Let me embrace your thoughts, and hold them sweetly,
I cannot be a romantic woman,
pull poems from the pedestal of my tongue and present them as beauty,
I talk of death,
of hearts as dark, seething things, quiet sanctuaries that are unoccupied as of late—
the cobwebs
stretch with no fervor, and no light has touched these places for, many nights,
we sit in the dark
palms stretched with distant Spanish prayers,
unwilling to darken these lifelines with vitality,

but pull the switch love,  let the fade of day bathe it, slanted with ginger dusk,
pull the mandolin to the lap, and strum until Eden flowers
 let these lips curl like petals that await blossom,
magnolia arches that glisten like tokens of starlight in the darkest of night,
pull it, and saturate us in light,

I’ve cross the x and o with kisses meant to be carried on the wind,
for our bodies to syncopate
and create war rhythms composed,
to the conception of affection to its consummation of naked shoulders
that had bared weight to breastbones that have withstood constant assault,
such strength can be admired,
but for you, I will surrender quiet weapons of destruction, and in fields of gold and sunlight,
taste all of life and moisture like dollops of honey and dew,

so, pull the switch love, the coldness has grown too unfathomable,
the edges of the soul weep,
pluck softly to the threads in the spine and sew them anew with tender inquisitiveness,
let my fever consume all your anemia
until your orgasm dissipates into the husky dawn,  I’m stroking your heart with veneration,
and softly giggle to your inquiries, if you just walk with me until time stops
you can pull the switch love,  and feel the dot, dot, dot.

I smell of honeydew and brown sugar, undone like the dark rivulet of hair

Your eyes held smoldering fire as I lay naked upon your scented sheets
the glow of intimacy and innocence had lit flesh like fireflies beneath ~
when lush lips parted sighs, fingers had stroked this wick igniting the well
of ecstasy resounding, like the twinkling of wind blown stars.
I weakly murmured:

I am not built for such a love ~ even still you drank deeply of spilling ambrosia
proclaiming from the depths of my oceans your undying affection yet,
I cannot breath ~ your lungs are not suited for this endeavor
and neither are my senses, hazy from your presence.

Blind eyes stare towards a ceiling though in opiate-d states and I weep
trembling beneath the weight of
relinquishing girlish charm for womanly knowledge

I cannot give you what you desire ~
if I no longer claim the gem of a heart buried in my finest silks so long ago, but oh,
when you lay your head upon my breasts, the whispers of your need,
is heard. You do not need to say a word other than your love.

And your naked pants spell nadi
while the humming of your teeth request I drink down, and seek you
beneath ever pulsing heart rates, it thumpsthumpsthumps of our melodies

like the rush of river, this blood, these bones, this heart, this flesh
even shed, shall be yours.

  My presence, like a wind upon curtain, is hardly   missed ~

but you may know that delicate crook of neck like shadows,
and perfume does. And, I miss you passively, dew upon the grass
of late, undeserving caresses.

I am a poet, ribs a hallowed ship. No, not emaciated, I am not in
short supply of affection. Not blushing to the repositioning of your hips
hoping to strum like your instruments or Wiccan sentiments. I respect it.

Yet, I remain indifferent. You could have asked to come down, down through
the himalayas … into white cresting waves, … into my darkest avenues - I would
have whispered my joys and your triumphs. But you fear these symphonies.
You say they are preternatural, and my love will fall like
rain in Soledad until you awaken to me again)

Sleep those tears away, if I cannot moisten my lips with them for,
(You are an artist and lover only in dreams. You do not know the sting
of your rejection then.)


the sight of your somber irises comfort me.

I love you like any moment I might lose you, how precious time is
I’d forfeit all defense mechanisms and still choose you.
I used to be an insomnia, spending all night contemplating death between these walls,
And how to pick up each piece after you honestly fall, when you’re the only one
Reminiscing and the only one who seems to notice something is missing
And I think it’s you and all the ways you used to smile, but
Between all these almost loving caresses, something precious turned vile
I never defiled how sacred these memories could be, I just tried to define it by
Keeping you here with me, but we’re so divided by technaclities it’s a wonder
They made it, and we’re so lost to each other’s touch I would did I ever pray it?

