idiosyncraticburrito

[idiosyncraticburrito]

Walking the woods barefoot

Taking lessons that didn’t need to be learned,

I showed up at your doorstep.

Stinging nettles buzzing at my feet,

Wild red berries in my teeth,

I must’ve looked mad kneeling,

Asking to stay the night.

10 days passed before you plated up your heart,

Beautiful pink and lightly charred,

I frowned and grinned as you tore into it,

Little spoons and big knives digging out my favourite parts.

I packed my little nothings and waved goodbye,

A small piece still in cheek, sitting slightly tart.

[idiosyncraticburrito]

Wound bearer

I lay flat on the cold grey marblestone,

Over this grave we constructed,

Just the lonesome you and I.

The phantoms of your cries

gently covering skeletons with

streams of the sand I cry.

Out of water, out of tears,

Inside and out, we are parched dry.

You are the bearer of wounds,

Deep crimson and full of ire.

I count them through,

From the ends of your frazzled hair to

Your curled up toes.

How long until they consume you?

How much more until we become the sad news?

The disease she always believed she was,

Perhaps I am just a wound.

I am a gash on the walls of your lives,

Ruining your carpets and drowning your mirthful sound.

We dig just past the clock singing midnight,

Our siren songs to keep us company,

You watch me bury myself in my obscenities.

Out of mind, out of sight.

[idiosyncraticburrito]

I was almost me again

A fortnight ago when my head fell

On his shoulder as I wept,

summoned by the gravity of loss.

You didn’t know it,

But I was almost me again

And he was almost you.

The lock of arms that separates

Me from holding you.

I see myself waking one morning

A thousand miles away,

Turning over to be pulled in to your presence.

But I was never me, you are never really you,

We play house with our little bodies,

You love how I love you.

[idiosyncraticburrito]

Bitters and Vermouth

Loving you is complicated.

I am a long distance daughter but not from flying across the seas to run away.

Nothing about this was lucky or ill fated.

I have been far away for as long as memory serves.

So much love to spare in a house of unrelenting rain,

And no warm place to keep it safe.

Carefully curating every crimson bruise in my dear diaries,

the dry corners behind my jeans

and sealed false bottoms with hidden keys.

Walking the exact 13 steps to your bed

when my own thunderstorms scared me more than the daylight you,

I would fall asleep in the safety that

lasted exactly a half rotation of the moon.

Unlucky 13 for an unlucky me and you.

I never did learn how to quit

the pursuit of you.

All of it latched, stashed and squashed

has turned bitter rancid.

My love has not aged like fine wine,

I am sorry if my loss tastes like

bitters and vermouth.

But then,

nothing about me ever did go down smooth.

[idiosyncraticburrito]

Gasps echoing down the hollows of my heart,

I find myself daydreaming about how

Your eyes could rest on my hands and linger.

Ravenous to hold them and

Envious of the air making itself

At home between my fingers.

I sprint down the empty hallways in

The most magnificently elaborate frills,

Hoping you run around a corner

To find a glimpse of a sequin.

I am running from your love,

Hoping it catches me against my will.

That way if I ever fall,

I will say I never mean to give in.

Sour grapes to my fox,

I demand love at my own whim.

[idiosyncraticburrito]

My arms shake

Possessed with the phantoms

Of the seconds, minutes and hours

spent admonishing any air

To dare come between us.

Holding on, for dear life to pass by.

I restrain my heart from aching

Over your lingering warmth,

The scent I would inhale greedily on my sheets

Like a desert ravenous for rain

In the mornings of pale december days.

I turned you around and told you to walk away,

But every step you take closer now

wishes me to pour milk and honey

Over the burning embers in your eyes.

The emptiness in my chest

Sits quietly most days.

But when you smile the way you do,

innocuously over my misshapen ways,

I find myself missing the man

Who wanted me whole when

I had only ever broken myself into parts

To display in my own

museum of tedious amusement.

My body is an empty house you once made home,

The carpet laid with your rolling laughter

And the walls painted with my intrepid screams.

I know not how to entirely cease loving you,

Cleanse my floorboards of your muddy June footsteps,

Approaching clarelessly to wrap me

in a sense of familiarity I could then

only assume meant love.

Making you a habit ruined me,

I’m unlearning the very essence of you

To be left with an outline of what

I curated for you.

But she was just that,

a boundary of a person, who was made empty for you.

[idiosyncraticburrito]

I carry you close to me

A locket digging warmly into my chest

Filled with your love like it’s meant to be.

My hands just reaching up to the bed spread,

When you pushed me off and I saw your contempt,

I puzzled over it and decided it was a memory to keep.

I stood and leaned my head against the bedside table,

When you taught us about the unregrettable absence of me.

I stood above the bed wishing

For bedtime stories and fables,

You spent your time convincing yourself

Of the brokenness in me.

[idiosyncraticburrito]

Sunday morning 6am - I’m in bed waiting,

For you to say you want to love me.

