looking for a lover who won't blow my cover

hip hop don’t stop
don’t don’t don’t stop

your smooth and rough slides by me,
my soft is perpetually in motion over your
ins and outs and my fingertips find
ups and downs and the music
enters my open and flows down into my closed and
through my inside; it pushes and pulls me
against your soft and rough and up and down your ins and outs

your sharp bites into my soft, pointedly prickling
outside of yes and no and maybe into
of course

my up pushes on your down,
flowing through your parallel with perpendicular forces,
pressing against hards under softs,
beats filling in the pause that seemed so indefinite

in my energy i feel your lethargy
my outside flowing into your inside through the smooth,
aroung the rough and into the warm,
wrapping and enveloping to stop the cold

don’t don’t don’t don’t stop
hip hop don’t stop

Everything is bigger than we could possibly imagine.

I sat in a chair with my back to a metal pole and felt the wind move and shake my body like it was nothing, like I was nothing, insignificant and small against the forces of nature. It blew like it wanted to sweep us all away as we stood, defiant, refusing to let go of the piece of earth that we had claimed, at least temporarily, as our own.

_____________________________________

I don’t know why we feel that we belong here. Nothing lives here, nothing grows, thrives or evolves but somehow, in this vast expanse of barren land, I feel that I have come home. Something deep inside me has been pulling me here forever, a magnet in the very depths of my being that knows this as the one true pole. I can’t explain the ways in which I feel connected to this land, but I want to bathe in its dust and bake under its scorching sun. I want to be in the desert and feel the desert in me.

_____________________________________

As I went wandering on a journey through myself, my feet crushed the cracked and crumbling surface and soon set me on a course of steps I could not retrace. I burned through cigarettes as I tried to cut through the pressing darkness that wrapped around me like a blanket, smothering but comforting. And even though I could see lights in the distances in every direction, I knew that I was very alone and felt liberated but slightly frightened.

The purple light shone like a beacon across the dry and dusty playa, grabbing me around the waist and pulling me in as I zigzagged across tire tracks and ground cracks like I was following some kind of bizarre choreography, leading me to the only place I could possibly end up. Something about it seemed unquestionable—subconsciously understood as my ultimate destination, like the bubbling house beats were written into my brain waves in flowing, changing melodies and colors. And it was not until I arrived that I understood why it was the here in which I had to be.

When I walked into the glow of the purple light, you were there, waiting. Like you knew I was coming, like you knew I was lost, like you were meant to help me find my way to where I was supposed to be. Because it was there and then that I was supposed to be, being here now, and you were what I needed to find, and I was what you needed to arrive. And you were soft and I needed something comfortable, something familiar, something new and old at the same time. I feel like we have met before in some other dimension, like our souls have twisted together like snakes or ribbons intertwined, inseparable, because when I look into your eyes I see the answers to the questions I didn’t know I had. I see myself mirrored and augmented and I see you beautiful, me beautiful, everything wondrous and exciting.

And I understand why you are with her because I can see that your minds and hearts and souls speak the same language, but I’m scared that I’ll never do it right. Scared that I’ll never find the complement, the one whose hands can spread over my body and make me feel unbroken, whose mind speaks in tongues and fragments and poetic verses, whose eyes reflect my unsung melodies. I’m scared that I’m wrong and that’s why, scared that I won’t know how to or what to or when to, scared that I am the only one in all of existence that speaks this language.

Even as your hands form circles on my smooth skin, I know that this is not that and I wonder if this is all I will ever have. And I want to be here now, I am here now, I do here now, but I want more. Not now, not here, but someday, sometime. But for now, all I need is your head resting on top of mine as the sun scorches my bare skin and I wrap my arms around you to keep you close, keep me steady, keep us grounded as the wind blows around us and we cling to this bit of land that is not ours forever, but ours for now.

I feel you in me like no one before, your soul reaching out to mine as your body does, with the urgency of a new lover, fraught with excitement and hesitation and tinged with happy disbelief. Your lips meet mine and I feel that we are in a constant state of motion-- not quite an equilibrium, but a perfect state of give and take, like the moon pushes and pulls the ocean’s tides.

They say that we live in a bubble and I remember
the soapy shiny film infused with refracted rainbows,
floating lazily away from the wand raised to my childish lips,
puckered in a half-kiss.
I remember how I used to watch them drift into the air and sometimes
gently float back down, bursting on my bare shoulders and
leaving them sticky-soft.
But that’s the thing that I remember--
that you can’t hold on.

