get

He loves her sex and poetry
(feel all of it, straighter hips, lips and balls

I’m also her gay sexuality
(the one really knows this me

Before all desires submission
(the one really knows this fantasy

I want to threaten or poetry
(but he expected. I’m just shy

Do yet myself == “Do”
Get up, getting off of harming anyone, you’ll forget when I come home

I’ll be a boy, stuck in before all your feelings
In before you get it up
In before prosthetic dicks

This thing about desire: leave the muck
I just treated him, scared

My third week is so hurt.
The role he may think, mimic

I’m more comfortable with lots of thinking
Sit down, get off the edge, I’ll remember when you come home

do

Do it. Do it all from him
(he’s a vampire

If I had his fantasies they’d involve punishment
an alarm along the wall.

He walks in this way, angry to tell you now leaving
leave the very idea of being me!

She rides out something beautiful
— shatter on us —

A lesbian body can
demonstrate an idea: I must love him
Ignore
Acquiesce

But bring her out
)) this voice ((

Do it from him
Ignore a poet, adversary, wife
Be a (wo)man who takes care of his balls
Ride out something beautiful
As punishment

When you come
^
< .home. >
v
“I’ll be angry”

I hate the room
I cannot leave
.the very idea.

Your phone was expected to demonstrate
I am not what
I am her
This fantasy

If I had these dreams, wet with shame
you’d slice me open?

He walks into a role, an adversary, or a wife
an angry wo-man lives inside

He grunts as though he could make her through writing
–guess his limbs–

A gay body can
My hate is so tired: I must love her
Count
Build

He’s just a poet, a butch woman*
*just a body in that moment

He would be so hard under his daddy
(there is no erotic here)

The idea of me is every man in that moment
my sickness builds
/\ a boy /\

Her own pleasure is on us, shattered, angry and jealous

Tie me up and torture my manhood
Make me ashamed of the silences between us

I can overhear your puppet

I really want to love you,
even though ?this body?

Barophobia

///1///

I wouldn’t deserve sexual pleasure. Occasionally I’m totally naked — man-boobs, tiny cock and consequence. It’s not to say that I couldn’t peer out over his face, pretending to be him. Spooking him, I make my sex through his presence.

My muscles are made out of air and silicone. I find myself always at the edge, willing myself. The closer I can see his death, the more I worry about how he goes into the moment.

I’ll write a woman. Crush himself into a thousand hearts in the form of her. My dick isn’t real anyhow, so I’m absolutely stone. He seems lost in my body. It doesn’t matter; I can’t betray myself. Breathe against him (I can’t).

I’ve encountered him before — he gets the details enough to say “my body.” He keeps going, far higher than I wanted to go. I feel nothing, just look at the shape of thin air. He wants to know: Do you understand the fiction between poetry, experience and the self? The closer I relate, the more poetry becomes a distant shadow, a deeper closet.

\\\2\\\

He’s curious about his side and how it is that it feels these feelings. He’s not touching, just looking at his insides, releasing the currents. He worries about his knee and the heat radiating from his restraints. He constructs a hard shell around himself, telling himself he is irresponsible; impossible.

My body becomes an object of his experience. His hips dive into my throat. I feel endangered by his sex on my face. I am pretending to be flat chested, wondering how it is that he intrudes, so strongly that I can remember enough to trace out my story. What I will think in order to fly!

When we sit close, I remember I’ve never felt anything contacting my body. Sometimes I am just curious about your breath, your shoulder, your height, and how you live in your own skin. But it wouldn’t be right to look at you as an object. I won’t push you. Fuck me. Try.

I’ll just snuggle up in thousands of clouds. I’ll remember the sweet smell of heat that radiates from your head when you are sleepy. When its unrequited, you don’t have to fly. Just sit close, desire coursing through your arms. I’ll become a small ball resting on your sleeve, peering out at the moment. And when I fall asleep, you can touch my throat.

\\\3\\\

Just when I was resting my arms, you ask “what happened to flying? To the sweetness of riding the warm air?” I turn my back toward you, as if you are holding me. I can feel the man in my desire and he’s beautiful.

But I have to watch my back. If anyone learned how I want, even if they haven’t, they would want to know, “what are you seeing?” and “how can you be sure? Can you even see?” And my desire would do whatever it needs to do in order to pretend. I’ll move. I’ll let go of that. Anything for you to relax into your ability to know I’m yours.

Perhaps it’s all projection and it only makes sense in the moment. If I let myself, I’ll go absolutely mute. When you ask if I’m ready, I close my chest or light it quickly into his. I told you already, that is irresponsible and impossible.

I was resting my heart on the right to be heard. I fear that sensation because a poem, for me turns feeling into numbness. I said today, on edge barely breathing…
“…”
I remind him that I was resting so he bolts awake.

///4///

The more risk the more beauty. But I want to fly. Even when we are sleepy. Still I’ve never felt something like this. Still scared, absolutely mute. Take off your face and pretend you are ready. We will talk about rising. How I feel him be. Wouldn’t it be amazing, would it? Traveling up to blend with him. What I want is beautiful.

But what my body would betray. I look over my shoulder. Our shirts over our faces covered in sweat. You will read my sex as nothing in something. What I want is possible, not straight. I fly over the canyon. You say try. I want or don’t know what I said today, “what would I do?”

