It happens to the best of us, doesn't it? The waiting, the yearning, the checking your phone every minute and a half because maybe you've just missed it, maybe you didn't feel the buzz in your back pocket this time and they're waiting for your reply. But sometimes, they aren't. Here's to the rest of us whose hearts ache from the possibility more than anything.
Also, another casual reminder that I am just a poetry lover who likes words, and I'm in no way an expert in the subject. This series exists to share with you some poems that I like and to talk about the way words make us feel; I hope you can enjoy it for that. Click through for the full poems and audio recordings.
There are people to live for and people to die for I comfort myself: there are people to sleep with and people to wake with there are fifty thousand years of waiting between one ping and the next ping I am waiter worshipper of pings I text myself to test the mechanism keep the phone on my body at all times keep my body in the condo where electricity is and also the internet I cannot shower with the phone on a towel at arms reach cannot sleep without the phone beneath my pillow on a gut string hooked through my cheek the pings yanking me from my watery dreams outside if I must be outside away from the electrical sockets I—but I never go outside there is no order to the waiting he pings I salivate instantly the joy in my bark is so sore is so severe it is almost rage I say hello this rationing is waterboarding please I need more air he says I breathe into your lungs hello I say am I not enough or are you not enough? he says my heart isn't a jar isn't a swimming pool the more love I have the more love I have I comfort myself: she might know his morning smell but she doesn't know her own fleecing she might know his morning smell but I know her name and mine.
2. Sadness Workshop by Stevie Edwards
Your sadness is unbelievable. We don't believe in your sadness... You need to flesh out the sadness. Give it some girth-- an ass that won't get off the couch. A taste for wine and ice cream and Taco Bell. Give the sadness chapped lips, an earache, a hip that pops on snowy days. Give it a lot of snow.
i could say the same is pacing a supermarket floor
his body a reflection in the waxed tile
really he is two men one flesh man one floor man
& both are moving in a direction away from me
they are picking out fistfuls of roses or maybe tulips
maybe assorted flowers with daffodils
& he knows the woman he really loves will dip her nose
into them like a doe & say thank you thank you
& she will kiss him with her tacky lips & for the first time
i am not angry that he might lay her down
& ask if he can do the things he will do
of course she will say yes that is what you say
when you love someone right?
it’s what i would say & this time not
because i’ve learned what happens
when you say no or when you say nothing at all
4. Blues for Almost Forgotten Music by Roxanne Beth Johnson
I am so often alone these days with echoes of these old songs
and my ghosted lovers.
I am so often alone that I can almost hear it, can almost feel
the half-touch of others,
can almost taste the licked clean spine of the melody I've lost.
I like to think of your silence as the love letters you will not write me,
as two sax solos from two ages across a stage, learning the languages
of kissing with your eyes closed. I like to think of you as a god
to whom I no longer pray, as a god I aspire to. I like the opening of your joined palms,
which is like an urn where my ashes find a home. The music of your lashes;
the silent way your body wears out mine.
Mostly, I like to think of you at night when a black screen of shining dust shines
from your mines to the edge of my skin, where you are a lamp of flutters.
I remember the spectral lashes–marigold, tamarind, secret thing between your thighs,
of closed kissing eyes. At night, the possibility of you is a heavy
sculpture of heavy bronze at the side of my bed,
a god. And I pray you into life. Into flesh.
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