Exhale

Looked up this afternoon, deep into the gray, and realized I wanted to end a friendship. I call it that tentatively, as it was something more than a friendship, and something much less - much less than everything else. I rolled this newfound detachment around my tongue, and acknowledged it as a confirmation of something that's been growing inside me the past few weeks.

It's not so conflicting to just look the other way now -- An odd, quiet, unsurprising liberation. I accepted it and returned to my reading.

It's as if I've visited a favorite place too often, ordered a favorite dish too many times, and with each return I craved it less. My thoughts are always somewhere else when you are around. I'm ready to try out a new space, to sit in a new window, to feel the sunshine on my face instead of seeing it from a distance.

Let's break up. ;)

Pulled from the Archives: Kryptonite

YOUR KRYPTONITE

Face it.

Everyone has a kryptonite. It's not just you.

Everybody has someone who makes them crumble when they get close.
Everybody has someone who turns their sturdy morals dust.
Their strongest assets useless
Their confidence confused

Everybody has that
one motherfucker

Who makes them look foolish and weak
Insecure and needy
And worst of all,

dependent.


Who turns you into the person you swore you'd never be
Who turns you into a person you can't recognize, but can't change
Crying to your enemies
Cringing on your knees

It's not just you.
And it's not just him.
It's not just her. I swear it.

Everybody has that one who...
FRUSTRATES them beyond no end,
who breaks their heart a million times over
just by doing nothing at all

Everybody has that one someone they're
forever running away from
forever running away from
but always
bumping into

Because that someone
is still (and will always be)
Home...

Heh.

If you're lucky, your one is
the perfect balance to your extremes,
the opposite of all that you are,

the one who will ground you when you get too close to the sun,
too close to godliness

Kryptonite will Humble you
to remind you that you're human.

If you're lucky,
your kryptonite loves you
And that tension can taste like static
And that pain can sound like passion

But real life is:
the kryptonite is your downfall.

Real life is,
you see him crossing the street
just eight feet
in front of you

you see her kiss him on the train
with a finger on his chin
or his number on your screen
with a semicolon grin

your logic keens
and you heart revolts
And the walls you build
melt like lead


if you're lucky,
your kryptonite loves you too

But if you're smart,
you'll keep them far, far away.

Mr. Broken Hollywood

I can't make the distinction yet, between whether he is bragging calmly, or just telling me his story. He's part of a chapter that's been long since forgotten, barely relevant but somehow braided into my history.

We had a heated fling the summer I befriended some street musicians. He was someone who sat next to us one day and fit easily into our ridiculous conversations. He used to answer the phone while his mouth was full of me and barely pause in either conversation, this impressed me. His bedroom was not cozy, but functional; he might have had a lava lamp, which I can never respect. There was almost a threesome once; she had a clit piercing. I did not play a full part in what went down, and do not regret it at all.

Smooth skin, tattoos, a brief sexual affair - and then at some point, I just simply looked away. I had a daydream, and I liked it, and when I glanced back I was surprised to find him still tucked into my shoulder. Who are you, and why are you here?

I met his mother. He cooked me breakfast. He might have told me he had fallen in love. I can't remember. I was already looking somewhere else when he said goodbye, and left the city for good.

And here he is now. After almost a decade on the other side, successes and pussy and money under his belt, he came back when things there got stagnant for him. His stories are impressive, if you're into that sort of thing. I'm happy for him, because I have no reason not to be.

He found me without the help of knowing my last name, or facebook - a rarity in this day and age. I didn't like how he kept kissing my neck.

Something about this all still feels so superficial...
More on this as it develops.


[Image credit: Modus Optimus]

Rambling Thought: The Binge..

I was brought to tears today.

3 years ago I had broken up with the right side of my brain. We fought all the time because I felt I’d been betrayed..

Before that we were a passionate couple. I was deeply in love, and every second of my thoughts were rearranged and dedicated to accommodate that space between words. I saw art everywhere and breathed internal rhyme schemes, and punctuation marks were the gasps between orgasms. Music drove me to distraction and I used to end all my evenings on the terrace, Brooklyn so beautiful under the wide expanse of sky, dirty rooftops kneeling between the thighs of my building complex as I exhaled deeply from the 18th floor. Speakers purred with the thick bass of hip hop from my windows, and I daydreamed, constantly. Oh, I was so addicted.

We broke up because I’d become incredibly unhappy - with my life, with myself - and I was so self-absorbed and immersed in my addictions that I blamed words for my inability to speak. I blamed words because they forced me to confront the parts of myself I did not want to see, and our conversations were overheard by too many of my enemies. We lived together under this tension for a while, floor littered with Dutch guts and disdain, condom wrappers and laundry. We went through the motions but all our actions came up empty.

I turned my back to Prose so many times in my sleep that I was not surprised to wake up one morning alone, with half my closets stripped. It had even taken the curtains.

Good riddance, I thought. All this new space gave me time to reconstruct, gave me time to move up in my career and really get it in. I became a straight-A student, I learned how to be more efficient and goal-oriented. I learned to pick up after myself and maintain a clean home. I suppressed almost every impulsive tendency I had and severed every addiction I could: I quit smoking cigarettes, I quit smoking weed, I embarked on a year of celibacy and learned how to really, really enjoy being alone. I quit facebook. I damn near quit the internet. I spent some time getting to understand the art of censorship, the language of the upper classes, and learned how to socialize in more demure settings. I forgot how to make jokes. I recovered. I fought with insecurities. I recovered. But when poetry left, it took with it all the beautiful things that made everyday life luxurious. Life is so much harder without those reminders of beauty.

*

10:41 on a Saturday night, and I’ve been sitting in front of my computer screen for the past 6 hours. It started with a link to a music blog that threw me back into the arms of hip hop… I kept touching and tasting, familiar and brand new, track after track and all these parts of me unlocked… my heart changed octaves and my blood pressure dropped, my eyes scrambled and my words became baffled as these doors crumbled down and like an addict, couldn’t stop-

I began to watch poetry slams. My palms itching and my shoulder blades twitching and of course, I stumbled onto Def’s Poetry Jams; and here my world paused… All thoughts lost, as my mouth parted dumbly, and my hemispheres crossed -

Every word that hit me, only made me weaker. It’s like this careful reconstruction unraveled to destruction and I’m rocking in the corner stuttering like I was tweaking…

the noises came first.
the mm. shit
after a dope fucking verse,
the hand on my chin and the big dopey grin and the
“wooh!” at the end from
holding it in…

youtube was the prelude. I saved to my favorites and played and replayed and chased related links; I had 16 tabs open while all of it soaked in and took in the faces of purpose and pain, and laughter and losses and after the gain not a single wall left inside me remained..

I felt parts of my brain lubricating. Re-virginized paths ambitiously widened, mind was getting hot and, without thinking twice my body began to rock and, I arched
at the shock of delicious being opened by something that I’d so SO long ago forgotten.

Every incredible metaphor brought me closer to my knees.
I kept getting hit -
over, and
over, and
over again

with the power of words - the power of vulnerability. And inexplicably,
I started crying.

All of a sudden I understood the psychology behind religion. I dropped my head to folded hands and I let the love, the purity, the huge power pour in. Today I injected myself with every drug I had left behind, I found music again, and the beauty, and words, WORDS, I kissed Prose open-mouthed and ran my hand through its hair and its tongue coated mine, and we stayed intertwined for a really long time… At that very moment my mind overflowed and I increased my soul’s vocabulary. I held my long-lost love close, and when I overdosed,

I cried.
And it felt so good.
Welcome back. It has been so, so cold without you.