,

I love incorrectly.

There is a solemnity in hands,
the way a palm will curve
in accordance with a contour of skin,
the way it will release a story.

This should be a pilgrimage.
The touching of a source.
This is what sanctifies.

This pleading. This mercy.
I want to be a pilgrim to everyone,
close to the inaccuracies, the astringent
dislikes, the wayward peace, the private
words. I want to be close to the telling.
I want to feel everyone whisper.

After the blossoming I hang.
The encyclical that has come
through the branches
instructs us to root, to become
the design encapsulated within.

Flesh helping stone turn tree.

I do not want to hold life
at my extremities, see it prepare
itself for my own perpetuation.
I want to touch and be touched
by things similar in the world.

I want to know a few secular days
of perfection. Late in this one great season
the diffused morning light
hides the horizon of sea. Everything
the color of slate, a soft tablet
to press a philosophy to.

why do i feel more dense than usual
(and what is this ~anxietynervousnessinexplicableexcitement~)

Forgiveness
is for anybody
who needs a safe passage through my mind.

The heart shifts shape of its own accord—from bird to ax,
from pinwheel to budded branch. It rolls over in the chest,
a brown bear groggy with winter, skips like a child at the fair,
stopping in the shade of the fireworks booth, the fat lady’s tent,
the corn-dog stand. Or the heart is an empty room
where the ghosts of the dead wait, paging through magazines,
licking their skinless thumbs. One gets up, walks through a door
into a maze of hallways. Behind one door, a roomful of orchids,
behind another, the smell of burned toast. The rooms go on and on:
sewing room with its squeaky treadle, its bright needles, room
full of file cabinets and torn curtains, room buzzing
with a thousand black flies. Now the heart closes its doors,
becomes smoke, a wispy lie, curls like a worm
and forgets its life, burrows into the fleshy dirt.
Heart makes a wrong turn.
Heart locked in its gate of thorns.
Heart with its hands folded in its lap.
Heart a blue skiff parting the silk of the lake.
It does what it wants, takes what it needs, eats
when it’s hungry, sleeps when the soul shuts down.
When heart’s bored it watches movies deep into the night,
stands by the window counting the streetlamps squinting out,
one by one.
Heart with its hundred mouths open.
Heart with its hundred eyes closed.
Harmonica heart, heart of tinsel, mettle,
heart of cement, broken teeth, redwood fence.
Heart of bricks and boards, books stacked
in devoted rows, their dusty spines
unreadable. Heart
with its hands full.
Hieroglyph heart, etched deep with history’s lists,
things to do. Nearsighted heart. Clubfooted heart.
Hardheaded heart. Heart of gold, coal.
Bad juju heart. Singing the lowdown blues heart.
Choirboy heart. Heart in a frumpy robe.
Heart with its feet up reading the scores.
Homeless heart, dozing, its back against the dumpster.
Cop-on-the-beat heart with its black billy club,
banging on the lid.

This is how I find myself losing sleep these days.

-Sylvia Plath

Two things:

1. I had always given my body too soon.

2. I wonder if it will sicken future girlfriends to discover that others had touched me before them, that they were not the first I'd touched. I think about this now because I know what it's like to feel that slight disgust and then to elicit that same disgust.

I remember overhearing an argument between P and her brother, J, and how J stabbed her at the end by saying that she was "filthy" and "pathetic" for fucking E and D (two people J really disliked at the time). I would have punched J if I hadn't been so stunned. He voiced the thoughts that lingered in the peripheries of my consciousness, and in his expression was a magnitude of disgust that I could have allowed myself to feel. I found P sobbing in the living room and it broke my heart to see how the nastiness of my petty disgust would have affected P had I openly expressed it myself.

And then a year or two later:

Sigh.

My sister told me a soul mate is not the person
who makes you the happiest but the one who
makes you feel the most, who conducts your heart

to bang the loudest, who can drag you giggling
with forgiveness from the cellar they locked you in.
It has always been you. You are the first

person I was afraid to sleep next to,
not because of the fear you would leave
in the night but because I didn’t want to wake up

ungracefully. In the morning, I crawled over
your lumbering chest to wash my face and pinch
my cheeks and lay myself out like a still-life

beside you. Your new girlfriend is pretty
like the cover of a cookbook. I have said her name
into the empty belly of my apartment. Forgive me.

When I feel myself falling out of love with you,
I turn the record of your laughter over, reposition
the needle. I dust the dirty living room of your affection.

I have imagined our children. Forgive me. I made up
the best parts of you. Forgive me. When you told me
to look for you on my wedding day, to pause

on the alter for the sound of your voice
before sinking myself into the pond of another
love, forgive me. I mistook it for a promise.

1. To look at her with open adoration.
2. To be openly adored.

3. Oh, to hold her.
4. And to be held without feeling guarded.

The world can burn.