Born and raised on the streets of suburbia,
I rode my bike up and down streets lined with maples and oak trees and
always wore my helmet.
My sister and I chased the blinking dots of fireflies,
cupping them in our hands to watch their lights glow in the purple dusk and
we were not afraid.
At night I sat on the swing
that always creaked because we never bothered to oil it and
all I could hear was the hum of cicadas and
the darkness pressed in around me.
I was safe and away from the city with
under-funded schools and gang violence and
almost everything bad.

When I turned sixteen I drove fast, windows down,
the wind whipping my hair into golden tangles and roaring over
the songs on the radio.
But I had to be home by midnight and there were some places I
just couldn’t go alone at night
(or ever)
because they were too dangerous,
too many dark alleys full of potential criminals.
I smoked cigarettes on a sidewalk outside of a coffee shop
twenty paces from the city limits and had to promise that I would not
walk back to my car alone.

But now I smoke cigarettes on my porch where
the sun bakes my skin during the day, smoke curling
lazily up in tendrils of grayish white and
at night the desert chill wraps around me and in between
the blankets but I rarely think of locking my door because
right there, over the horizon, I can see the refraction of
dozens of rainbows.
I can’t can’t can’t don’t want to escape.

My knee bumps yours underneath the table in a coffee shop, your back sliding down the vinyl coated booth as you stretch your feet onto an extra chair. Your face is thinner now, your skin hugging the jawbone, black hairs coating your cheek. I want to say

—You look good

but I think that that’s the kind of thing you say in movies when you are meeting up with an ex or something like that. And it’s not like we were ever anything.

I needed to be close to him and feel nothing, to understand that the emotions associated with distant memory had no bearing on my present state of existence. I needed to know that I could move on with my life and understand him in the context of my past and present, but never future. I needed to know that what never began had ended.

I felt his rough cheek against mine as he embraced me in the train station, his chameleon eyes glinting in the patchy filtered sunshine. He was the one that really started it all three years ago, dancing close to music in the living room that would be his bedroom not too long after. After him, I changed the way I looked at boys, at relationships and everything entangled. I learned not to expect too much, to depend on myself and know that I do not need constant emotional engagement.

I am floating in the middle of a city I have never really known. We are not intimate, but curiously entwined like new lovers still discovering elements of each others’ beings. I feel free and independent for the first time in ages, liberated by cars moving on a labyrinth of cables criss-crossing across the city. Strange that something so confining can feel like the ultimate redemption.

_____________________________________

Sometimes I feel like my senses and perceptions are so much that I might just explode, a ball of fire engulfing me and leaving in my place a pile of carbon and matter of no consequence. My heart gets so full at the immense beauty of the world and it makes me want to scream, release my inexpressible joy and sense of fulfillment to the cosmos, sending my emotional outburst spinning into the utmost heights, through the stars and out into a vast expanse of nothingness.

I felt the music in the very core of me. It touched some basic nerve and I had to dance, had to move, had to listen to my body and all its demands. The wind stung my cheeks but my body refused, just kept dancing and spinning, the beat inside me coming out. The stars pulsed with energy, filling me with hope for the beauty of this world. My eyes to the sky, my feet on the ground, my heart jumping as one star shot across the inky black expanse leaving a fiery trail in its wake. Something magic was about to begin.

As the sun rose we found each other, all bundled in layers and filled with energy and love. We clung together as if for survival, and as the sun finally pulled above the mountains to the east, we embraced and saw in each other’s eyes the same sense of wonder and feeling of excitement. The music, the sunrise, the wind on my cheeks and the warmth the embrace— this is what makes my heart beat. This is what I came for, what I had to discover again. This was coming home.

—How do you dance in the daytime? he asked and I wondered
—How do you not?

The sun arched over us, victorious. Another day of light, another day of life. My skin soaked it in as I peeled off layer after layer, unwrapping and unraveling until I was stripped down to my core. His arms locked around my waist, our bodies pressing together. I wanted to pull him closer and closer until there was nothing between us, the atoms of our selves pressing together but never touching (they never do) in a touching not touching game of push and pull. He smelled like clean and boy and desert all at once--

—Your hair smells like fireworks and firewood. Those are my two favorite smells.

One burns brightly and explodes, dazzling us in a display of lights and colors, the other more constant, consistently warming and nurturing. I don’t think I could pick a favorite, though. I’m consumed by both sustenance and destruction.

