like a flower and a feast

There’s a dream where we break all the dishes in my kitchen and then
eat the pieces.
I know it’s a dream because we are still alive after we swallow.
It sounds more like a nightmare,
and it would be, except that
we are together,
so even the fractured ceramic is
tender as we chew it.
There’s a dream where we want our own world,
so we cut it out of blue and green paper
like a science project,
except your silhouette is every piece of land
and my spine is every mountain range laying across you.
Here are the broken plates
mending inside of us, healing soft
and pliant, bending like the necks of swans,
forgetting that they are glass.
Maybe we can forget, too.
I can kiss you where it’s sharp
until you can’t remember how the pain
made you someone to be afraid of.
There’s a dream where nothing bleeds, but everything is alive,
where broken things can be made
unbroken just by wishing it.
Let me tell you about the earth
and what it looked like before we
got our hands on it.
Let me tell you about the earth and
how it broke apart like a plate on
the tile floor.
We all know what it is to be unmade.
In a dream, we tried to forget.

The God’s honest truth is this: I wanted to ruin you. It was selfish and it was delicious.
I wanted you to pick out the bones of me from between your teeth for years after I happened to you.
And I did happen to you. We made sure of that, didn’t we?
Happened like the aftermath of some gruesome accident, it was so bloody and raw that you had to stop to look, didn’t you? And then you couldn’t take your eyes off it.
It was inside of you for as long as you could remember.
Then you had nightmares about all of that ugliness for days. That was how I wanted you, half thrilled and half terrified that you were never going to forget what it looked like. That it would be a splinter that never worked itself out of your skin and you’d feel it whenever you brushed against somebody else.
And why should you? When I loved you like that.
How could you forget?
My body so full that if the ocean tried to take me, the only thing that would come back up to shore was you. Or a bag full of bones curled around the shape of your name.
I loved you like how an abscessed tooth beats at the root, incessant and painful and raw.
I would have swallowed the entire Earth whole if you’d asked me to.
I would have taken the sky by the corners and ripped it away from the horizon.
So yes, it was the hungriest I’d ever been.
It was the most glorious I’d ever been, with you like that
stomach like a furnace, stomach like a hungry pride of lions.
Point me in the direction of any God you know and I’ll tell him,
I’ll get on my knees and beg him to never let you go,
‘I want to ruin that man. I don’t want him to ever forget me.’

I wanted it so much. I don’t know why I wanted it so much.

I have loved you so much that everything else sounds like a lie.

People then, who are sad, but can’t let themselves feel sad, or express it, the sadness, I’m trying rather clunkily to say, these persons may strike someone who’s sensitive as somehow just not quite right. Not quite there. Blank. Distant. Muted Distant. Spacey, was an American term we grew up with. Wooden. Deadened. Disconnected. Distant. Or they make drink alcohol or take other drugs. The drugs both blunt the real sadness and allow some skewed version of the sadness some sort of expression, like throwing someone through a living room window out into the flowerbeds she’d so very carefully repaired after the last incident.