the California suit

Yes, you can wear it too. It's the same suit
and the same secret. I'm the same secret.
It's the shirt you put on that smells like me
but only other Suits would recognize. It's the
smile you put on that
remembers me but doesn't ever speak.
It's the secret I keep: you're all dressed alike,

---

On the grand timescale, you haven't
even managed to interrupt one grain in the
cosmic sands.
and on our little dustmote
dustboat
must-dote
you planted a grenade and
grinned at the results.

I keep searching for the physical evidence.
The bruises that survive the dream--
that survive your beating eyes
proof that all these worlds, coexisting,
can know each other.

And every time I turn my neck i feel the
stain that tells me where your lips go
to drink. But I can only feel it.

Tell me you're real, and
make sure I can't see the evidence.
Tell me you're real, because
God do I love it when I can't tell the
difference.
Fuck me and tuck me in with all your realness
and then, you sly thing,
leave.

I know

that love is made of oxygen.

Just watch how well it
burns.

Love is a tricky thing

(I love finding inspiration in the work of others and playing off each other. A friend who sympathizes with me wrote a poem; she is responsible for this.)

This is what happens when you

find all the drops that you couldn't pour into

your boyfriends and lovers.

All those drops, the last ones that

kept you upright, rippled

one by one in blue waters.

While you give them away,

you don't notice the strength

leaving your body. You don't 

realize that the outcome is complete

vulnerability. 

And when you used to be a stone,

impenetrable by the knives and

winds of novelty or of change

or by whatever actually intangible things

about which we write poetry,

you are now water, too. 

Infused with love--

sweet, saccharine love.

You are just as much of a father as you are a mother.

My eyelashes are the crushed butterfly

wings that used to kiss her

blue children good night.

I am the old stitches coming out of

ragged blue jeans. 

But they have been resewn before,

they will do it again.

And sometimes they break a bottle

over the ship and it feels like

it was your head.

And I will be proving somebody right,

you say, and I can hear the lies

and bullshit drip through your teeth.

My sons and daughters deserve every

bit of joy and applause they encounter.

But only them.

Ever.

Don't ever pour this much of your heart into anything. Just trust me.

Samson by Regina Spektor--Cover