He Makes Me Laugh, Head Thrown Back And Eyes Alive With Happiness. He Asks Me To Come Closer When We

am I condemned to a life of longing? seeing you laugh makes me go all nervous. watching your eyes light up as your grin threatens to shatter your cheekbones and the way the sunlight hits your hair in the summer as you twirl and twirl and twirl.

or the way your breath forms a cloud around ur mouth and condenses into the chilly night air in the winter. i’ve watched and witnessed and drowned in all the tiny things you do. and god, I’ve fallen in love with each of ur subliminal actions. each tiny quiver that your body makes. it fills me with want. i want. i long for you.

is it going to be like this forever? am I condemned to a life of longing? I would throw myself off the edges of your hipbones under the covers and drown in the tiny rivers under the translucent skin of ur wrists or sin in the holiness of your sweet kiss.

holy holy holy. if god had seen the way your eyes light up with happiness when you see me or the way your hair swings behind you like telephone wires in the breeze as you walk ahead of me he would have not written that girls should not lay with girls. honeyb, you are the most religious thing I’ve ever come close to. moans like a choir, hands clasped together in wanting.

i am condemned to a life of longing.

💓💓

• “If Moses had seen the way my friend’s face blushes when he’s drunk, and his beautiful curls and wonderful hands, he would not have written in his Torah: do not lie with a man” (rabbi yehuda al-harizi/judah ben solomon harizi, book of taḥkemoni iirc)

• “The number of hours we have together is actually not so large. Please linger near the door uncomfortably instead of just leaving. Please forget your scarf in my life and come back later for it.” ( Mikko Harvey, from “For M,” Foundry)

• I want to stay on the back porch / while the world tilts / toward sleep, until what I love /misses me, and calls me in. (Dorianne Laux, from “On the Back Porch,” Only As the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems )

• “I am sitting at my kitchen table waiting for my lover to arrive with lettuce and tomatoes and rum and sherry wine and a big floury loaf of bread in the fading sunlight. Coffee is percolating gently, and my mood is mellow. I have been very happy lately, just wallowing in it selfishly, knowing it will not last very long, which is all the more reason to enjoy it now.” (Tennessee Williams, from a letter to Donald Windham)

•I cannot write about Damascus, without the jasmine climbing on my fingers. I cannot say Her name, without my mouth getting overcrowded with apricot juice, blackberries and quince” (Nizar Qabbani, A Green Lantern on Damascus’ Door)

• “Put your heart in it” “My heart’s with you. I don’t have it anymore” (Dear Ex, 2018)

• "Why did you call me at the office today?” “I had nothing to do. I wanted to hear your voice.” (In The Mood For Love, 2000)

• I’ve dreamt about you nearly every night this week (Arctic Monkeys)

• This tweet

• Sharing a bubble bath on a rainy day, Santa Cruz, February 2015.

• Chungking Express (1994)

Lover, I know I’m such an excessive woman. I bleed so many emotions, each as destructive as the last. I breathe in love and exhale anxiety, infecting everything around me with paranoia and insecurity. I bleed scarlet angry and drink bluesy sadness, so much pain and turmoil, so much misplaced passion.

It must be so overwhelming to be mine, must be like loving a charred forest that doesn’t know how to trust the sun again, mistakes warmth for destruction. Lover, please leave if you find yourself crumbling under the weight of all that has broken me. I know I’m too much and that I’ve painted the inside of your heart in splatters of ugly colours, regurgitated trauma.

But you say no. You tell my ghosts that if they’re staying, then that they’d better make room. You hold me until I am strong enough to walk again, kiss me until all the loss tastes like strength. Tell me that the inside of your heart is a masterpiece now, all those colours look so pretty. You hold up a mirror to it and say look, how can all this look anything less but human.

A love so unconditional, so relentless in its support. How lucky I am, lover, to call you my own.

“You once told me that the human eye is god’s loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn’t even know there’s another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty.”

— Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel

Hozier, ‘Cherry Wine’

[Text ID: “I’m all but washed In the tide of her breathing.”]

Forough Farrokhzad, from Another Birth: Selected Poems of F. F.; “In The Dark,”

Men hold up a baby saved from a pile of rubble. Damascus, Syria, 2014

salting wounds with poetry, and counting losses with a pen that’s run dry. tomorrow will be one year since you hurt me for the first time (oh how quickly time flies). and it angers me that everyone can still read your name in between these lines, that your pulse is still the rhythm of my poetry (and my life).

how casually you haunt me, old friend. i am no longer afraid of the memories you left on my skin (though i moved cities to escape them) so perhaps i can call this a year of growth. but is it really, when i spent months trying to fight the urge my bones had to rearrange themselves into a different woman?

the 29th was hot last year, and it is hot today too. but i’m not that girl who was complacent in her own destruction anymore, no. ive left the demolition site for good.

now, i kiss the girl i was and i thank her for staying alive, hold her and say that i’m proud she survived.

you kiss the lake and catch sight of the moon in its reflection. feel yourself drowning in everything you were once proud of. lost boy, don’t you know? those who communicate with angels are already lost. it is not beautiful or brave. the way the water pulls you in and traps you in it’s embrace is tragic. where is the angel you were praying to now?