tactile poem

I could (should?) write a poem, a book with how I've not been touched, how disconnected and a lost and empty it's made me feel in my short lifespan. I was born premi and spent part of my life in a box, always getting sick so that I could go home and feel loved, safe. (Having a comprimised immune system and chronic underweight-ness helped, I'm sure). My own wounds have kept me from intimate relationships, my own self-sabatoge has frustrated me for seven years, before realizing I'm not ready. Your body knows what you do not, and my desires don't line up with my needs. A desire that goes deeper than sex or death, deeper than your fingers around my wrists or my lips on his neck. Skin on skin is soul on soul, desires and needs I'm still trying to reconcile...
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tactile poem

It is only touch—it is only through touch,

that I find myself

wanting:

pianist hand between my knees,

fingers long enough to

crush love from down the road and even

those caresses I savored; massage chair

beating the back of my heartbeat to submission;

only imagining your palm a sail in the

wind of my jaw do I find my skin

opening like a door, pores faceted,

crystalline when touching the other we

drink until oceans empty, exchanging basins.

But the fingertips, your stubbled cheek,

they still thirst. My aching hand

stretches across the table

of its own accord.

Even my blood is parched,

gravitates toward your nearness

as though trying to drink storm-winds,

laden with water but achingly empty.

Electricity lying with the mountains,

with the heavy clouds,

rushing over my head and all of me shivers

at the mere thought of thunder,

having only dry winds about me

when it hits.

When moving, towards high closet shelves

fingers reaching for the last grocery bag,

wrestling a child into her coat—

each stretch is a gateway,

one side gaping open while the other

falls into itself. How to balance it?

Muscles must move like lovers,

a ribcage apart but with give and take,

though too much is always taken,

so that the skin lies above like a window

and everything peers out in

snap-straight shaking fear:

at the storm that shakes the glass

at the emptiness that whips around

this clapboard house, colder

than west wind.

(all work (c) treesa, under all psuedonyms and pen names, 2008)