That’s how love goes, you’re mine today and tomorrow we faded
I wake up to you gone, and you always promised you stayed
But it’s morning now, and time to face what’s kept us here
A promise broken when it was made but never forgotten from fear (and that’s the fear)

I’m just watching and waiting for the epiphany, you realize every second is another
To lose me, and despite all the quiet resentment, you’d be strong enough to still
Choose me, I’m your knight in shining armor with my sword and shield, and every
Battle I’ve waged has been just to keep you here, but baby, I’m sorry,
Every bird needs its freedom, and if you’re no longer happy where you want to be,
Take your happiness wherever you seek ‘em
I’m signing hello declaration and goodbye explanations,
Beginning dear love without the proper salutations,
I used to think you were my breath and guaranteed salvation,
But seems now I’ve stalled, expired exhalation.

 
That’s how love goes, you’re mine today and tomorrow we faded
I wake up to you gone, and you always promised you stayed
But it’s morning now, and time to face what’s kept us here
A promise broken when it was made but never forgotten from fear

(and that’s the fear) oh, oh, oh, OH!

Bridge:
When I tell you I love you….(that’s me giving)
When I say I need you…(that’s me surrendering)
And when you say you don’t know
And when you say you can’t do this anymore
THAT’S THE FEAR that we’re losing ourselves
THAT’S THE FEAR,  that I can never love anyone else
And I don’t want to if it’s not you!

 
That’s how love goes, you’re mine today and tomorrow we faded
I wake up to you gone, and you always promised you stayed
But it’s morning now, and time to face what’s kept us here
A promise broken when it was made but never forgotten from fear
From the fear x3

But that’s how love GROWS from the fear!

  

    Spine by ~ursrule

I prefer to begin this confession with the simple truth that
I prefer you don’t call me beautiful because beauty fades and pain remains
And I prefer you don’t gently slide a finger against my face hoping to erase the tears
that blazed their paths unforgiving in nights I have whispered Spanish curses to my pillows
for I’ve tilted upon the edge of moonlight blades that have kissed my wrist, and how love poems
whispered gently of how beautiful a blade would dance across these veins

I prefer to admit I never want to live in Paris, here the rain patter against the window
leaving ghost spots of a leopard upon my skin like your fingers that should have caressed
 but my vulnerability does not reveal splendor, and so I rest alone, and think if I dress my lips with tints of cerise
and curl invitingly for foreign men with curiosity about sweet mahogany skin and pearls that decorated my throat

they won’t see the bruises if my hips are all they view         from the distance

I prefer you don’t trap your fingers to the underside of my thigh and wonder why I’ve never had an
orgasm from another man or why I cannot invest emotionally in someone I’ve kissed
and I tell you because I cannot let my bones submerge in the bitterness of the unions and that each
endeavor was like watching and waving at ships sailing silently into the night with just a single star to be guided by
or how every kiss numbed my mouth until I couldn’t feel my lips slanted over hers, his, hers, and theirs
that their taste like Novocain and I’ve never had a taste for impassiveness.

I prefer that you fall silent when I do, but do not stare when my eyes are not on you
that gaze is recalling the dusks I made vows upon colored paper cranes, and sent them to the skies
each a promise of lying by his side when I would die, how our bones would calcify together
luster in time and how without flesh or organs or blood make love in the dirt that soften with the rains
of our hunger, how without eyes there was nothing stopping him from seeing that what moved me
that it was not lungs and heart that kept my affection,
but of course the dawn would show only how he abused me,
like stained glass on every dip and hollow and junction of carcass, these bones are brittle and in this coffin
lined with velvet and lace there is no room for please, wait I thought this was forever and in this eulogy 
eternity amounts to this day

I prefer that you don’t say you felt something stir in the underside of your spine,
or that you would like to see that artwork of mine, for there are no inkspots and I am not a mona lisa,
you are not Davinci and I am no masterpiece, there are only ragged red threads and broken promises
that laced this backbone, there are only secrets near whispered and words half spoken that have
remembered the empty spots.

