westcoastdreams

101 notes

I give myself five days to forget you.
on the first day I rust.
on the second I wilt.
on the third day I sit with friends but I think about your tongue.
I clean my room on the fourth day. I clean my body on the fourth day.
I try to replace your scent on the fourth day.
the fifth day, I adorn myself like the mouth of an inmate.
a wedding singer dressed in borrowed gold.
the midas of cheap metal.
tinsel in the middle of summer.
crevice glitter, two days after the party.
I glow the way unwanted things do,
a neon sign that reads;
come, I still taste like someone else’s mouth.

170 notes

Above the green plateau there is always grief,
which, inspired, becomes the breath of life.

1,425 notes

We’ve been kissing for months. Three times a week our toothbrushes share a chipped porcelain mug in my bathroom. As my lips reach for the juice falling from her laugh, her mom calls. I listen as she talks about Biology, her new job, asks about her sister. Her eyes drop as she whispers, No, I still don’t have a boyfriend.

On cue, I stop chewing. She looks at me, waiting for my face to flush, for me to tear from the bed, but I won’t get mad at her. She shouldn’t have to explain why we can’t go swimming in public, why I don’t own a razor, why she doesn’t need to buy birth control. She hangs up the phone; I pick up the fruit, tell her Apparently, there’s a tiny amount of cyanide in apple seeds.

She shrugs, says she can handle a little danger, but I’ve studied how her dimples disappear when she lies, and I know she’s thinking about a man she could parade around her family, who could kiss her scratchy with stubble. The kind of man I’ll never be.

She squeezes my hand in the movie theater dark but tosses it to the side in front of her friends. Says she just needs time. She walks on the sidewalk. I walk in the street. She closes the door. I kiss it goodnight. She goes home for Thanksgiving. I promise not to call.

If I were a postcard, she could hide me in her pocket. If I were clay, she could mold my body into something easier to love. If I were the guy who sells her a cup of coffee every morning. I could smile at her anonymously, safe as a stranger.

She kisses down my neck, my peel hiding the rotten fruit inside me. As I tell her about the cyanide, her head resting on my chest, she talks about cider, autumn pies. See, she says, Apples are harmless. But she saves the last bites for me, scared to let her lips wander too close to the core.

15,437 notes

Immature people falling in love destroy each other’s freedom, create a bondage, make a prison. Mature persons in love help each other to be free; they help each other to destroy all sorts of bondages. And when love flows with freedom there is beauty. When love flows with dependence there is ugliness.

A mature person does not fall in love, he or she rises in love. Only immature people fall; they stumble and fall down in love. Somehow they were managing and standing. Now they cannot manage and they cannot stand. They were always ready to fall on the ground and to creep. They don’t have the backbone, the spine; they don’t have the integrity to stand alone.

A mature person has the integrity to stand alone. And when a mature person gives love, he or she gives without any strings attached to it. When two mature persons are in love, one of the great paradoxes of life happens, one of the most beautiful phenomena: they are together and yet tremendously alone. They are together so much that they are almost one. Two mature persons in love help each other to become more free. There is no politics involved, no diplomacy, no effort to dominate. Only freedom and love.

75 notes

Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life.