Home and other Poems

Home

wherever you lead,
I hope your love leaves
a map engraved upon my
heart that I can trace with
a touch and follow back to
linen sheets and tucked away
weekends that suckle away
Sundays dry, until all we have
to drink is our bubbly laughter
and fall asleep at dawn, once
we’ve tired of sharing bread
and conversation and trading
secret glances, whisper touches,
I ache to reunite with my transient
heart, home is wherever we fall.

---

My Thoughts are Cannibals Eating themselves Until there’s Nothing Left

                                                    my homework still gets done
                                              I smile and nod and laugh
                                        no one knows what lies beneath,
                                    in my chest that feels like
                      a plate of steel atop my being and 
               if the weight was actually a
         need that white coat validation to tell me
               I’m not alone in all of this feeling,
                     steering me every which way
                           while i tremble in the backseat

  and sometimes when people 
   ask “are you okay? I say yeah
a fever dream
                                                          a bone aching can’t snap
   out of this one type of
    three day reality bender
     but i'm not even sad
                      
                      I promise     

---

another dragon to slay

another dragon to slay
some days it’s a pebble
in my shoe and the next
day it’s a mountain to move

what I’m trying to say is:
it hasn’t gotten easier, just different

grief is a wretched creature,
contorting itself until it’s unable
to resemble anything but the 
lingering hurt that haunts every
empty space 
                         the kind you abandon            
                         with a false belief that 
                         you can ever leave the 
                         past untouched enough
                         to fill in the longing
a voicemail becomes a relic,
a holy thing you wish could
hold in your palm,
the old t-shirt clings to your
frame, a uniform worn longer
than who wore it before,
and the handkerchief folds 
neatly into a square on the
bedside table
                                       I still curse the world for moving on without you
                       I cry when that restaurant closes, I notice when I hug my little cousins
           I want to press them downwards, shrink them back to a height you once stood by 
grief is the currency
of the living, clutched
in our fists like a rosary,
I dare pray to a thing I 
don’t believe in because
I believed in you, only you
and now I am just a rock
in a stream, left behind to
face the current, and mourn
when I become weathered. 
so i’ve been doing some

        thinking about this weight
                         doesn't even actually
                                   exist because the other
                                                     day i was able to 
                                     get out of bed and how could I have ever done that

                                                
an antidote is all i really want
                                or a diagnosis, 
              my emotions deem themselves
                           in control in the driver’s seat

                                                                                                                                                                                                        just wishing i could get a grip