I’ve shared a room with enough pretty features
to wonder what separates one from the rest,
like shades of lipstick or degrees of hurt.
Since I’ve met you, I know.
It’s all about what moves you,
like choosing purpose over career;
aspiration over fear.
Whenever we share a space
you define that difference better than any word
I’ve ever written or read.
My mind stews in denial, plots in obstinance like a stepchild.
Then you enter, stage left
and my body betrays my every effort to appear composed.
My hands fidget, my legs thump like a tail,
feet kick the ankles of my chair,
foreign stares telling me to stop something I didn’t know I started.
Breathing becomes labored,
everything I’ve ever wanted to say
held hostage between my chest and tongue
like a hand held over my mouth or gun pressed to temple;
the impression marked like a brand name by hot poker
whenever I think about telling on myself.
My eyes bounce off everything else in the room
trying to keep away from you
like addict in a bar recovering from booze.
You ask what all the huffing and puffing is about
and I deflect with humor
in place of having to decide where to begin with the truth.
I’ve had enough fleeting crushes
to tell short term from long.
But I’ve never stopped being puzzled
by what makes one person rise above hundreds
as though my heart was a gold trophy instead of a failing organ.
Is it pheromones? Laws of attraction?
Survival of the fittest?
Even when your back is turned to me like a wall
you level me
the way a wrecking ball yanks a building from the sky
and scatters it across the ground like a body erased by fire.
Outside Lehigh University last November,
drinking overpriced Miller Lite’s during intermission;
I paused to look up at the sky for stars
and soon as I came back down, your eyes steered upwards.
I watched you, watching the sky,
a grin spread across my face like coloring outside the lines;
having read somewhere once
that people who are attracted to each other tend to unconsciously mimic each other’s moves.
“What?” you asked, catching my dumb smile
“Nothing”, I answered;
consciously praying it was true.
I’ve been moved by beauty and its deviants
enough to know I’m drawn to different, to weird and the outside of boxes.
But there’s a world of those girls I might write about once or twice
then dismiss like a meteor shower that’s passed.
How is it that you are the only one
I want to circle around like the sun,
risking the last of my last resources to print another page to write upon?
Even when you don’t feel like talking,
you make my heart pause, jump and drop
like drawers around my ankles soon as I get home.
Without making a single motion towards me,
you make it stop
like a car collision or near miss adrenaline rush.
Just being there,
so close to me I could turn around and touch…
I squirm in my seat as if driven by an itch
I’m too embarrassed to reach for in front of others.
You lean forward in that white, deep-V neck tee
so that I can see the color of your bra…
imagine peeling it back from your skin
like wrapping paper over a gift found before Christmas morning;
not knowing…I’ve become a teenage boy holding a textbook over his groin
when the hot girl brushes against his shoulder or drops her pencil by accident.
You don’t have to do much,
just catch my eyes like a ball in glove;
sit still as a model in art
allowing me to worship you in silence
and I’m forever your connoisseur.
Even as your voice grows near, I harden.
My body telegraphing to the world
that whether we are alone or surrounded by a thousand eyes
all I ever want to do is to bury myself inside of you.
I have been taken before, enamored, even possessed.
But, I’ve never stopped asking how and why.
How one person can mark you for life like a scar
while another fails to scratch the surface,
no matter how permanent it looks at the time .
Why, one is temporary
and another remains a force through absence and opposition.
Since I’ve met you, I know.
It’s the way my entire body responds to you without ever being touched;
the way nothing and no one else exists when you‘re in the room.
It’s the way you make me write,
when I haven’t had the slightest bit of motivation
to do anything significant with my life in the last three years.
And
the way I know I could get my shit together tomorrow
if I thought you and I were about to happen.
I could dismiss you as another drug on legs
and start working the steps, but I’d rather die face down in a gutter like Edgar Allan
than chance coming down.
I could write you off as a stellar muse,
say my thanks in a book dedication years from now,
but it’s not just my hands that you
move. _________________ shemovesme.wordpress.com
Thu Sep 06, 2012 10:28 pm
MysteryGirl Moderators
Joined: 02 Jun 2007
Posts: 3419
Location: I come from a land downunder
I really need to just presume a trigger warning with your stuff Brach...it knocks me on my ass everytime and leave me sitting there thinking...HOLY SHIT, I wish I could write like that.
It is painful to have a muse like that but oh my God it brings out the best in your writing, there are so many lines there I want to quote that Id be here all day. But you paint word pictures that I not only see with my eyes but FEEL with my body.
And, I dont know the answer BTW, why we hae that visceral attraction that our brain cant control.
HugZ, MG _________________ Be yourself.............everybody else is taken!
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