Just Between You & I

I made this tonight with a sharpie.

Anis Mojgani :: Shake The Dust

*This poem is the first draft of a writing prompt for a group of spoken word poets I am working with. We will be doing a weekly writing prompt. This week’s prompt was “How To”. And this is what I wrote… It’s called How To Tie a Tie.

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One.

            Stand in his bedroom.

            Pay no attention to wallpaper planets.

            He’ll practice first in the mirror-

            like asking you to be his girlfriend

            as you watch him make art with origami

            fingertips, easy.

Two.

            Try not to blush when he tells you that

            the wide end should fall just below his navel;

            an invitation to learn a body other than your own.

Three.

            If your hands feel foreign, press your palms to

            your stomach and wait,

            though crushes bleed urgency.

            Watch his hands

            weave fabric into a careful knot at his throat.

            Red silk twisting and folding into itself like

            eleven-year-old tongues, too afraid to kiss.

Four.

            It’s your turn.

            Smooth the tie against the nape of his neck

            and weigh the length of each side until it looks so.

            If he smiles at you-

Five.

            Begin twisting- wide over narrow

            then under,  and over once more.

            Rise up through the loop around his neck

            see-saw adam’s apple,

            and fall into silk sternum.

Six.

            Pull slowly, then stop.

            Adjust the crooked ball with brittle, chewed

            fingertips.

            You never learned how to look good for god.

Seven.

            He re-ties it himself-

            the muscle memory of six hundred Sundays.

            ‘Not bad’, he tells you,

            ‘but these things take time. ‘

You lent me a book called You Don’t Love Me Yet

as if to say “I don’t love you yet.”…

I know you don’t

I have to tell you I’m only a few pages in

and they’ve already broken up and had sex again.

I bet that their flippant romance reminds you of us;

their secret acts of lust, their logical break-ups.

Sometimes you question your feelings for me as fiction.

I know you do.

I know you can’t count the number of women you’ve turned into pages

and I wish it didn’t bother me that I’m not one of them.

But, if we were reading a novel written about us,

both of us would hate ourselves for what we’ve become.

You’d curse yourself for your silence.

For all of the times you walked five steps ahead of me

and never once looked back;

worse for the times that you looked back and didn’t stop.

For all of the times you said, “What’s your problem?”

when all I wanted was for you to say you were sorry.

I’d cry every time I turned to a page where I had forgotten what it felt like to feel special.

I’d berate myself every time I curled into your bed instead of out the bedroom door,

every time I’d lie in the sound of your voice calling me baby.

Slam the book shut and yell, “YOU’RE WEAK!

YOU’RE WEAK AND YOU’RE SETTLING! AGAIN!”

as if the story would play out differently if it were up to me.

If I were writing it…

Nothing about the way I love is fictional.

But, I’ll read the good parts a million times over.

Fall in love with each sentence.

Delight in the way our hands discovered each other’s bodies-

as if we were looking for something but didn’t want to find it too quickly.

You used to make me feel like I could be anything-

even loved by you.

But, love isn’t fiction.

I can’t tear out pages or erase the bad parts.

I can’t hear you singing Lua in my kitchen every time I close my eyes

or pretend that you still kiss me like you mean it,

even though I know that you meant it once.

I can’t go back to those first couple of weeks when we thought we finally had it figured out

and you held me like a  miracle.

I can’t touch the bruises on my knees from the night we didn’t care who saw us.

They’re long gone now.

But, the rain still falls like it did last spring

and I’ve grown tired of excuses.

We are writing this together.

We always have been.

No string of words will make you fall in love with me

or decide to treat me better.

I know I can’t change you…

I never thought that I’d want to.

Once I told you that the reason I wanted to be with you

is that you aren’t what I had in mind.

You are the exception to so many of my rules.

But, that I didn’t care- because it’s you.

And if that isn’t some kind of love,

I don’t know what is.

You used to think I was beautiful-

even when I was vulnerable.

Especially when I was vulnerable.

I don’t know what happened.

I don’t know what happened.

typewriterblues:

I’d really like it if you filled this out. -  Try me?    Check out my book. (buy it!)

vincentnicasio:

via typewriterblues

We ate dinner on TV trays;

cheap plastic ones with nature scene tabletops,

rusted bronze legs, and dents from being tucked away in small spaces.

