You Don't Understand Poetry.
I could never write when you were around.
Now you're gone I don't want to write a eulogy.
So I won't.
I haven't lived this long without learning that it's what I do that happens. If I get up in the morning, I'm the kind of person that gets up in the morning. If I bite back my tears my skin turns to rock.
Still, you've stolen my words for so long. I'm sitting in our shell, my home has always been my outer skin to invite people in to but you curled up like a parasite at my invitation and then started hardening the walls.
Sweetheart, I don't have walls. I have a skin. You know what comes through skin? Sweat when I am afraid, perfume when I am happy, and needles when you throw them at me. Long ago I decided my skin was not there to keep people out. Instead I awkwardly began to use my surface for touching, for welcoming, for the intimate rhythms of reassurance and communication and in doing that I opened myself.
Now my skin is as permeable as the surface of water: it's better to call it cohesion than constraint. By opening, over and over, I called this self into being until I had enough gravity to hold myself together.
I need to tell you that this decision is not hysteria. This is all me, together, agreeing with my own gravity.
I need to tell you that when you throw your needles, trying to puncture my skin and let yourself in, what they are hitting is not alterable surface but bedrock.
My love, you are already in. Your self is already in. I just don't understand what you're doing in here.
It looks to me like your only goal is to remake me in some image. Whose, or what image, I have never managed to guess. I have asked you to tell me.
I wish I could tell you a secret here. Tell you that I have so many images I still want to share with you, tell you that I want you embedded so deeply in my future that maybe we sometimes forget where one skin lets up and the next one begins. But I've already told you that secret, dear one, and all the other secrets I know.
What you do with them, that's what happens next.
Now you're gone I don't want to write a eulogy.
So I won't.
I haven't lived this long without learning that it's what I do that happens. If I get up in the morning, I'm the kind of person that gets up in the morning. If I bite back my tears my skin turns to rock.
Still, you've stolen my words for so long. I'm sitting in our shell, my home has always been my outer skin to invite people in to but you curled up like a parasite at my invitation and then started hardening the walls.
Sweetheart, I don't have walls. I have a skin. You know what comes through skin? Sweat when I am afraid, perfume when I am happy, and needles when you throw them at me. Long ago I decided my skin was not there to keep people out. Instead I awkwardly began to use my surface for touching, for welcoming, for the intimate rhythms of reassurance and communication and in doing that I opened myself.
Now my skin is as permeable as the surface of water: it's better to call it cohesion than constraint. By opening, over and over, I called this self into being until I had enough gravity to hold myself together.
I need to tell you that this decision is not hysteria. This is all me, together, agreeing with my own gravity.
I need to tell you that when you throw your needles, trying to puncture my skin and let yourself in, what they are hitting is not alterable surface but bedrock.
My love, you are already in. Your self is already in. I just don't understand what you're doing in here.
It looks to me like your only goal is to remake me in some image. Whose, or what image, I have never managed to guess. I have asked you to tell me.
I wish I could tell you a secret here. Tell you that I have so many images I still want to share with you, tell you that I want you embedded so deeply in my future that maybe we sometimes forget where one skin lets up and the next one begins. But I've already told you that secret, dear one, and all the other secrets I know.
What you do with them, that's what happens next.