I prefer you don’t ask me to Spanish or Creole, those languages are mine, and all the tongues of the world
could not set these admissions free,  but if you just let your fingers fix against the base of my skull
and you be gentle when we dream together, if you lave my collarbone with apologies and assurance
and leave your fingerprints against the slope of my hips, I will tell you,

I prefer you don’t love me, I am a desert of a woman, a machine in affection,
I cannot offer protection against the affliction that I am, and this war you shall wage cannot be won.
  My requests are harsh and like the soft gurgle of the river, I sweep fast away, but always
held still by that which beds it, and keeps it there to stay.

I prefer you don’t fall in love, I’m now left as shipwrecked beast,
these bones are blossoming weeds and once I may have been gorgeous and comfortable
soft and womanly, like the scent of me on your bed sheets, but when the shelter rocks to the tempest
I blaze and victim to the heat of this moment, when I am all you see, you cannot take just a part of me.

             body language by ~Orzz

oooh, I’m all tired and blue, caught in the maelstrom of you

  I, enter where the sun rises, and cast light shafts across your body
laid down in my sheets with the taste of my love making still in your memories,
I’m tongue numbing mute when I gaze at you and wonder at the succession of this love,
wonder that when I sleep, do you stay up and count every eyelash on each eye
because they shelter havens deep enough to drown within -
 

 do you trace my collarbone because it has fortified my torso
and protected as best as it could my heart for you?
 I, saw shadows flit across your jawline,
tiny fingers that silhouette against my starlight, but how I rise and glow,

and this fire,
it burns, it scorches your biceps in intensity, but still, you touch me,
as though unaffected, and am I beautiful, or do you not notice when you have stripped me naked?

I, strum symphonies in my veins, let them rumble like thunder against my bones,
and you sleep through my orchestra of sobs and caresses, I’m proclaiming affection in soft melodies,
let the notes fall just so on your breath, you see, each inhalation is precious to me, and each exhalation
is a part of me, I’ve slithered into your lungs and you haven’t even felt me. But you feel me
when you invade me like war on homeland, spill my virginal blood with weapons armed to your teeth,
and wave the banner of my surrender like sheep flesh on wolf’s tongue.

 
and the fool you left behind, doesn’t even know what to do

I slit love into my wrist when I forget I let my wings be stripped, just for the ends of a kiss,
when I forget if I ever have a daughter, I will teach her that she is a musician, and can strum her own instruments
compose compositions worthy of Mozart, and that the heart can withstand the most brutal of slaughters
that her father, like a slave picking cotton, procured to the crackle of possession.
I sew imperfection to those wounds, like threading anew mangled flesh, ravished with intent
when I try to rationalize that masquerading as affection does not offer protection to the affliction this battle inflicts
the faint echo of a smile like mine and faces like yours aborts with harsh relief at the first of the bleed.

but, still, your knee can combat my thighs, and your hands can bind my arms, and that strangled
half cry can be lost in the cicadas chirping their ignorance to this heart thudding, blood thickening, undone defeat -
and yours words curl against my sternum, a heavy gold coin as a vestibule for heaven and remuneration across Styx.
My body cannot twist and bend cannot flit like stones to produce fire, it is made for endosmosis and aegis
 it is meant to rise with the dawn and fall with yours into the dusk, meant to float in the ocean of us
and swim back to the continent of we; your arms are twice the length of mine, and with bound limbs you reach
sustentation and I plummet from the sweet ivory of your flesh, and that magnolia that was mine into the dark

you were always afraid to open your eyes in, and journey alone without my hand subdued in yours.
that misery taste like —-

everlasting is the language of your tongue, as swahili, 
as we journey along godshead and in the silence is 
when the sun bends around the sea and I watch as
it descends into the gold of your hair and there is something 
like love that moves through me when you turn to face me
but all I see is a silhouette with this streaming hair:

