When I was young, really young, I saw a robot in the back of Boy’s Life. It had a little tray and it could move around the house.
In my mind, I thought that if I had one of these, I could get it to do all kinds of cool things. Bring me my lunch. Spy on my brothers. Go places I couldn’t go. I wanted nothing more in life then to save up enough money to have one of those robots.
I need more goals like that one.
The only thing you get from being honest about your conceits is the additional conceit that this somehow will make you a better person.
Freedom is ignoring the walls we know are around us.
what happens when we lose the light
better a spill, then a slow leak
you can call it hope
or a memory
or even the promise of one more time
I call it: what I had
before I became distracted by the regularities of life
You slipped into silence,
and I listened to rain,
we were in a study and I think
you paused, your breath
was never quite as hesitant
as now.
Today I am a fist. My hand is so tight I can’t tell what I hold inside it.
The sky is drawn in shades of dark gray.
It’s not raining.
The creek behind my townhouse has kissed its borders. rising to annex the banks to either side. It is awake and alive.
It’s not raining.
The road is a slick black sheen, a velvet pathway, and I can lose myself in the rhythm of the wiper blades.
It’s not raining.
My face is wet, scattered drops brushed aside by hand.
It’s not raining.
If it were raining, you would be here.
I would be watching the silhouette on the wall of your shirt being drawn over your head. I would be able to taste salt rain drops on your shoulders, feel you arch against my palms.
But you’re not here.
And it’s not raining.
Two years ago, in the Fall, I was in the back seat of a car driving to the cottage for a Christmas in the mountains with my close friends.
I received a text from a girl, one I’d corresponded with a week or so before.
The text was short.
“I want to bleed for you.”
Attached, a picture. Her initials in red, cut in into her pelvis.
Another picture followed. And another. She was dressed in crimson.
She wanted me to come over one Saturday afternoon when her boyfriend was away and she was napping. I was to wake her with a hand over her mouth and a knife to her throat. I would bind her, leave her helpless, and then fuck her. She would struggle. I would cut her slightly to remind her of the danger.
It never happened; a couple of weeks later she was in a minor accident, and we lost touch.
Months later, kneeling over an angel, and preparing to draw wings along her back, I thought back on that conversation, in the back of a car in a cool November, and learned something important about my brand of devil.
Frankly, if our bodies are a temple, you are a small country church waiting for a tornado.
But I have grand aspirations for you.
I forced your hands into a steeple, pressing them together between my own.
Last night, while at a friend’s DC art show being hosted in a small hipster antique furniture shop, I came across a green vinyl kneeling bench. It’s the kind of piece you’d find in an older home, in front of a small alcove with a statue of the Virgin Mary and some lit candles.
It made me think of you, and how I wanted you.
And let’s be honest. The distance between what I want and where you will find yourself is not so very vast.
Which is why you were kneeling in front of me, hands clasped in steepled prayer.
I was going to build a better church.
Starting with you.
she was sweet
such a mink
of a girl
i’d pet her
curled, upturned like a budding
flower
she stole my hat.
said
‘it looks so much better on me’
but all i heard
was how large my head was
at night
she wrapped around me
like i was bamboo