Cheap thrills

Sometimes it's the cheap thrills
the anonymous hands
that almost erase your name
from my lips
and empty my mind.

Sometimes it's the whiskey in my breath
and the required pressure
in all the right places.

In any case, at times
I manage to give my desire
another guise
and I don't know what makes me more shameless:

That I wash away your image
or that I always come back to it.

Small obsessions

Sometimes I write into the void
I address the lover
I have not met yet
Or have not touched
The could-have-been
The will-it-be?

Sometimes I write to my addictions
Small and big ones
Material ones and not.

Who said cowardice
is not another pill to swallow?

I was always smart about the wounds
-keep them invisible
they're usually easier to hide.

Sometimes my addictions are of the mind;
small obsessions, sometimes to songs
or words
or unaddressed emotions.

The hunger always eats from the inside out.

2018

It was a year of pieces
and in pieces
and gluing them back together
clumsily trying to make them stick
in any way that did not hurt
often failing
sometimes not.

It was the year
I started unlearning to shut up
and shut off
and started gripping with
having a voice again.

Seashell

I whispered all my secrets
into a seashell
and gifted it to you.
When you bring it to your ear
I hope they're echoed back in waves.

Dog bones

Part of me wonders
Whether he's just a man bored
Throwing bones at random
And me
Hungry for him by instinct
Ready to swallow
Any crump that comes my way

Found with no confusion

Found
At the beginning and end of my thoughts
The middle ground taken too.

No confusion as to
Where I end
And you begin.

Two entirely separate existences
We are well-defined
We never meet.

Superstitious

And I think
I have after all grown superstitious
of words. I have
turned them into magic spells
that fix the untold into the present
bringing it into clear painful focus.

And I trod so carefully
and was so prepared
and yet I was left balancing on the edge
hanging
but not falling.