“you need to learn to read the bible in Latin
because that is the language of the gods and 
maybe they will listen to you and keep you from being such 
a black thing, so unnamable and hopeless and damnable  
and if you would just learn how to take your heart from
your chest and stroke it back to life; find your lungs
to be these pink newborn things looking for life
and take that small child with the unruly hair and those wet
eyes and tell her they are suns sinking beneath the depths
of her skin to never rise unless she opens her mouth
and cries, you will just be the voiceless cracks in the earth.”

and I sat down and she smiled softly and came forward:

“i am not sorry that you do not know the difference between
love and hate because some days they are all the same 
and if you sit here and listen to the silence with your cup of milky tea
and just exist for a moment in time, maybe you would learn
to speak all the common language with flexible, various tongues
and love all the cultures and suns that orbit the world finding
too many brown faces upturned to the heavens desperate
and forked tongues licking the ground for more dignity
and if the death toll rises maybe you can get on your knees and
pray and save some lives because you know Latin 
and the gods know you.”

and I ask her how she knows all this when she cannot see the sun
because her back is to it and all she sees is my face:

“because I am you and you see for me and if you would just get
up and take my hand, you and I will dance across existence
and learn Hebrew enough for it to be special ink on our skins
and understand it all as words untranslatable, and real, and
the garden in which our immortality lays as lillies and orchids 
and deep red roses like our love.”

Against the gentle rock and cascade of the shifting tide, a lone crustacean returns upon his peregrination between land and sea, its claws glistening with drops of water, though they are raised high, as though in victory. At the sight, I muse that my grandfather might have execrable from excitement in a gale of Russian and sputum, jolted from his unchanging perch of a rocking chair, and pressed the Ushanka tightly to his skull. The man had been pale and blue eyes, all sharpness and little placidity other than his hushed affections, and fidelity learned through hard winters and continuous deaths. Raised amid the ideas of war and propaganda, he married young and did not die the same; the Russian Revolution had crafted the paths available for adolescence, and made the type of man that holds neither conviction nor faith in what was not procured from his hands and blood and sweat.

I think about him only so often now when reminded, though now lovingly recalled, fades again into the annals of reminiscence. I think of the parchment sight of his hands, a thumb missing from the left, delicate blue veins stretching beneath the ancient complexion; I think of the dropping support of his mouth, as to appear continuously disapproving; I think of the sharpness of his chest, so his face appeared as starved as when his picture was first taken (eyes disfigured into large, charbroiled sockets ethereal in their intensity).

“The wanderings of nomad will never be satisfied,” I respond, soft, a voice buried beneath the sand. It holds the weight of a previous cohort lost to progression, an accent that might reveal where roots had begun; though her voice was melodic and just as improper as others transitioning between several intrinsic vernaculars. Such too made her exotic. Yet, no matter, my statement remains unfinished, expeditiously following pursuit of its predecessor. “But, do try nomad. Be an exemption amongst the rest who’ve tried, and failed.” 

I mean no insult or injury, though I expect he understands the shaded displeasure that underlined the command. Oh, just as he, I traveled long and far, the most settling; there was so much learned in the hard jungles of African where hate had been grown long through the blood. At the age of seven, pressed between the petrified bodies of bloodied parents and massacred strangers, the sounds of gunshots setting in merciless death bringing succession, we discovered how fragile mortal existence was. The heat of perfumed blood and rot embedded in dark limbs, the taste of extinguished expectancies and eradicated ambitions, being cradled in a shelter of my mother’s still arms and beneath so many warped cadavers, the length of the day was only determined by the fade of salvoes.

Artyom, Greek derivative of Artemis. The namesake of my grandfather had been accurate: safe and sound found me amongst the wreckage. We sought asylum in the United States and new life. It was the way of all those within my family, to have significant names and live to its definition, yet I disappointed. Though I never felt the stirrings of a devotee, I liked to think I was named upon the occasion of Christmas, or the more religious denotation. I thought this for many years after my mother’s death, wroth comfort from its impossibility. Seven tentative years later tilting upon the precipice of adolescence, in a drunken stupor, my father divulged its truth to the odium of my grandfather: Natalya Demkina, had claimed to possess the numinous ability to look inside human bodies, seek all the internal sinew, tissue, organs, and make medical diagnoses. She had been perceived as a mere charlatan, but they said, large gray eyes had stared back suspiciously so, before I let would suckle my mother’s breasts and cosseted the constituents.

