Your needs and wishes are branches
pulling at my hair
flies
cramming down my throat.
I am floating
no more.

Eyes like hands

Eyes that touch
eyes that
violate.

*

  I try. It is really nonsensical, almost invisible on the outside but there's a constant chaos waging on the inside of my head and I try to tame it, to somehow make up for it. The expectations of others, the pain shame of disappointing, of never enough, always just by little bit but enough not to pass unnoticed. Over the past years I've been dismantling; reassembling, then taking apart again, looking through the pieces of memories to find the core of truth, the one thing that will somehow make everything worthwhile or logical or bearable or pretty. Once the illusion is broken it can never be put back together, no matter how hard you try or plead. Maybe growing up is about having all the youthful illusions broken, the eyes once opened never close, the vision can only be clouded, numbed, but it's still there.
  I've seen the most part of it, the friendships, the families, the lovers, all those supposed to be meaningful to be always lacking; supposedly sufficient until they're not. And then the confirmation whispered, that they were never enough, but they could have been, they could have been.  And the more you see it the less you want to but you don't want to go back either, willful ignorance is pathetic, something to be pitied. It shows a weakness of spirit, a denial to know and accept one's self.
  And you accept, and you learn to embrace it and then to live with it, to enjoy what you can and even to fight. And I wish that were enough. But when you're soft you don't choose the places where the skin gives way, where the light hurts most, you're just soft all over and if you can't punch through the world then you wrap your self around the world, your world and try to make it all ok. As if holding on tight enough will keep everything together. As if you can keep anyone together.
  You can't even keep yourself together. The needs of everyone just keep pulling at you, your needs too. It's not a voice that screams, it's the little things that eat away at you. The silences, a bottle in the freezer, an unused room, things that were never moved, questions, promises whispered, appointments said but never fixed, it's rolling around to a pillow, the leftover smell in some else room, a special drink, stories that happened to somebody else, your stories happening to somebody else, it's knowing the next move without even seeing it, the smell in the air, sometimes it's knowing the wrong side of people too much, too well, sometimes it's their good side and it hurts equally much. It's your hands, hungry and cowardly, all the words drowned at the back of your throat, a cemetery at the based of your throat that chokes you, it's being always careful, never relaxed, measuring words, measuring the loudness, constructed. It's speaking truthfully low and slurring and avoiding to do so sober because then you can't be held accounted for what you say, it's the liquor speaking, not you being human.
  It's all this and much more, your getting accustomed to them but not really, a numb mist spreading over your mind, a hollow laugh, too cynical for your age, you were supposed to dream still. It's knowing you don't and even if you did, you have no idea what it would be of.

Rós

And as the music rose
the rain began to fall
turning the skin sticky
then slippery.

His voice pumping
its way into my bloodstream
deep breathing and swaying

the feeling of sheer,
exhilarating
ecstasy.

WN

It's the white noise that disturbs me.
The soft buzzing near my eardrums,
it sounds menacing. It's
so low that everything else
sounds loud,
an exaggeration.
A distant laugh,
carried by the air through open windows
and over rows and rows of balconies
with roses and magnolias.
Fabric,
gliding down skin,
leaving it bare,
hair standing on attention,
electrified.
A gulp, 
the slow turning of the neck,
fingers brushing away hair.

Breaths,
getting irregular and

more.

Still there

  It can not be helped. You can still trace its outlines, feel its edges. The tiny prick of jealousy, like a small, almost imperceptible wooden splinter, pricking through soft tissue. It comes along with questions; what girl is he taking out tonight, who did he fuck? It comes along with solid certainty, even after the realization he's opened up his mouth and blabbed about you, perhaps even unknowingly recommending you, never understanding how he's put you into the radar. Or perhaps he has.

  It's a rotten thought but knowledge often desecrates the tender moments. It bathes them in a cold, ghastly light, bares them naked and finds them wanting. Crumbling. Common. And if your memories and treasured moments are common and cheap and faked, what does that make you? People are supposed to be the sum of their memories and actions. The first is false, the second impulsive, sometimes vile, usually misguided. 

  It makes you feel an emptier version of yourself. 

  And you accept it.

  You accept the jealousy you have no reason to feel, rationalize it, dissect it. It's not what you know that haunts you. It's all the possibilities of what you don't. We're all junkies is deep down, we have that one thing we can't resist, that we'll do anything to get a dosage of.
  For me that's tenderness. The resemblance of intimacy.

*

"I can't seem to get comfortable," I said and he reached across and grabbed my arm and pulled me from the arm to lie down next to him on the couch, limbs entangled and bodies heated, pressed close. I dozed there for seconds, stayed curled and enjoyed the intimacy. The movie ended and the room grew dark, we stayed there breathing, his face buried in the back of my neck.

Pulling, pulling, teeth grazing skin, the smell of salty sweat in my nostrils, the craving for heat, for proximity, for violence, then resting.

I slipped out of the bathroom, he was fast asleep and I got dressed quietly and headed to the living room. I rolled a cigarette with the remnants of my tobacco, laid across the couch, solitary this time, drew long, burning breaths, my eyelids heavy, the cigarette slipping between my fingers. I woke up couple of hours later, he was standing above me.

"Why would you sleep here, don't you want to come inside?"
"I didn't want to disturb you."