I am elated because spring, because love, because good God my friends
are amazing. Creativity and the shape that contains it, the way that distance
exacerbates insecurity and how a look, not even a touch, can help attend
to the tender details, a preference for in-person interaction, an insistence
on bodies as the shape of creativity, on bodies as bodies. I want you, it’s simple,
and all these flowers and all this work just makes it worse, more salient,
i.e. better. I like the sharp cut of desire as much as the soft unfolding, the ample
radiating outward of alient energy, gallant passes at some kind of brilliant
unfolding into all that we are in the moment. And this one, too. I worry
that you are too overwhelmed to connect with me. With work, babies,
and the basic challenge of leaving the house each morning. Surely my worldly
concerns concern you equally, how the crazy phases of life and their rhythmic
changes pulse with possibility. You are in over your head with me. Anyone
would be. Is. Except Jessica, maybe. I’m in over my head with myself.
It’s still spring, but now it’s Monday and I am quite undone by the fleeting
nature of both feelings and existence. Instead of elation, anxiety. Chaff at
the edges of what little attention I have–attention as a field that should be
sorted, but isn’t, anxiety as a kind of energetically thwarted love that stubbornly
refuses to leave the solar plexus. “I’m going to put my feet in the toilet,” says
Desmond, fully serious, slowly walking up the stairs, then suddenly declaring
it a joke. But is it? I go upstairs to check, just in case. I love my friends.
Desmond sits on top of me so it’s pretty much impossible to type, and I spend
the next five minutes telling him to get off of me. When I get to this line,
it’s tomorrow, and I extend my emotions once again, pretending I’m in control
of my love and creativity, my ability to not obsess over whether or not my lover
will message me back, whether they’ll tell me their dreams or tell me they’re
tired, hopefully both, but however it goes, I’m gone. Obsessing about however
it felt to do this and that and that and that. I prepare for tomorrow’s workday
and sigh. Trevor says he likes it when I sigh as I write poems. There’s a romance
to the moment that I believe in but don’t feel, not right now, even though it’s still
spring, and my friends are still amazing. I’m still hanging on your every word,
sweet one, and the semblance of something between us, among humans, among
feelings, exhausted by my own elation and swoon and by the basics of the day,
now several days, of trying to write this poem while mostly parenting and working.
My legs ache from hauling boxes up and down the steps to my new studio, disarray
a necessary precursor to order, all the weird and necessary objects lurking in boxes,
phrases lurking in emails. Why don’t you watch my instagram stories? They are
for you, in part, for all of you. For excessively late nights and early mornings,
the challenge of getting the grown ups and the babies out of the house at the same
time. I am aware of my indiscretions, have declared them to the proper authorities,
know that all these yearnings are ridiculous. There’s some kind of luchador horror
film on at the bar and I’m remembering a particular burrito place in San Diego,
site of many now-distant loves that I don’t want to wait another decade to see again,
the hollowness of middle age followed by overwhelming abundance. Behold,
all my loves! Ill advised and otherwise, marked and unmarked. Have you ever
been to Sky Zone? I want to dive into that pool of styrofoam with you and survive.