comfortable silence- a collection of poems

beloved

i was thinking about our conversation earlier. how you're constantly analyzing faces and anatomy for your art, brain always searching for things to turn into more pieces, and i realized that i wasn't so much as clear about what i was entailing. i write poetry. and with a constantly active mind, it means constantly finding metaphors, words, sentences, phrases, nit-picky and pretentious ways to describe everything that i'm seeing, feeling, and taking in. one of my favorite lines i've ever written reads as follows: "i draw flowers on everything. everything. just to try to recapture the bloom in my heart, the first time your lips brought my name." i wrote that about the first girl i ever realized i loved. recently. i can't help but find myself thinking it feels so kindred to you, to us. you're tranquil, you're serene, you're something so quiet it would go unnoticed if it weren't for your draw. the lure. the persistent pulling about you. you're compelling, compulsive, causing chemical chain of circumstance that in all my life of loving, i've never encountered except with you, in all my time of searching, i've finally found something new; you spark me. ignite me, like lighter fluid on a lake, and i burn still, and calm. 

but still so feral. 

i want every piece of you. give me your messy. give me your joy, give me nights where neither of us sleep because i'm the shoulder and you're the river. give me dancing in the kitchen, give me driving down empty streets and blaring music that reminds us we're alive. lend me your secrets, your dreams, aspirations, shower thoughts and suicide thoughts and thoughts that terrify you in ways that nobody else can comprehend and i swear i'll listen. i might not understand, so make me. talk to me like i am the last conversation that will ever matter. talk to me like you're scared of what will happen if the words stay in, talk to me. talk to me like you begin to fathom how much i want to know, talk to me; or don't. sit, stare at your pages and i'll stare at my keys, neither of us will get anything done because we just won't let go of the other's hand. sit, run nimble fingers across cold knuckles, and bask in comfortable silence. lay down all that you find, your terror, your anger, your passion, your beautiful genius, lay it out for me love. press it into the hems of the silence and suffocate me with the fabric. make me into your seam ripper, look me in the eyes and run slender fingers along my spine and tell me that this, this is what i feel, this is what is wrong, this is what is right, this is who i'm becoming and that makes me feel this way. dig me into the folds, drown me in threads of thoughts, rip everything apart and we will laugh in the midst of the chaos.

this, darling, this is what being alive feels like. the feeling of the november creeping up your collarbones while you sit on the steps. your hand grazing mine for the first time, how mine were freezing and yours were clammy but neither of us cared, this. this is our messy. this is our joy, this is our late night, movie night, dinner party for two, this is dancing in the kitchen because we're learning to love breathing again. this is our first drive down a busy, busy road, weaving our way through endless lanes of people we won't care about in a year. this is the music that we can show to teens and say it saved us. this is all of my secrets, my dreams, my aspirations, you, it's you. you're my thread and thin and fraying you may be, you are strong. i am fabric, constantly stretching, constantly testing limits, this is the recklessness of my first sewing kit. a little white cardboard box, housing clumped piles of scrap pieces. tangling strings and buttons and needles alike. this is all of our thoughts, interlacing, resurfacing to intertwine. this is loving hungrily, loving feverishly, loving like it's what we've always known. loving like it's breathing, routine, repetitive, every second of every day because if we stop, it feels like we're dying. 

this is loving in comfortable silence, and being okay if things become loud. 

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