my words. i wonder what you thought of me, when you saw me in the morning, with mismatched socks and mouth bare.

but personal tragedies intervene and what you once held in your hands you watch trickling through your fingers like water and you can do nothing to stop it but watch and then wipe your hands clean.  all of the ways you put colour in my cheeks and quickened my pulse could not fix the bigger things, the things we pretended did not exist, my mind beating a constant rhythm of what now? and then and then and then but what now? you said we could have it all but how long must we wait. you valiantly ignored my oscillating mood swings and i tried not to mind the heavy silence that shrouded it all as we shrank into cowardice and tried to mend the cracks with creaking bedsprings and fingertips touching under tables. 

And he stops to watch her, reading by the window, dappled in daubs of orange and mauve light, swathed in the blue yellow of afternoon. The tilt of her head, the crinkles in her forehead as she absorbs words. The red of her hair in the sun. But when she glances around and sees him watching, she closes her book with a snap and walks past him and out of the room. He is relieved at least that she cannot look him in the eye. She is skilled at making her emotions palpable, despite hardly ever speaking her mind, and sometimes he wishes that she could replace her quiet fury with the kind of screaming matches his own parents used to have.

He has no right to ask anything of her though, and he knows her anger is justified. Sometimes he has wondered if he should leave, pack up his things and leave her with a note and her unspoken thoughts - to think that she missed him would be some solace in the mess their marriage has become. He could cope with the anger, but beneath it is quivering hurt and burning humiliation, and to know you are the sole cause of such things is difficult to hold steady in your mind. He sits in her chair and breathes in the smell of her against the cushions, watching the sun sink slowly.

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adrian henri

cut up

and then
and then
and then
but what now?
nothing springs to mind
but the imaginings of a child

you said ‘stay here and
we can have it
all’
i found nothing but
the same

maybe you are still there,
holding everything
in your hands

or maybe you are still
waiting
wide eyed with
fingers outstretched