Theron,

I left for houma and
I wanted to drive off the road
I thought to write
"Bury me with him" in blood on your floor
Abby licking my wrist wounds.

There is no one who will ever be as important to me as you were.
You were my everything.

The Rush

            The Rush

                                                                                   By Jennifer Tem

There were only two hours between our births. Our mothers were born a month apart. Both of our fathers had died in the war and both of us were the first child born. Both of us were females with a rare birth disorder that left us struggling in the ICU in the first hours of our lives.  We both had names that started with K and ended with IE. How much more of this can I tell before you start to writhe with disbelief? Perhaps I could have gone on for another few sentences, about our matching birthmarks and yellow-gray eyes. But eventually I’m sure you’d call bullshit. And you would be right.

Maddy and I were not born two hours apart. Our mothers were not born a month apart and although both our fathers were dead, Maddy’s was dead from an overdose and mine was just dead to me.  I grew up in the lower Bronx and Maddy grew up in Ohio. It wasn’t until a dim night as an undergraduate that I met her in a dark bar in New Orleans. Somehow the same country loneliness ran through us both, regardless of our different upbringings. Both of us wanted a father we didn’t have, and looked for him in every man. Both of us hated ourselves and the world and only were happy when spinning into a downward spiral, and we weren’t even happy then. Not truly. It’s what brought us together. We needed the company of another failure.

The first time we made love was in a rainstorm in Peru. No, it wasn’t. This isn’t a romance tale. The only time we fucked was a night when both of us were drunk, and I was crying. Maddy was high on coke and so was I but at some point my drunkenness outweighed everything.  I took her home where I lived with my sister and her husband and she held my hand while I cried over the shit pile that was my life.  She left me after a time and came back with bourbon and we took shots and kissed. Her fingers seemed to know exactly where to touch me. I remembered at that moment what a friend had told me about making love to another woman was like making love to yourself. But it wasn’t romantic and it wasn’t love. It was loneliness amplified by the knowledge that we were already two very fucked people. 

We woke up next to each other with the smelliest breath and hangovers from hell. I had to leave; I left her there on my bed like that and called a friend of mine and we had sex, normal sex that you have between a man and a woman. I tried to not think about her but my mind kept wandering back to her lips and her fingers and our deep friendship. When I returned Maddy had left a poem on my pillow from Pablo Neruda.  I held it and thought about her and wondered why everything that happened seemed so far beyond my control.  Later that night she was at the bar. I was already drunk and she was already high. We came together like continents crashing in rushed time.

“You left me”

“I’m sorry..”

“What are you scared of? Don’t we deserve some happiness?”

“Maddy...”

I looked into her eyes and saw everything I was afraid of becoming and at the same time already was. She ran her hands through my hair and I reached up and kissed her deeply, forgetting all my preconceived notions and faults. She could be my PERSON. I WISH I could tell you this story, but I was a coward and I left her at the bar. I didn’t go back the next day, or the next, or the next after that.

Maddy disappeared from my life.  I don’t know what happened to her. Later on I did some traveling,  had my heart broken a few times and  looked for love still. Then I thought about Maddy and how I had left a girl cool enough to leave me Neruda poetry on my pillowcase; a girl who understood me.  I wish I still had that poem but nothing is sacred enough for me not to destroy. There is no happy ending…I’m alone now only without Maddy. Wherever she is, I hope her hell is more forgiving.

Validation

Validation

(Why is it so addictive?)

A world can go from voice filled

to silent in a day

and it's so quiet

there is no one to tell me

how lovely i am

and how they never want to be more than two feet away.

the oxytocin has run out

and I'm dry everywhere,

brittle-

the addiction

needs feeding

but I'm alone,

and it's so quiet here.

I started a journey

that he broke in half

and now I'm two steps back

from where I began

looking for validation again.

the undermath

Just under that layer of smiles
I have to keep rolling
keep talking, keep rolling
so that the iceberg is always showing
and there isn't time to delve beneath
the tip of my persona

I can feel it trying to melt into the deep water
the black of myself
and I roll forward,
as soon as I stop
it will shatter me
it will fill me with despair
I will crumble in tears upon my mattress
and stay that way, contorted until I sleep

But if I keep rolling, keep talking,
never stop,
I can keep it at bay for awhile
until it hits me like a tidal swell
and I am crippled with it
my depression
always just under the surface
and me trying not to fall through the paper-thin floor.

d.u.m.p. ? The Magic Hour. aka FUCK YOU.

Our magic hour does not overlap

Or even coexist

We are separate

You coming first

Hyper and messy

And I trail, picking up the pieces of the wreckage at evening’s dusk.

-A clock that will last for 60 years.

-A calendar that never will be.

-One lost string from a song that wasn’t written.

-My not-tear, wet against my fingers.

But,

You’ve already learned that it’s easy to pretend dreams don’t have faces

You can be selfish

You can be

whatever you want to be, boy, in your dreams.

You haven’t yet learned that life is harder to live in the dust of your boots

Or worse- another’s

No, don’t turn around boy

No need to see me in your wake.

Keep walking

Keep walking

toward your magic hour.

