tempered tenderness

I know you left your underwear there on purpose. We are disgusted for a day. You wanted me to see how wet I made you. Ready to soil ourselves all over again the next. Didn’t you? I searched for the hot thrill of guilt while I mourned our friendship as I nurtured its despair, found only the dreadful weight of sin and a bruise here, there, crimson and pear.

He dragged it around as if it belonged to him, reveled in my desperation, mistaking himself the nature of its intensity- the silence choked me, whereas it encouraged him.

it’s all over at this point

Like a calf nuzzling into the arm of the butcher that raised it. I thought it unfair that he bore the blame alone. I could not reconcile love with such denial- but this had not been sensuality either, which is sincere in its simplicity, this had been an admission that if a woman was not sexually available to him, he did not value them and, of my passive acceptance of the harm done to me.

and yet it keeps going

They were men at my expense, I become one at theirs. Sex, the struggle between meaning and emptiness- Where is my rage? What have I done with it?

Love casts out fear and he is the fire that takes its toll from those who tend to it. A cannibal cradling its victim as they search for their heart- Indignation always takes place of admiration. That’s why God must be born immaculately. I am not afraid of losing; living any other way would be obscene.

Last night I was barefoot and afraid. He watches me with as much grief as mockery. On the edge of that apartment building I first heard Bryan Ferry. While I confess to my woundedness- Terrified. and bear witness to my own trespasses. Not because I may fall. The terrain of our lack- But because I might jump. only ever was the capacity for possibility.

Cali braids my hair. I tell her about before. The swaying into the other lane at the sight of nursing calf and foal. The cigarette smoke blowing back and forth. Swimming underneath a sky of coal. Cali braids my hair. I tell her about before. The bogey hole and the whispered prayer. The motorbikes and the metro line I’d take. Laying underneath pine and heaven’s glare. Cali braids my hair. I tell her about before. The boys and the crosses they wear. The benzos coco swallows somewhere. Running into arms tan and fair.

This miserable life is my obsession, I’ve been thinking about it since I was born.¹

I look down at the blisters that swell along my heels and soles of my feet. The skin peeling back the edges. The pinky that’s past saving. I look down at the watch father slapped onto me before dying, whose hands have stopped between the hours of my birth. Light slanting from the window and settling on my forearm, where devotion inks it black and gray, a radiance that seems to almost come from within, going against a dimness I hadn’t noticed before. I’ve seen life without you lately. My feet sliding across a varnish stripped floor. My clothing moving upon my body as breathe leaves my lungs. Sifting through sand and loose tobacco for change I drop into fountains. Stripped to my underwear, spread out across the living room floor, listening to the records I picked up on the way home. I’ve seen life without you lately. Walking back from the metro, towards my aunts, watching the cigarette smoke swirl into figures that soon dissipate, or from the beach, deaf from the heat, observing the ways lovers sustain their state, how their hearts negotiate with fate, fingers reach across and anticipate.

1. Debré, Constance. Name. Semiotext(e), 2023. pg.48