writingsforwinter:

I have to stop myself from thinking of poets as people

who are easily fuckable. Two weeks ago I woke up

at 4:30 AM after dreaming about the man I love having

a wet dream about me dreaming about him;

see, I don’t remember how to hook up with boys from bars

without feeding them pickup lines about the various kinds

of medication I’m currently taking.

My college roommate’s name is Paul and I followed him

all the way to New York just to listen to the sound

of the silences between his silences,

but sometimes I wish I could change Paul in

for my eleventh-grade crush, who always said bullshit

instead of I love you when I made him come

in the backseat of his brother’s car.

The periodic table is just a habit.

I like to think of myself as the most unstable element,

Francium. The gases that implode if you so much

as look at them, the elements that don’t have room

for any more electrons in their outer shells.

We hung apologies from our shoulderblades

like epaulettes and found that in the end, they were too

heavy to keep us upright.

Poets are easily fuckable, to me, because they’re empathetic.

They cry when they come and rub your back

when you can’t. But after eighteen years of dating pitfalls,

I’m finally ready to accept the fact that my body

is something like a grenade, a rising crescendo,

and not even a poet’s honesty could soften

all the ways that I have trouble letting people in.