Still, years later, again I was redefined. Demkina and I were born in the same year; she is Saransk, Mordovia, and I in Izhevsk. I still had no understanding of what tenacity was, not until, I was told, very gently at fourteen when I had my first menstruation blood, and bewildered, I burned the underwear in the inglenook. He told me namesake did not denote the persistence of enduring (as it were the encumbrance of a woman) , nor given accurate shading of character, but by the constituent of an amicable heart and mind. He told me I was named after the Natalia Republic, whose history has been wroth with death, disease, and cultured. It changed my entire life. The taste of Nomad had settled anew.

My taste was death, destruction, and dusk, the last breath of my mother; I had inhaled it deeply, and felt her lie right beneath my soul. Some believe the wandering was about having little regard to societal views, traditional senses of finding fulfillment within life. These individuals searched for purpose, for experience, and others, like myself, began as escape, though none sanctuaries against killing men.

My walk back is now hushed; the wind no longer blows, and the moon seems stagnant. I feel more tears slip past lackluster fortifications and pretend rains have fallen.

            Night One Complete

             Self-portrait by ~digging-4-more

When I was a child, there was no question about which language was my native one, no confusion about which language should be used in private and public. They were interchangeable, one and the same without an prejudice against one or the other. My mother never really got the Creole language, but my grandmother and I would hold whole conversation over matters that we couldn’t have revealed by the dominant and ever present English. In Creole she would say: “Your great-great grandmother practiced voodoo—she was evil. No wolves would stay in her house; they would leap in great numbers from her windows and kill themselves.” As a child, I didn’t understand this contexts but I would remember replying in the same language the simple inquiries of a child. Things are different now. Creole, though apart of my heritage has taken a more recessive role, something that I haven’t had the need to acknowledge to the lack of its intimate discussions. We speak of these things often but not enough for it to be a tangible thing, it is a natural, secret language between us. I can’t speak it well anymore. Sometimes my stepfather joins in.

Bilingualism is an important issue arising in today’s society with the debate of whether English should be the solitary language one should know and employ in their futures. Many views differ and they are both correct in their own right—middle ground is nearly impossible, if the diminutive hope of it ever exists. Bilingualism should be taught early; it should give children the wonders of language, the need to understand its intimacy, the want to employ themselves.

I was also a very strange child in comparison to others. The kids I grew up around spoke very mean, harsh words of English I didn’t understand and repeated to my grandmother for their meaning. I learned then, English—as all languages—were cruel in their right and were specific tools. They were meant to inspire, to promote, to destroy, to deceive. I hated the meanings of the words they spoke to me and so I refused English, I refused to speak a language that could hurt someone deeply with curses. They were anyen, nothing to me, the speakers nor the words. My words were creole, they were soft and gentle with their almost melodic sounds, phonically and precise. Their was never harm meant unless it was intended. The abuse began with the words ugly and brown-nose, which was odd to me because they were brown-nosed just like I was. Of course my confusion with their words were due to the mis-communication in languages, the casual and unconventional ways words are interchanged and used. I spoke back to them as pati mwen. Leave me. And they never did because they didn’t understand.

Eventually I started to grow up and I learned the power of words more. I cannot say what exactly attributed to this things but my father, who I had an estranged relationship with was often an inspiration. I would think because I was by technicalities of a different race, he would want me only if I bettered myself and rose against the statistics he condemned me to. I would think those children’s words of ugly  were a direct explanation of why he was never around. In result, I had to learn how to defend myself against them with my own, to pick them up as almost physical things and deter and defeat my enemies with. My grandmother also encouraged me to use their own words against them and to demean and bully them back. I would say things that I’m not proud of back, never their curses, but my own. For the most part it was, enough for the time.