Let’s
Be nervous
Get our hopes up
Play a song for you
Sneak around town like two teenagers
Hope for an empty house
Where can we go?
Down to the river
Where I’ll make fun of you
With all the good intentions in the world
Of course
Remember what breathing feels like
Be cold for a second
Skip rocks
Sonic drinks in the cupholders
Car in park
Can it be May?
With the bridge overhead?
And we’d sit on a bench
Keep our hands to ourselves
Or at least try
Feet in the gravel
And dinners to get home to.
Every poem goes back
To the expectation
Of you
Love Is Something You Build
We built a city. We first found this plot of land that needed some tending. There was a murky dust that almost choked us, and I guess that drove us to put a roof above our heads and a floor beneath our feet. There was a lot of structure that way, a certain hardness, and it gave us walls to lean on; the dust outside didn’t seem quite so real. Our faces were pale and weather-beaten, we were shaking with scratches on our hands from holding on too hard. It was dark outside when we stumbled in. The stars were out, but they were far away, you couldn’t quite reach them. So it seemed as though they didn’t really exist. They were glinting and impersonal, to tell the truth. They watched, they listened to the dark, but they didn’t tell us what to do, or change anything at all really. No, you go ahead, work this out for yourself, they seemed to say. You got this. But we didn’t.
We built this thing together, it wasn’t all that sturdy, but it suited our needs, for the most part. It was the kind of place you could crawl into, take shelter from the biting wind that seemed to gnaw at your skin, left you bleeding all over the place, half dead and bruised. In here, there weren’t wounds or scars. We repaired each other, touching and saying, oh, it isn’t so bad, you are beautiful, we kissed and made it better. Let me push the hair out of your face, let me into the spaces that might be painful. Somehow, a hand running down the length of my side healed, mended the bones glowing beneath the skin like magic. You built this saying, “The bruises from the outside aren’t so bad, but wouldn’t it be nice to have a home?” but when you look out the windows at where you used to live, you just want to cry for the past.
From there, rooms, houses, trees, rivers spread out across the flat wasteland, with the stars silently looking down, with shut eyes and mouths. It helped, this world within a world, it was warm, full of sheets and blankets and pillows. We furnished the rooms with words, those words that you don’t repeat, only hold as close to yourself as you can, because of that throb of unmistakable sincerity in your voice. In the corners, there were songs. We spent days and nights drinking and dreaming of you, you, you, you are, are, are, are. There was also the music of bedroom laughter, the kind that wasn’t going to be muffled. And whispers, secrets, as though secrets even needed to be told, were words needed? Ears still waited for whispers and whatever else they needed, straining because of a desperate need to understand and know each other within this room.
You thought, today, it’s like I’m more of a child and more of an adult than I’ve ever been in my life. You felt yourself growing, forming roots in this place, deep and snug in the ground, covered in dirt, laughing all the way through, coming up through the ground of this civilization new and pure.
Later, you assume, the walls will fall, and the dirt will creep back into your lungs. But for now, you crawl back under the covers, and enjoy warm firelight and the limbs of another person.
