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| in the more than four years since i started this xanga, today is the first time i've written a poem that i won't be posting here. today is also the first time i ever wrote a poem about someone and then let them read it. i think, in a way, it was the first time i wrote a poem for someone, not just inspired by them. and that makes it his, not mine. it wouldn't be right, no matter how much i like it and think others might enjoy it, too. i just wanted to share that. :) | | |
| we are not a romance novel. your manhood cannot enter my warm femininity, copulating as consciously as rocking horses jostled on accident. it's not that easy. it's not blind luck and a good fuck. but the pad of your thumb cushions my concerns as you smooth it up and down my back, and i know. i know when you hold me that our story isn't meant for pages. our oral is not tradition, though our tradition may be oral. let's paint the town with the colors in our dreams, graffiti our fantasies everywhere there's no space. they'll never contain us, but they'll never forget us, either. (c) katie h. 3/31/12 | | |
| i tell people my favorite word is lugubrious, or sometimes languid, but that's only because i always forget about smolder. but with you, i can't forget. your knuckles knead the memory into my shoulder blades, up, up into the base of my neck, down the neglected corridors connected by dark gray matter of fact, i can't say exactly what it is, but i feel it. it's like drinking velvet wine while draped in wine velvet, feeling like one of your french girls and praying you don't actually have any. the secrets between us hang like the space between the stars, vast and imposing when we're apart, but impossible to notice when our fingers deftly draw us close to the supple skin and shocking down in our tenderest of clefts. in that space, you tongue the truths i've tucked away from centuries of falsified dangers, and i ever so vainly attempt to unbuckle orion's belt and its hold on your heart. though i grasp, reach, claw at it with tooth-tortured fingernails, the back of your soul is a room i've only entered in the dark, a shadow i've walked through and felt hold me, tentative but full of longing. i am desperate to be made vulnerable by your honesty, clamoring for the clammy-handed comfort of your shadow sharing mine. i want to luxuriate in our carnal incarnate and be there when lust becomes love. (c) katie h. 3/31/12 | | |
| i love the feeling of your skin on my skin, your fingertips dragging me down into the depths of a hell i'm desperate to explore. when i taste the saccharine sin from your lips, o pilgrim, i cannot help but to guide your holy palms toward the place i have prepared for you, where the fallen feast on each other's flesh, drink of their cups, and, in the little death, grasp foolishly at eternal life. join me, father, for i wish to sin. (c) katie h. 3/7/12 | | |
| i left my legacy. i did it in fifth grade. but I got myself wrong. scrawling the content laced along primitive sinew destined to someday evolve into heartstrings, i believed i had the right to forever. i thought i’d seen enough. so i etched it into the cheap red plastic of a slide-shaped metaphor for my childhood and assumed that was that. i didn’t know. i couldn’t know. there’s a world out there they don’t want you to know about. it isn’t even hiding. and in the daylight, it doesn’t exist. i found it at eleven thirty at night on my elementary school playground, like opening a gallon of milk that expired nine years ago and taking a swig without sniffing. phantom hands quietly turned off my headlights, fate rolled down my window, and my id stoically coasted my car through the parking lot until something vaguely conscious within me parked and stepped out, leaving the door unlocked. i was alone with the ghosts of a hundred eleven-year-olds; who should i fear? the secret world is the one i found on a swingset, across the open asphalt plains, beyond the fenced in baseball diamond and childhood dreams. i sat in that swing, faced the brief forest i once imagined went on for generations, and threw my legs wildly into the wind. that’s when i crossed over. with the gentle hands of silence cradling my back as i swung, i came into the world they won’t let you peek at. i gave in to the indulgence of feeling myself slice through the universe with every pump of my legs, then stretching them out and watching the smooth moonlight fall over my dimpled skin like silk. the innocent sin dripped like candle wax through my soul. i reveled. in fifth grade, i looked the high noon sun straight in the eye and called myself enlightened. years later, as stars blinked away hidden teardrops in the corners of their eyes, ten minutes on a swingset taught me better. now i spend my time searching for craters in the moon, sifting through clouds with my eyelashes until i feel sufficiently dwarfed by the atmosphere. i am the sum total of my emotions, larger than i look, expanding every time i feel something new. i keep fastidious track in a faded brown notebook, saving my place with a rapidly unraveling string that began light pink but now adjusts its tie between the lapels of a grayer suit. and yet every morning i still wake up, walk to the mirror, and introduce myself to the partial stranger on the other side. i cannot know myself. what we know is complete, final. i am not finished, but a work in beautifully chaotic progress, illuminated by the moonshine reflecting off a rusty swingset. and that’s rather magical. don’t you think? (c) katie h. 8/16/2011 | | |
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