Running the hills of your silence,

Echoes of my bare feet chasing you

In the grass soaked from your tears.

I slip into the icy December,

barely stopping to dip my toes in

Frivolously hoping you’ll join me

And see that I’m shivering.

Wrap yourself around me

Because I’m colder than I seem.

And I want to be warmer than I can be.

The scent of his misbehaviours

hasn’t left me yet,

And I can only stand in the rain

Washing someone off myself,

Once again.

[idiosyncraticburrito]

I forgive you like I forgave my mother,

Often and hopelessly.

A dark storm of I should’ve known

With a silver lining of just maybe this time.

I learned to heal from all the women before me,

So I forgive but I can’t seem to forget.

I lie here in bed next to you,

Waiting for you to love me for

Absorbing your wounds.

My heart patiently lying on the floor

Hoping you would look at me,

A sponge of your bleeding scars

And pick me up with compassion.

You have loved me more,

More as I poured into you

With all my light.

But my cup runs dry and

now that you’re almost quenched,

You clutch my fading hand for some more.

More more, milk and honey

I’m never enough even when I’ve given you everything I’ve got.

I teach you to love me,

And I compile an instruction manual

Like I’m a complex piece of machinery.

But it’s so simple,

You just don’t want to see that you could love me better.

You want to be enough

And you twist your knife in me

because it’s killing you that you’re not.

[idiosyncraticburrito]

There has been no magician,

greater or grander than me.

I have concocted dreams of our life

out of a few words of reassurance

you uttered this morning.

Imagined love has been my biggest illusion yet.

I am bad at signals and you are just a lighthouse in the broad daylight.

[idiosyncraticburrito]

The fear in your eyes when I scream

makes me wonder.

Am I too fierce or are you too fearful?

Am I too much or are you too little?

I speak softer so you can listen,

I gaze warmer so you can look,

I dance happier so you can hum.

For you, I change myself

and you dress in my old skin

just to strut around showing me

the worst sides of myself.

I hide my whispers of sacred fears under the bed

and you take them out under the moonlight

to marvel over like poetry.

I am a story to experience,

a musical to rave about to your friends.

Something so beautiful from a little distance,

never real, never truly yours.

[idiosyncraticburrito]

Home is something you only care for when you leave,

It’s nostalgic of the love you never appreciated.

And I want to be the serene summer cottage

you dreamt of and savour every single sharp corner and inconvenient architecture in,

Something you never call home.

[idiosyncraticburrito]

I am to be lonely in the loneliest of times.

You carve a hole in my barely healing heart

And use my stifled cries as a lullaby.

My love is slept on,

So as the night passes you by,

So will I.

[idiosyncraticburrito]

You dip into your paint of regret

And draw on me all the strokes of contempt.

I stand there, unmoving as you forge

A lonely night sky into the arches

Of my shuddering chest.

This darkness is a birthright,

A beautiful gift from you

And you never taught me to refuse pain.

So I went down on my knees and

Held out my hands for you to

Lay all your sorrows into the red selvages.

[idiosyncraticburrito]

Milk and Honey

I never drank love

So the fool that I am,

I told myself I would only love

By pouring into every cold corner of you.

At first, I shred my arms open,

But you stand there unscrewing the bottle.

Drinking me dry every morning,

Asking for honey to make it sweeter for you.

Licking the red off the corner of your lips,

Shaking your head with that waning look of dissatisfaction,

Demanding more and more like a careless child.

Little by little as I drip into your glass

You say my eyes don’t shine the way they used to,

You complain that I don’t blush for you anymore.

My vengeance is to love more than I am.

Yours is to watch me become less of myself.

[idiosyncraticburrito]

Loving you has always been war;

Combat in the middle of my assumed comfort.

Always on a perfectly sunny Monday afternoon,

Ordinary and unsurprising unlike the weekend.

Waged with the sound of muffled cries

Instead of loud sirens.

The mouth of my grief suffocated

With the pain in your eyes from the wounds you just laid.

My wounds carelessly stuffed with the gauze of your unspoken remorse.

And always when I would finally

reach the end of my fears,

Would I find myself staring down

Into a deep green chasm of your uncertainties,

waiting patiently for your reassuring hand on my back;

Tipping me over, off the ledge.

I often find myself in the middle,

Halfway between loving you

And wanting to heal from you.

Between the devil of your warm excuses

And the sea of mourning in your soft brown eyes.

I am fighting myself to love you.

This rampage you started

only has one casualty,

and you haven’t even picked up arms.

Your crimes are already forgiven,

Yet I’m bleeding red and still running with the bulls.

[idiosyncraticburrito]

Isn’t it beautiful that

People seem to love love.

So much so that we would rather be

In the wrong love

Than to not love at all.

So greedy for just a taste of

Pouring into their eyes with all of your being

Even when all that stares back at you

Is doubt and hollow promises.

Loving what you built, over the person

you raised the banners with.

I am hungry for love

But now to be loved

Conditionally yet unapologetically.

To be loved because and then despite.