I would like to apologize in advance for cross-posts that result because of the tumblr app. I try to keep the fandom quarantined.
I am so
tired
of being
tired
and having
tried
and being
tied
into knots over
you.
You told me once
inhaling on a spring morning
that you thought magic smelled like lavender.
I think that you are wrong.
Magic must smell like
dark wet grave dirt
and sweetly rotting apples
and the dead-branches sacrifice of fall.
She wears five thousand faces and none of them hers,
steals five thousand voices and none of them in tune.
She walks like a model and a vagrant and a face in the crowd.
“I’ve never done this before,” she says,
polygraph-perfect.
He wears his heart on his sleeve
and his thoughts on his face.
He stands straight, shoulders open, neck bared.
“You’re beautiful,” he says,
too earnest by far.
She says she was born in Moscow, Madagascar, Ireland, San Diego;
she grew up here and she’s just visiting and she’s never been here before.
She meets your eyes just long enough,
cool as you please.
He stumbles and stutters over his words,
and his smile is as clear as a child’s.
He tells you the things
no one else will say.
“I love you,” she says,
and hears her heart stutter.
“I know that you do,”
he lies.
I opened my mouth and I swallowed them down,
all the sweet things you called me;
let them sit in my stomach for days,
weeks maybe,
digesting.
But I am stronger now, and longer,
and I shed your names like skins.
When I was young,
I used to write all over my body-
things I liked,
like long fancy words and
brilliant turns of phrase
and poetry that sang,
penned on my arms and legs.
When the letters faded I’d smile,
knowing they’d been absorbed into my bloodstream.
I’d imagine I could feel
my heart pumping prose
and Shakespeare’s sonnets wrapped around my bones
and John Donne in the soles of my feet
and meter rushing in my ears.
“I will be a writer,” I’d say,
“I must be a writer,
writing is what I am.”
And now I am a writer,
will be a writer,
have been a writer,
but I still wonder-
was it the scribbling made me so,
or the ink poisoning?
and the sins of our past set
not like the sun, but like stains-
deep and indelible
and incriminating.
I cannot write my name in stone.
I cannot scratch and scrape my way into brick eternity.
I cannot carve away at trees.
I will not be bound.
What’s in a name?
Power.
I sigh my name on errant breezes,
scratch it in the dust,
trace it onto breath-fogged windowpanes.
I like to watch it disappear.
I leave less than footprints.
As for your name—
I cannot bear to let it leave my lips.
Who knows what it would do?
The interesting thing about tameness
the thing we’ve known for ages and nobody ever says
is this:
it’s genetic.
Bred in, born in
poked at by scientists
and selected for centuries,
mapped out in floppy ears and curled tails and spotted coats.
Pre-determined domestication.
No amount of murmured endearments
and gentle touches
will soothe the offspring
of scared and snarling hunters
or dull their sharpened teeth.
Some things are just born wild.
I have freckles now you’ll never know.
There’s a constellation brewing on my breastbone, dots on my wrist, my toes, the shell of my ear. There are figures and patterns that your fingers will never trace.
Another year of sun and my body will be a mystery to you again,
a strange sky filled with unfamiliar stars.