The music commanded my heart like his lips against mine, pressed up against the side of a car in the middle of the day in the warming sun and whipping wind. And finally lying naked beside him as the wind shook the tent around us, a fine grit of clay dust covering everything but nothing mattered but our bodies and hearts beating together. This is what I came for. This is coming home.

i've gone and done it again.

i really like this one. i hope it plays out well.

you tell me "i thought that smoking was cool
when i saw pulp fiction,
uma thurman just made it look so chic"

i disagreed a bit,
"i think that i was influenced more by real people;
when i was fifteen years old i was smoking cloves.
the sugared filters were a draw for sure,"

licking my lips after smoking a clove,
my naïvete like a blanket that i pulled over myself
unintentionally

i don't think that i ever though smoking was
"cool,"
just a thing to do to pass the time

i am sixteen and sitting in your kitchen drinking raspberry beer and watching you play poker. your hair is long; you won't cut it for a while. i always liked it better that way anyway. i'm drinking raspberry beer like a sixteen year old who hasn't been drunk more than ten times ever. maybe eleven. i am sixteen with short blonde hair that i cut myself with scissors from office max and pink disposable razors. my bangs are too short. i am dancing with you in your living room to bad nineties music and our lips meet and my head is spinning and i don't know if it's the alcohol or you.


six months later we are laying in your bed in the same room. the furniture's all mixed and muddled. your roommates don't live here anymore. sometimes you let me smoke cigarettes in the kitchen but i normally stand outside on the shaky black fire escape. you say that the nicotine will stain the walls. i think they're off white anyway. sometimes i call and you don't answer. i've learned not to depend on your dependability.


i am seventeen and standing on your fire escape looking into your window. my hair is blonder and the bangs are right. i don't cut it for myself anymore. your bed is gone. you went to california without saying goodbye. i hear you love a girl out there. i smoke another cigarette and hold onto the hand rail on my way down the stairs.


i am nineteen and sitting at my kitchen table when you call me accidentally from the airport. your voice still sounds the same. my hair is longer now. i have been drunk more times than i can count. i smoke cigarettes in my backyard when i'm home on breaks and my parents are gone. i am nineteen and i am preparing to step onto an airplane and fly up north to see if you cut your hair the way i don't like it.

the skin on her back hugs her shoulder blades closely,
arms straight and unassuming (as if they would snap
with a single blow)

i look at her and see the possibilities,
want to grab her and shakeshakeshake it out.


i've changed.

hands still tracing hipbones, checking, but with the reality that
the skies are getting bluer, the grass a vibrant green in this desert landscape:
the gates are open and the hills are beckoning, and
i will heed their call.


i want to breathe, to dance, to feel the music in me and be fully
alive.


this small, able body which is so uniquely mine will
sing and dance and live.

in with the love, out with the hate.

the familiar tangle of fingers and your hands on my shoulder blades;
i understand that you're not ready.
i understand that you need time.

my arm drapes across your chest as you move to cover my hand with yours.
i wonder if you still see her face sometimes.
i wonder who she is, what she looks like.



but your hand covers mine and pulls me across;
traces down my body and holds me,
lifts me, pushes and pulls me--
this is good for you, i think. this will make you happy.

and after several nights i think of your lips on mine,
the taste of you remembered
but i wonder if you are really fucking me
or just fucking around.

A little after seven at a gas station just outside of Claremont, ET drops two. As we wind our way northeast, she starts to feel it. It seems to manifest in a feeling of confusion, or at least mistrust, because she begins to constantly question our direction down the rutted dirt roads. When we finally arrive, the suburban crew is getting well into it and I can feel mine start to kick in as we begin the mile and a half half-blind trek.
__________________

Curled up and intertwined, laying side by side with an actual couple, I feel his hands on my back and nestle closer against him, partially because of cold but mostly because I love the feeling of his body pressed against mine. It is utterly strange and also inexplicable— we act as if we are together, and for (almost) all intensive purposes, we are together for the moment. We are taking care of each other, warming and comforting and just simply being close. In the desert, during this trip, removed from civilization, we can be together and forget that in a matter of hours we will be back where even holding hands in public could be bad news. With every kiss on the cheek or the top of the head, I feel my heart alternately melt and break; It feels so good to be so close to him, to feel that he cares and wants to keep me warm and safe, but I know that in the morning he will go back to her and this will be just a memory for at least the next half a year.

