Finally, I've been kissed

once again in my dreams,

i decided it was alright

to taste your lips

as you press me

against the kitchen tiles

while the rest of the world slept, unawares.

and so you came back to me last night, i imagined, from a place called lindaloma, a name that's always sounded like something you made up in your head to give your existence, existence. the entire floor was alseep and you led me to the kitchen, where just a slice of light reflected on the white tiles and pressed me against them, kissing me into a pain i have known in all our conversations but never really been able to express to you. i don't know what your kisses would taste like. i will never know. but in my dream last night, i knew that mouth was yours. and although i woke up with a holey stomach, i felt it was your way of forgiving me for being the whore i am inside, while i pretend to be a nun outside of me. i like to believe, you sealed what love we had in that kiss, even if it was only make believe.

i'm redeemed, even as the feel of the kiss makes my eyes run.

Rumi?

there was Rumi who stuck a chord in me. and there was you who did the same. something about stirring people's souls is so individual and queer that it chokes me if i think too much of it. Rumi, you, i.

i wish you thought of me as me, without poetry, without anything. i wish you loved me with nothing, for nothing. but how may i ask you to love with nothing, when you never loved in the first place?

Hollow

how can you make me fall apart
and break my fall with loving lies...
how can you treat me like a child?
and like a child i yearn for you...
As I listen to Katie Melua singing, you become a slab of silence nestling in my cavity, melting gracefully, spreading through my mouth and sliding down my throat into my guts, knocking me hollow.

lies

go ahead and scar me again. tell me you love me and i'll believe you even if you never meant it.

never

there was warmth, longing and the need to walk away from you, when we tread along that sidewalk yesterday evening. i've never quite understood how you found my soul, when everyone else only found my hands. and yet in the warming of these hands sometimes, i almost forget that you never held them. never.

Silence

and yet

what did we leave behind for each other

but a stretch of silence

when the nights coiled and twirled and held our words together

they became conversations

when we touched each other through the trans-pacific waves

we consummated our love

when we lashed out at each other, the words fragmenting, bickering, falling like swords and we clenched against wants

we fell

FEAR

i've developed a fear for motherhood. all my life i wanted to become a mother. but i also remember how i got cramps every time i saw women give birth on tv or women talk about childbirth and pregnancy. i've never quite understood what makes me that way. but it looks as though i have a deep psychological fear for gestation and child birth.

i am terrified of the growth, the changes and the bulge right now. on others, it looks fascinating. but i get swiftly nervous thinking of trying to play God, creating, when i have no capacity to even be good about a process so special.

i'm terrified. terrified. i cannot pretend to be great about this. i do not have the greatness of womanhood. i'd rather adopt than try to create within me. i am a coward in this, as i have been in everything else in life.