I know your grip
well enough to anticipate
that we will be gentle
in the breaking, like the snap
of lead against paper,
quiet, frustrating,
the smear of letters on fingers
and a shallow piercing in the page,
wipe the graphite away
but the hole remains.
I’ve always had fickle fingers,
human enough to want,
but too weak to hold;
some nights I’ll tuck cigarettes
in the in-betweens,
a half-hearted attempt at growing old
if a bit obvious in my pretense
when my callow grip dips
to leave a burn in the fabric
of my worse-for-wear jeans.
Though I can always undress,
the smoke—which some hours ago
eddied around my head—
will still take me to bed,
woven like tinsel
in the plait
of my hair.
Going to sleep
with the smell
of clove and tobacco
and the shirt I went to work in
is an exercise in tolerating the paltry parts,
speaking vows in the quiet of a palsied heart,
hands flat to skin drum our beats manually,
to simulate, or syncopate, the affections
that flow gently in our veins
with the rivulet impressions
of my cotton sheets.
Under the cover of night
I’ll show you the parts of me
which cannot be loved—
deeper and darker than the place
where my thighs meet,
more inner than innards,
more brittle than bird bones—
will you know them too?
Touch them as lovers do?
Can you sleep through the little toddler tantrums
of a girl all big and grown?
Commitment is pen to paper, to finger, to face,
smudging my leaden love
in the sweat on your brow;
now marked, it glistens to say
that by one another are we known
but by ourselves must we be forgiven.