The scars of too many meals with grandchildren.

Even Thanksgiving looked like this after a few hours.

We’re an American family.

Mammy used to have a green recliner chair like Papa’s

until she got a new one; this one, pink and overstuffed.

It sat beneath a plaque on the wall

bearing my grandfathers name and a large stuffed bass.

I’ve heard so many stories about that fish

that I’ll never be sure if it was real or fake.

I guess I should have asked.

At Christmastime, Mammy would pull Snowbaby figurines from a box in the closet and place them on the desk,

right next to their small, white, fiber optic Christmas tree.

They said that was all they needed.

I wonder if the first Christmas my grandparents spent together was magical.

I wonder if they shopped for ornaments together,

decorated the tree while jazzy Christmas music filled the room,

colored lights reflecting in their smiles as they threw their heads back and laughed.

This is what love looks like.

I like to imagine that they spent the day lying on the floor together

wrapped in each others bodies, exchanging stories like gifts.

I hope that the cold of the windowpanes seemed a million miles away,

that they studied each others faces until the street lights came on,

I imagine that they used nothing but string lights to light their home for months afterward,

long after the carolers had stopped singing.

Not because of laziness-

but because they loved the way the warm hues danced across each others cheekbones.

I’d like to think that in their years together

they hadn’t grown tired of tradition or forgotten what holidays can look like,

No, no. Just the opposite-

they were saving the good trees for young lovers.

They already knew what pink lights did to eyelashes.

Had seen firsthand how green shines in wineglasses,

how blue touches fingertips.

They remember how easy it is to fall in love with cold hands.

How could they ever have forgotten?

If anybody knows any good writing prompts, send them my way!

Walking to work this morning,

I passed a dead pigeon laid out on it’s back

with its wings cupped toward the sky on a stranger’s doorstep

and I knew that you were gone.                                                                                          

Please don’t go,

a stranger pleads with me on the telephone

and I wonder how many days will pass before they find his body

His fingers clutching his phone like a hand to hold.

Curled up on the floor of his apartment

that no one had stepped foot inside of
until death’s smell crept into the hallway.

He tells me that he just needed to hear someone’s voice.

That he’s had a bad night.

He asks if I ever feel lonely sometimes.                                                                              

His name was Michael.

I could hear the ball of fear rising in his throat

when he asked me, “What do you do when you feel that way?”

because nothing he has tried has worked.

I’ve been called out of the blue.

Suicide jury duty

Woken from sleep on a Saturday night

and asked for the cure to loneliness.

I give him three minutes and thirty eight seconds of my time

and I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering why
not being able to save someone feels so much like killing them.                                       

Loneliness is the most dangerous of all serial killers.

She is cold bed-sheets,

television as background noise,

eyes glued to sidewalks,

She is unanswered phone calls,

light reflecting on the blade of a kitchen knife.
She is an empty refrigerator- coupled

with the fear of walking through the aisles of the grocery store alone

Again.

She always finds a way to get underneath your skin

and the worst part is-

she’ll make it look like you did this to yourself.                                                                 

Your autopsy report will label you a suicide.

A victim of your own hand

and the newspapers will sweep you under the rug, Michael

Because nobody speaks about suicide unless the word faggot is in the headline

unless they are made to feel foreign in front of mirrors

unless strangers have known the curves of their body without their permission                                                                                                                                                                            She’s still out there, Michael.

She visits me sometimes,

but she doesn’t stay.

Next time I see her,

I’ll ask her if she ever wishes that she had someone special.

Photo by Jeff Tamagini.

This is me doing the sacrificial poem for the first bout of preliminaries at the National Poetry Slam. (@ All Asia)

I’m not going to lie- this was a bit scary for me. But, I am so, so happy that I did it. 

Scary? Yes. Here I am in a room full of 120 fucking amazing poets. 

But, it went so, so well. I couldn’t be happier that I did it. :)

Hell, I even scored better than one or two of the poets who were actually competing! So, that felt really good (especially on 15 minutes notice). 

So ridiculously happy tonight. 

Every time I push myself outside of my comfort zone with something like this, I’m always thrilled that I did. 

LOVING NPS SO FAR!