Flying Compartment

Bind me into a story
I never felt anything I read, not even once
What sentence wouldn’t deserve pleasure
like the fall of a glider resting against the mountainside

Awaken me at a right angle
Intimacy is not the accident you wanted, not right now
A number of swooping birds are feasting
perhaps it’s ok to die to satisfy hunger

Cover me under the pain in your chest
If only he were deeply closeted, a woman on the inside
He asks me this only to look away
given that it’s safer not to soar

I felt something, like a hard shell around a soft desire
This sport is irresponsible, impossible, and sad
And still unable to ask you close

He will circle higher than the current
Generate standing waves of love, triggers point downward
Toward a restful death
without the friction of my hips

feel our pasts : look away
feel we’re pilots : doubt it

take off your subjectivity
take off your sex

I want to do, he had learned how I trace the more he wanted to
This fall will give, or hit an end, like an accident, like nothing he’s willing to ask
I let go, no longer numb, climbing in spite of continual descent

He will think about the instruments of height
Get within the current, ask me to try
Snuggle up into a thermal
a cloud of our shirts left behind

What are common causes of shoulders?
Your hips and locks on planes?
What is just a shame?
a lesbian trapped in flight

Warm air is irrational
Were it possible to find myself feeling his body
Morning Glory tells him to take me several times
Resting so amazing
Traveling inside a deeply closeted woman
I won’t push him to be the things I smell
I just watch his breath
He collapses where I begin

Liftoff

Circle within guilt
just sad

Otherwise
talk about his presence
take flight whenever I sense his body

I know what he always wished for:
Can you/I have a penis?
Can we roll together until we hit full velocity?

(this is a very poetic story about the ground and the sky, but it’s not rational)

Talk about it
Tell me
Try

A pilot could master me if:
My chest is bound
Heat flares from demands and affirmation

Warm air is a resting place, somewhere I don’t feel like drowning
But if I loose the things he pretends
Lose the ground
Pretend I don’t feel

Tell me
Try

But mostly just guilt
And pretending to be you

Stow away my presence
Take flight
Pretend
Lift
Contract

Heat Rises

My mind betrays me: I won’t hurt him
The window passes through different shapes
lifting
gliding

My mind betrays me: Are you ready
We can generate columns
families
friends

I read that to achieve long straight distances
You drown on holidays
Hit inversions
Surround the air
And are carried aloft

My mind betrays me: I say nothing
The heat radiates from your back
warm
safe

My mind betrays me: I think outloud
I’ll write a cloud, smash an instrument
I’ll fly right through it

My mind betrays me: I wished I learned how to feel
He is willing to soar long distances
He will master the thermal

grasp

I can put it on
I can put it on for you
For you

Slip the hold
Grasp the cracks
I can’t
Control

I am so scared
to lose you
as your back turns away

I am so scared
to feel you
chest on my back

make/resorts
make/resists
make/restraits
make/restores

twist my desire like straw paper
rolled between your anxious fingers

wanting your abuse
the only way I know how to protect

watch me decay
to half life

But you said
You said
You were angry
What is that?
Danger?

But you said
You said
I’m here
Hold my trust

But you were angry
You were
You said
You said
Let’s not blow up

Blow up is what I know
how to protect
hold me?
I’m decay
Half life
Blow up

All I know
is my fault
is your desire
is my shame
is your come

Obsess control
The only control I know
Is over my own brain
(heart

If I can think it through
If I can think you through
If I can think through you
enough
again
over
some more

You won’t fury
You won’t hurt
You won’t touch
I will want
What you want
So I can want
So I can want

reach

Step in just enough now
so I can eject my agency
whenever he is in the room
thinking,
and gasping,
for me

An animal comes out of my chest
My come fills up with violation
My violation jets out the door
The door closes on everyone’s scared faces

Hard strokes down his throat
are so taboo now
whenever they choke themselves
dreaming
and reaching
for you

Now fill up the blade again
My blade will graze the surface of your skin
Your skin will generate my compliance
The compliance is transcendent arousal

Straddle your object of equity
not just in scale or distance
whenever you speak of killing
exiting,
and longing
for me

Wrap your size and sensitivity in a towel
Your towel smells like violence
Your violence jets out of your hands
The hands lunge at my throat

I just see if in me
not only in context and strategies
whenever I feel
numbness,
and dying
for you

trying to walk with a man

My poetic remixes are based on how I learned to draw as a kid by tracing. I rewrite the poem in my own words, with my own experiences, memories, and sensations, as a way to trace the feel the flow, style, rhythm and meaning.

Rich’s “Trying to Talk with a Man” has been analyzed as related to her divorce, a realization of the end of love, gender trouble, the intimacy of dead ends, projection, co-dependency, and war.

I was struck by this poem because it resonated with the explosive tendencies that have existed in my close friendships with other men. I walk a fine line between a longing for camaraderie, physical attraction, and a desire for platonic intimacy, all of which, alone or in combination, trigger my gender identity panic.

remix of Adrienne Rich, “Trying to Talk with a Man”

In these fields we are testing bombs
that’s why we came here.
Sometimes I feel safe under the canopy of trees
Free to submit to the force of waters that smooth stone away
I see it like I see myself in you
Partial, deep, alive, holding, ready to break open
We run breathless as the rain soaks our skin

What we’ve had to give up to get here–
whole LP collections, plays we enacted
we were heroes, looking through windows into some other life
my love letters, your suicide notes
sunsets across the frozen lake
we could pretend we were free as children

Coming out to these fields
we meant to find something we never were
driving among careless robins and cornfields
We use a language whose grammar negates pain
You swaddle me with familiar silence

Punctuated by the cries of tired toddlers
reminding us of the limits of our choices
everything we were saying until now
was an effort to blot it out–
Coming out here we are up against it

Out here I feel more vulnerable
with you than without you
Ghosts rise from the road into the sun
rainbows disappear from view
We talk of past lovers, indiscretion
describing our heartaches as if they happened to someone else

Sirens approach and you look at me like an emergency
Your dry heat feels like power
Ignore me and walk ahead
as stars in my eyes demand your attention
reflecting lights that spell out: EXIT
Talk softly, walk closely against me

We go on talking of the danger
as if it were not ourselves
as if we were testing anything else