Screaming from the Building

Listen, I hate this. Yes, that’s how I want to start.

I’m not comfortable with writing and audiences, so I’ve been toying with could I just not and staring at a blank screen and trying to balance stupid shit on top of other things around my desk for a few hours now. 

For clarity, I’m not talking about public speaking, or presentations in front of people. I mean only and specifically sharing my creative work. It is actually and currently physically painful to me that I’m going to put this out into the world.

There’s a reason I write anonymously and that’s because I’m a coward.

Here, I might add, I got that sentence out before I really understood where it was going and now it’s going to stay there, whether I like it or not. (Not, for the record. I like it not).

I’ve let my problem with audiences stop me from doing more than a few things that I really did want to do, but in any moment of truth that involves anything emotionally important to me, I run screaming from the building.

But I write. If I am honest, this is how I would blog, and this would be what I post first:

---

Blessing

You said you had a type and I knew

immediately that any answer to the question

(I didn't ask) would be

terrifying.

You saw it in my eyes and smiled kindly.

The easy silence you let hang between us, then, now... I 

Hope lasts forever;

I'll keep my question buried in the small spaces between you and me.

You cut around everything I needed to keep so carefully,

only nicked my skin open in ways I couldn't feel.

Those count; they all count.

Spilled in while I was trying to look away.

{Silence}

I love you, too.

---

Eating Alone

I fit right in at my neighborhood dive,

comfortable with my back to the corner against the jitters.

The half assed pass with a dirty rag leaves the table grippy,

grabbing my bare arms, a reluctant lover with no one left

to choose from in this empty room.

     I think I live in this roach light; I love the dim of the middle distance,
     somewhere around the five hundredth in your thousand yard stare.
     This place, like me, like you, is out of focus until I stare and I make sure
     my lingering glances are short and rare.

---

Eating Together

I brought roses; I shouldn't have.
We talked, laughed, sparked, clicked, planned, did.

No more; we chew.

---

In Passing

It was a simple moment, an easy 'here'.
The small brushing of the bottom of your hand against
the top of mine that I remember weeks later, I
stop and think about, I think about and... stop.

In some quiet periphery, some slight and gentle ticking,

is there a badly fraying rope,
the snapped strands twirling 'round a straining and failing center?

Nothing may come between us, I say, and we both laugh with each other
for, I hope, the same reasons. You know me well enough that you can excuse yourself
and sink into me, and I can feel you feeling safe.

To me, it sounds like the deck of a ship, wooden hull and sails slapping hard against the wind,
through the trough of one deep wave and over another, when all around is
solid green water shipping over the bow, blasting the deck clean and amidships
I feel the cannonball against the waterline. I'm listing, with a full sail.
Soon I'll be sideways to the water.

In all that swirling maelstrom, in all that spinning,
it would be impossible that I could pick out just one rope snapping;
but I look up all the same.

I'd catch the falling blade in my back, with you in my arms.
You had already saved me, and I'm still in search of the sunrise.