To know you

I know you, slender lips and neck

All rough fingers and supple touch

I know your hands will play want to play with mine

A harpsichord of gentle downward tune

Crescendo into softening eyes and tongue.

A novel on your lips is left unsaid

And I, tracing the pages with hot fingers

Breathing in each word with combined breath

Like brail upon the page your sculpture lies.

To know you is not an answer

But instead a exclamation!

 An ellipses trailing into fading night

Magic hour times the dusk with us in mind.

Tenderly I wonder if to write a poem

If to find a pain that passes

If to hold a man who’s passion

Rare and violet like an orchid

Tumbling headfirst into acid

Is not better in its bloom.

I'm on fucking FIREEEE

Lucid dream

Last night I had a lucid dream. I woke up exhausted mentally. I remember confronting my fears..and reaching to touch them..the bravery it took to do that and the exhilaration..and then finding upon the touch that they were made of air. My hands went right through them. I wish I could remember more...After I broke through them there were other layers of learning...I was floating by the end..full of confidence..

We are many.

We Are Many

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Of the many men whom I am, whom we are, I cannot settle on a single one. They are lost to me under the cover of clothing They have departed for another city. When everything seems to be set to show me off as a man of intelligence, the fool I keep concealed on my person takes over my talk and occupies my mouth. On other occasions, I am dozing in the midst of people of some distinction, and when I summon my courageous self, a coward completely unknown to me swaddles my poor skeleton in a thousand tiny reservations. When a stately home bursts into flames, instead of the fireman I summon, an arsonist bursts on the scene, and he is I. There is nothing I can do. What must I do to distinguish myself? How can I put myself together? All the books I read lionize dazzling hero figures, brimming with self-assurance. I die with envy of them; and, in films where bullets fly on the wind, I am left in envy of the cowboys, left admiring even the horses. But when I call upon my DASHING BEING, out comes the same OLD LAZY SELF, and so I never know just WHO I AM, nor how many I am, nor WHO WE WILL BE BEING. I would like to be able to touch a bell and call up my real self, the truly me, because if I really need my proper self, I must not allow myself to disappear. While I am writing, I am far away; and when I come back, I have already left. I should like to see if the same thing happens to other people as it does to me, to see if as many people are as I am, and if they seem the same way to themselves. When this problem has been thoroughly explored, I am going to school myself so well in things that, when I try to explain my problems, I shall speak, not of self, but of geography.

Lines I love from Jesus' Son

"Where are my women now, with their sweet wet words and ways, and the miraculous balls of hail popping in a green translucence in the yards?" "We put on our clothes, she and I, and walked out into a town flooded ankle-deep with white, buoyant stones. Birth should have been like that."
(Work)

"Sometimes what I wouldn't give to have us sitting in a bar again at 9:00 a.m. telling lies to one another, far from God."

"The virginal sadness wasn't all fake. There was a part of her she hadn't yet allowed to be born because it was too beautiful for this place, that was true."

"In the darkness under the universe it didn't matter that the driver was a blind man. He felt the future with his face."

"It wasn't my life she was after. It was more. She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she'd done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child can be hurt by its mother."

Remember.

Natty, know this here and now and always and anywhere: ever since I met you, I have been thoroughly entranced by you. You are hypnotic and gorgeous, and while this certainly rings true for every photograph of you I have ever seen, I mean it about YOU, not your physical body. You are almost overwhelmingly strong-willed and independent and fierce and formidable. I realize it's hard to see those qualities in yourself, and I have seen you falter sometimes and hide that ferocity behind self-doubt or some delusional thought that you need someone else to validate you for you to be that woman...but even at your worst, I have seen that amazing woman I first saw when I met you, pounding out and showing through the cracks in your insecurities.

You will find that woman again, Natty, because she's right there in you. Just shake off the sand and the grime and you'll find her.

I love you.

gonna try something new..

Be a new person. Class up. I want to be one of those girls that people respect and say, wow..she has her shit together. And she's sweet and nice and fun.

Bout to start making that me.

People suck.

People are sooo disappointing! Shaina always says so but I still give them lots of time to be awesome or at least even a little amazing. Are they all destined to come back into my life two years later after I've already given up on them and pretend to be amazing again? Cause it's too late then, you know really. I need these people to stand up and be amazing NOW. You are in my life now so act like a decent person! If I know you, I probably love you. I love you. I don't turn that on and off and I'm tired of pretending like I do..like I'm some kind of jerk who has an on/off switch. I don't. I don't see how they can. And if they don't love me, and want the best for me, then why the fuck be in my life at all? To use me? Fuck off! Go use someone who has no soul, no heart. I'm too nice for this shit. There are plenty of bitches who won't care. I realize I'm nice and it's easy but what kind of person does that make you? Huh?

A fucking shithead that's what kind.

You make me want a pineapple.

Well, Mardi Gras mardi gras.

Car was towed , wallet stolen...many things happened that are better left unsaid. You make me want a pineapple though. L heart you Mardi Gras. Come back soon.

Keyboard tracker

keyboard tracker, shifty eyelid undulate inward through tapas will.
bound nets web minds untrue
the seeing eye need only roll toward you.

tomorrow is the same red/blue
aging skin holds softer sadness thorough
latent pixels tie the time to you.