a bit of old writing

Lock clicking, doors opening to the smell of new carpet. Its all as we’ve left it - walls gleaming white, glasses that masquerade in plastic put away next to the dishes from pottery barn. Appliances silent. I take a step into the home that is not mine, but for a week I will pretend. Set my bag down in the corner. Black, like yours next to it.

The home in my mind will have walls that do not gleam. They will be open and uncovered, rough with the strength of the material holding up our lives. I will trace the grains in the wooden beams into the texture of your skin, watch the world outside our windows until they turn black to mirror the world inside.

Our dishes will be cheap porcelain, with loud Chinese designs, and forks and chopsticks that do not match. Make dinner with me, and we’ll not think about tomorrow. Slices of tomato slimy between my fingers, just as the phone hums off in the distance.

For now the gleaming white pottery barn dishes will have to do. I watch you heat your milk for cereal in the morning, hair slightly askew, right leg rattling the table beneath our bowls. But you don’t seem to notice. I am looking for my keys again.

E. E. Cummings

para-pet:

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says

we are for eachother: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis