linguistic hunger.
A love letter of sorts in poetry, for givemehistory. The product of staring at this picture for far too long, and of watching a beautiful, beautiful game.
(Note to Emerald: not exactly Stevie & Xabi per se, but something about gorgeous boys and glorious moments that verges almost on it. Posting this is faintly embarrassing, because it's awfully rough and I'm writing, well, fanpoetry, almost, but that's okay. :x)
i.
I've been feeling starved and anorexic
during these heavy summer hours,
malnourished and half-transparent
without actually being so. It's a kind
of linguistic hunger, maybe; mouth and
stomach missing the stilted way words spilled
lightly from your throat. The soft rough
breaths you would take between sentences,
feet fast on the ground, ribs flexible and heaving.
I want to kiss the late afternoon sun
out of you. I want to spend early mornings
trying to memorize the way the veins
skip under the skin of your hands. I
want to sit by your side, next to you,
in your shadow, indistinguishable and
bland when placed by the steady steady
brightness of your face. I. You. I see you
with the sand against your ankles, arms
still by your side and eyes turned towards a
thickly warm Mediterranean horizon. I see you
laughing into air that tastes like honey and
cardamom and pomegranate. I see you in
the wet evenings, with the rain slick and sharp
against the back of my neck, in the mornings
after I get up (an anonymous head bowed
slightly outside of a coffee shop, hair fine
and dark and too sharply short at the base),
in the train stations when the doors slide
closed, underneath quiet bridges.
I see you
everywhere.
ii.
I wonder which direction the wind blows
five thousand miles away from here.
How the nights solidify, how the light
stains your room before dawn. If history
walks on delicate feet through the streets,
weightless, whispering stories that remind
you of greatness and glory and a thousand
years of war, of soldiers and gold.
Is that what you hear at night, the battle cry
of crusaders and martyrs? Is that what you
breathe day in and day out, what you swallow,
what spreads its way into your bones and lungs,
benign but dangerous nonetheless?
iii.
What I mean is that I miss you,
I miss you. I've got that dry, breathlessly
desperate taste in the back of my mouth again,
even months after, the feeling that's something like
victory and tears and impossibility. The window's open and it's
cold where I am; I can hear the weather report
from the television set two rooms over and
I haven't had anything but coffee and chewing
gum for days and I love you, maybe, or, at the
very least, the way your shoulders settled
under the weight of ten thousand prayers,
the line of your neck silhouetted against a dark sky.
This is what I remember: Your knuckles pressed
against my palm, the blazing white lights,
the unexplainable deadly vicious beautiful
joy of being alive in that very exact moment
where anything and everything seemed possible and
within grasp, when we were untouchable and glorious.
This is what I remember: The way you had smiled at me,
warm and golden; the press of your mouth,
a little dry. You, made beautiful from something that
I understood but couldn't ever put into words.
You.
(Note to Emerald: not exactly Stevie & Xabi per se, but something about gorgeous boys and glorious moments that verges almost on it. Posting this is faintly embarrassing, because it's awfully rough and I'm writing, well, fanpoetry, almost, but that's okay. :x)
i.
I've been feeling starved and anorexic
during these heavy summer hours,
malnourished and half-transparent
without actually being so. It's a kind
of linguistic hunger, maybe; mouth and
stomach missing the stilted way words spilled
lightly from your throat. The soft rough
breaths you would take between sentences,
feet fast on the ground, ribs flexible and heaving.
I want to kiss the late afternoon sun
out of you. I want to spend early mornings
trying to memorize the way the veins
skip under the skin of your hands. I
want to sit by your side, next to you,
in your shadow, indistinguishable and
bland when placed by the steady steady
brightness of your face. I. You. I see you
with the sand against your ankles, arms
still by your side and eyes turned towards a
thickly warm Mediterranean horizon. I see you
laughing into air that tastes like honey and
cardamom and pomegranate. I see you in
the wet evenings, with the rain slick and sharp
against the back of my neck, in the mornings
after I get up (an anonymous head bowed
slightly outside of a coffee shop, hair fine
and dark and too sharply short at the base),
in the train stations when the doors slide
closed, underneath quiet bridges.
I see you
everywhere.
ii.
I wonder which direction the wind blows
five thousand miles away from here.
How the nights solidify, how the light
stains your room before dawn. If history
walks on delicate feet through the streets,
weightless, whispering stories that remind
you of greatness and glory and a thousand
years of war, of soldiers and gold.
Is that what you hear at night, the battle cry
of crusaders and martyrs? Is that what you
breathe day in and day out, what you swallow,
what spreads its way into your bones and lungs,
benign but dangerous nonetheless?
iii.
What I mean is that I miss you,
I miss you. I've got that dry, breathlessly
desperate taste in the back of my mouth again,
even months after, the feeling that's something like
victory and tears and impossibility. The window's open and it's
cold where I am; I can hear the weather report
from the television set two rooms over and
I haven't had anything but coffee and chewing
gum for days and I love you, maybe, or, at the
very least, the way your shoulders settled
under the weight of ten thousand prayers,
the line of your neck silhouetted against a dark sky.
This is what I remember: Your knuckles pressed
against my palm, the blazing white lights,
the unexplainable deadly vicious beautiful
joy of being alive in that very exact moment
where anything and everything seemed possible and
within grasp, when we were untouchable and glorious.
This is what I remember: The way you had smiled at me,
warm and golden; the press of your mouth,
a little dry. You, made beautiful from something that
I understood but couldn't ever put into words.
You.