On quarantine

  Quarantine has proven to be yet another time for self-reflection but it has also been greatly trying for my mind. The house has become toxic, the strands holding it together falling apart faster than it would in any other case. Last year this time around I felt so much sturdier, wobbling but somehow still starry-eyed. I felt I was heading always towards a certain esoteric balance and equilibrium. I felt secure in my relationships with others.
  Yet now I feel more pieces of my life needing to be cut off and taken away, for they are spreading on my psyche in a way that can only be called catastrophic: not exactly cancerous but rather closer to the spreading of gangrene. I feel uncertain in all things except my close family. Everyone keeps saying how this is a time for inner change and development and so on but the truth is that not all of us are allowed the mental space for such an inner reflection. A healthy environment and a lack of anxiety for basic things in the future are necessary for such a thing to happen.
  And so it is not like that. I am mourning for relationships that have fallen irrevocably apart and that have been doing so for some time now. I can at least have the time to do so properly I suppose. But there is not future that I can foresee to plan for. Everything shifts faster than sand under the gusts of wind. In some respects that is relieving and forces one to obtain roots in the present.

*

Stop searching

You said
that many years ago
indeed you put up a wall.
"I stopped searching for you."

But I didn't.
It took me much longer to accept
to move on
to stop looking around every corner
under every word.

And now
years later
you told me "I love you"
in the airport.
"If you don't come
I will.
I don't know
if I can even last a month."

Amidst all the silence
all the chaos
all the ground going under our feet
did you stop looking for me?

I have no reason to give you to stay.
I'm not even looking for one.
The silence has
encircled me.

Faces

Isolation has many faces.
It's leaving the house without breakfast
so that you don't stay
longer than necessary.
It's sitting in a darkened room
in an empty apartment
with your headphones on.
It's lying to your mother
so she doesn't worry more.
It's trying to writing a good morning message
struggling to find words
that don't sound hollow.
It's never writing that message.
It's declining invitations
for want of desire or money.
Wanting company
and quiet
and sacrificing both.
Isolation has many faces
but sometimes it's
the only
shield you hold.

Chaffed

My lips are bitten raw
and I remember
when my skin got so chaffed
from your kisses
and
your teeth
that it turned
too tender to be touched.
It was redder
and you laughed and said
we did not kiss
we dined on each other
instead.

Every day another desire

I feel
the pulse of him
in me
filling up
before the skins touch
before the bodies crash.
If desire has a smell
it's already
in my nostrils
making me dizzy
from afar.

Ways to self-destruct

The way to self-destruct
is to live two parallel lives
and let the one overwhelm
the other
Where you let the imagined freedom
catch your reality by the throat
and bleed into it,
just to point out
all the ways
it drowns you.

Of course
sometimes
the ways you self-destruct
reach out a hand
that grabs
and saves you.

I am
for I chose
small, eroding, self-destructions
over eradication.

Your arm

It came to me unexpected
while out with friends,
the sudden image
of your hand
circling around my waist
under the bedcovers.

It was so real I felt
the sensation of your arm
against my skin
and I was flooded
by the presence of you,
sometimes your existence
overcomes me.

And I was so ready
to touch
that I wanted to reach
within the gaps between us
and somehow bridge
the light-years of seperation.