“I need you here with me— not way over in a bucket seat” but today is not our time. Soon, perhaps, but not today.

one minute times sixty times twelve times ninety beats per minute and i'm out the door. my heart is racing faster these days as i press my hand to my chest in a silent prayer that the damage isn't already done. sometimes i can feel the blood rushing through my veins and my head spins like i just stepped off of a rollercoaster: single file and exit to the left.

i'm ready to go, ready to step onto the plane without looking back.

my heart is a muscle
every time a piece of it breaks or tears it grows back
stronger, more capable

As our fingers intertwine, lacing together and building something
we may not be aware of,
the complex committees of logic begin the
legislative process—

the Congress of logical thought and the bureaucracy of
intertwining body and emotions passing the bill
around and around, a systematic process of
conception
creation
implementation
revision.


I. Conception
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows.

And at the conceptual point, it was
that easy. The interlacing of fingers and the subtle pressure
of a tongue tracing the path down from the jaw,
over the neck to the collarbone,
hands gently brushing the hair out of your
blue blue eyes.

Your arms are wrapped around me as the sky lightens yet
you leave me in bed alone —
but kissing good morning and not
goodbye.

II. Creation
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility

You called me that night at 11 PM; I felt
that novel thrill in the pit of my stomach as I heard
your voice on the telephone line.

My hands trembling with the cold, my heartbeat
skipping along, I open my mouth to
breathe in life.

Something in you feels, tastes, smells different than
anyone I have ever known. I am afraid I will break it but
I want to look deep inside you and discover
its very core.

You are warm and I like the feeling of your hand in mine.

As we wound our way through frigid stairwells, I could feel
your eyes sweeping over me and
my stomach flipped. My lips found yours and
something began.

III. Implementation
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

Tripping along the uneven concrete, I grab your hand and
you squeeze back. Step by step we’re getting closer;
something is closing in on us.

I know only that I know nothing, but I know your eyes and that
I am not afraid.

Patent black leather, shiny, stepping
click-click-clacking against the bricks;
delicately singing out as I grasp the metal gate and
pull; echoing through the halls, tracing out
a path that becomes familiar
like learning to scramble eggs.

You are warm and I feel your heart beating against mine.
Your whisper tickles my ear on the pillow:
“You can stay as long as you like.”

And you wrap your arms around me as I stay the night.

IV. Revision
I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance

Hands wrapped tightly around a cardboard cup,
cigarette burning red-orange in the dying light;
you smile at me apologetically across the table and I
watch the smoke spiral upwards.

Now we’ve regressed to chance meetings of
suits and curls and lips meeting in the middle of a crowded room.

I wrap my arms around myself and step forward into the night.

lying in my bed with you, my mind is not at all where it should be. because i'm thinking of three years ago and snow falling and a certain boy reading romance novels into my ear. of that day we laid close in a room that we thought was secluded only to be discovered in our acts of infinite nothingness.

your eyes remind me of pretending to be older and going back to bed in the middle of the day. you remind me so much of what i'm trying not to be. our hands brush, clasp, intertwine but my french tips haven't retained the class that i guess i wanted. and i am realizing that no matter what i tell myself, i haven't changed and


i'm sorry.

fingers interlacing
you can almost quell the shaking
the unpredictable beating of my heart

i think that with the pollution here
we could really count the stars
one by one
naming them all--



the same thing
so there is terrible confusion

we are real. everything we think and do and say and feel, our hope and dreams, our aspirations and fears. it is all real and everything matters.

i am a part of everything, i've realized. my consciousness melts into the larger whole as an integral, unique part.

------------------------------------
i feel the vibrations of the stairs under my
red red shoes, accenting and encasing
i trip nonchalantly up the staircase,
deliciously separate from it all yet
inextricably woven into the fabric.

my fingers tap on the keys with urgency.


i push on the keyboard and it pushs back against me.

my feet can tell, dancing along the sidewalk
tripping cautiously
painted toenails and vibram footbeds instead of
something more encompassing.
everything is different here.

but i'm still pressing my fingers to my neck,
the steady tap-tapping reassuring me
my heart does not feel it.



i want to dance close and have it mean something.
i want your hands on my hips and your
rough jaw against mine,
not kissing but with a subtle sense of understanding.

i want clear night skies and glowing embers
flames that threaten to lick the sky
uncontained and furious.

i want to explode into consciousness.

i want to venture into perception as if i
were the first to discover it,
travelling immeasurable distances to discover
where it ends and where it began.