This is the one where I finally write about you.

I'm so tired of love that has to pretend that it's not love.
My heartbeat has turned into an alarm that won't be snoozed,
I want to rip it out and toss it across the room
where you stood and devoured all of me with your tongue
and then begged me for more.
Last christmas,
I held you like it was the last beautiful thing I would ever see,
filled your mouth with as much charm as I could pretend to muster
but it still wasn't enough for you.
I am homesick for a person who has only held me once
I have undressed in front of you, stripped myself of skin,
untangled myself from the doubts
and asked you to love me.
but love, for you, was just something to do
until the new year started.


Leggy.

Last Words

It ended
and look,
You're still alive.
The days are still stumbling by,
life did not end.
He left,
and you did not fall.


Leggy.

Just Love Me

I don't know when love began to smell like you

But it comes and curls insanely around my legs and refuses to let go

This love is a love that does not beg or want to be noticed

this is a wake up on a wednesday morning and go to work kind of love

this love just wants to lie on a couch too small for two bodies, legs tangled, 

watching bad television.

I know that you're only visiting this body 

but who wouldn't want to vacation from their real life here?

with me?

I'm trying to be a good host,

i'm petitioning the sun to shine a little quieter today.

the earth to slow down on its rotation around the sun

Everything has been quieted darling,

so what are you waiting for?

please, just love me.

Leggy

p.s - opened a book blog with a friend - www.twonightstands.com/blog please check us out.

The thing is...

i do not know how to not be this loud.

how to sit back and laugh like my tongue is dipped in cherries and honey

how to shut up and bite my tongue even when i should

i do not know how to stop halfway, how to back away from things that are not mine

i do not know how to not claim territory, 

i feel like no matter how loud i am people don't hear me

i do not know how to pretend that you haven't hurt me

i do not know how to make you love me.

i want to be a safe place for you

but i do not know how to dim this fierce thing i feel

you bring out all the sharp places in me, 

and i do not mean to constantly draw blood when you come to me for safety

i do not know how to be this person you want me to be

i do not know how to simmer.

this thing between us is cheap and vulgar but i fully bought into it knowing that

i stumbled upon you with hands covered in sin and alcohol

i wasn't expecting anything holy.

and i stay when you tell me that she's the well you have to drink from or you'd die of thirst

and i'm the desert.

i stay when you come to me with blindfolds and ease

i stay because you make my spine throb on your good days

and i stay because i wake up choked in tears on your bad days

and either way, at least you make me feel something

i stay because to stay stimulated even when i have no stomach for it, even when i want to crumble every time you reach for me makes me feel alive.

after my fifth glass of cheap wine

i forget that i can still taste her on your lips

i pretend that this thing is real and special

i can only love you when i'm drunk

only in the dark,

only on nights when i need to burrow into flesh

the thing is,

i stay because i cannot leave.

because where would i start picking up the pieces of your life you have left all over my couch?

which cities would i have to start avoiding?

i envy those women,

who smell like cinnamon and never settle for less.

i stay because secretly, i want to break your heart

i want to plant mines under your skin 

that i hope your future lovers find.

The thing is,

by God, i'm so tired of writing about you

and all the ways i'm breaking my own heart.

leggy.

Disappearing.

In a bid not to become your mother, you have become the women your dad fucks to remind himself what a real human being feels like.
he has turned your mother into a ghost of herself,
made her supplicate at his feet for years,
and left her to fuck women who are exactly who she used to be.
you are loud and opinionated and everything you think your mother is not.
she worries that no man will marry you
you roll your eyes and ask her if the years of marriage she wears with pride has done anything but suck all the juices out of her skin
but at night, when no one is watching, you worry that she's right and you are not the marrying kind.
you tell men that you are not the marrying kind
and they agree;
you are the woman they fuck after marrying the marrying kind.

The world is burning and you are burrowed into sheets.
He tells you that he loves you and you desperately want to believe it
but you don't.
you smile and tell him that he doesn't.
he is the softest part of your morning
the part where you wake up and watch him and he breaks into a smile sensing your gaze
and i know he makes love like he's the ocean and he's trying to drown you
his hips separating shore from water
like he has only ever belonged to you
i know that he feels like a spiked drink after many months of fasting
and sometimes the sadness requires you to burrow yourself into flesh to survive
i know he burns like he's the sun and you really need the light to walk you back into yourself
but baby, he's just the moon; stealing light sources and pretending to be radiant.
so you need to stop leaving the lights on and the doors open for him
he won't stay and he doesn't belong to you.

love,
leggy.

A Litany of Confessions

Is there a word for the moment when you win an argument?
when the punches have landed when you weren't even looking and how even though you've won you feel the air gushing out of you in defeat?
it's the same word for the moment when your ex lover chokes out that he's getting married with a tongue that has just ploughed you into supplication.

my friend is falling in love and it's glorious to watch.
she's knitting his name into anything that moves, into any story that dares to draw breath
his existence is always being spilled into conversations and she's kneading love into his body between endless cocktails and tears and burning and she's feeling the most she has ever felt in her life and even though they are tap dancing across continents and around people, he is still her favourite place to exist. he is discovering the grenades between her skin and picking them off one after the other because in this love story the princess rescues herself and the prince is just along for the ride.

I am not in love with you but everything is all light and weightless.
You tell me stories that make me throw my head back and gulp the breaths of others around me
everything is garlic and ginger and cinnamon
i am not in love with you but you walk in like you belong here and
in the absence of speech our bodies make summer when you pour me on your backseat.
I will never call you home but the seams of my body are coming unraveled in your hands and i don't know how to put this much shame into poetry.
do you know what the world sounds like after everyone leaves?
after you have picked your teeth and tucked your conscience back into view
after you have peeled me out of my skin and spilled me on the floor in penance
i lay there and whimper out a prayer,
i say:
Forgive me Lord, but i am so lonely and sad and just looking for a body to disappear into.

25.

I've been grappling with what i want to say in this post.
every year i ask the current year to be kinder to me than the previous year was
i think each year is competing with the last to be my worst year yet.
my twenties have been ridiculously tough.
there were times during my 24th year that i didn't think i was going to survive my 24th.
but i did it, didn't i?
it definitely didn't make me stronger; i think that saying is bullshit but i'm still here am i not?
i survived. i crossed over. i'm here at 25, alive, keeping the demons at bay.
I'm still struggling with christianity. i honestly think to be a very good christian you have to find a way to keep the doubts away but i am not succeeding.
i'm trying to still keep it all together because i literally cannot afford to be an atheist. i really can't. because even on my worst days of not believing, i still need the comfort that there is someone higher than me, who is all knowing and all seeing who loves me and will see me through.

I've been writing this blog for 8 years now.
8 years!!
it's so refreshing to read through it and see how much i've evolved, how much my opinions on so many things have changed, how much i've grown. i think that's really the best part of blogs, to see how far you've come.
while reading through, i noticed how many of my new year or birthday posts talked about trying to be a better person. ha. i can tell you definitively that i have not succeeded on that front. i wish i could be that girl with the sunny personality, running around in the gardens, wearing flower crowns, getting told that my aura is peaceful and being all peace and love (barf) but i'm just not that girl. i can't even be friends with people like this and when i meet them on the internets i just think and have such strong convictions that they're faking.
but as the great Desus and Kid Mero would say - I believe God is still working on me, beloved.

anyway,
here's to 25,
be kinder to me than 24 was.
i really, really need you to be.

love,

leggy.