pulse
sit across from me,
with no space in between.
chest again chest,
and our legs folded awkwardly.
wrap your arms around my neck,
and i’ll hook my head on your shoulder.
oh, love, can we just sit here and listen to the nothing
with the backdrop of our uneven breathing.
the silence of the world is so vast that i’m drowning in it.
you are drowning with me,
and i’m interlacing our hands.
and oh,
this feels full,
not enough, but full.
and this is not quite as scary
as i once thought it’d be.
with our bodies so close,
and your forearms touching my neck,
tell me, dear.
can you feel my pulse?
will you tell me,
pull away just long enough to look at me and say,
you are alive and you are real.
this is not hell, you will know for sure if it is.
and maybe, if you say it strongly enough
i’ll believe you.
maybe if your breath hits me cooler than the humid air,
i’ll believe you.
i pull my arms up, turning your hand open to the ceiling,
and i thumb at your calluses and feel your wrist,
and feel my heart pound in harmony with your pulse.
thinking of what i would do, if i believed that we were alive.
oh, it’d take everything in me to believe that if we were alive,
it would be a good thing.
hope is scary and there’s a reason i don’t believe in god.
if we are real then i know we are both drowning.
i think you are enough, sometimes i think you are more than enough.
when i think that, i fear i am wasting your time.
i would tell you that, but i’m afraid of what you’d say.
either you agree and shatter my heart, or you call me a fucking idiot and piss me off.
so, i won’t say it, certainly not now.
we are sitting in the silence, my shoulder wet,
and it’s times like this that i understand the art of kintsukuroi.
you’re ice with cracks in it, i feel the dread of your becoming.
i know, though, once it comes
it will be so beautiful it will bring me to tears.
i wonder if you see me as i see me,
a stick of dynamite with the spark rushing forwards.
but the reality is, we’re just two dumb motherfuckers
in the middle of an ocean,
desperately trying to keep afloat
by holding each other’s hand.
but i’m not your life raft,
and you’re not mine.
it’s nice to pretend though,
that we aren’t just pulling each other down to meet death quicker.
it’s ninety degrees and we’re broke as hell,
in a shoebox apartment,
with enough wasted dreams
to make that metaphor in stanza fourteen real.
i know, sometime after seven
we’ll pick ourselves up and stumble into bed,
as far away from each other as possible
and hope that tomorrow is better.
