socially awkward.

(60)

clavicola:

I can never read my own words, can never clutch at their necks
and choke out a meaning without putting months between us first.
I feel my poetry in the base of my chest, as a thin puddle of
rainwater that I look into and see myself       among last winter’s leaves
, and a run over coors light. 

It’s so easy to look at the mark of another’s pen and see a glimmer of your
own scarf fly past. I feel nostalgic for times I’ve only ever read about,
but still I feel them like a tremor in the knots of my spine, like I’ve
touched the skin they’ve touched, like I’ve
lived the world that they’ve swallowed like 
watermelon seeds. 

My fingertips move while I sit thousands of miles away at the summit of
a mountain that traced like cobwebs. The last stanzas are the hardest. 
I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve accumulated in the hook of a
comma, how many kisses I’ve hung in that pause, but I can
tell you that a period is always intentional, and that a caesura says more
than any of this every could.  

But tonight there is a candle lit, and as I write down the thoughts 
of a Thursday evening with a glass of cheap wine cupped between my
palms, I think of all the ways one can be honest without telling the truth
, and how reading over the last line I wrote makes me feel
all too vulnerable, like I’m holding my own life in a petri dish before me
and examining myself underneath a microscope until everything I say
becomes pulp.