bone

by Yrsa Daley-Ward

because writing is a soft and a hard place, all at once.

I’d been given poetry at seventeen when I heard Mama tell someone on the other end of the phone that being alive was harder than she thought.

Stop inciting stirrings, movements between us, little rebellions, causing chaos in all of my darker places.

The Lord knows you are beautiful and unfair. I think perhaps you should spare a thought, dear,for those who are sick over you, burning up with you, damp with you. You know what you do. You’re a slow fever. Don’t be so very engaging, amusing or witty or bright. You are causing confusion and jams in tight spaces. You are an accident in waiting. The type of accident with casualties spanning from me to you and here to there, a potential tragedy, a stunning unborn disaster. Should I touch you, I will suffer and you will suffer and she will suffer. You are a danger zone. I must not enter. I should not enter. But I might.

Me. Vincent. Sam...

To Six Who smells of tobacco and says, “Come on, I can feel that you love this.”

Sometimes exactly what you want not to happen happens anyway.

Loving someone who hates themselves is a special kind of violence. A fight inside the bones. A war within the blood.

secret

They say women are gentler, treat each other better. Please. As if we never learned to eroticize our rage, to block out the screaming of the gut.

also the sex is good and we are falling into something we will soon mistake for love

there is that feeling you get when you catch up with yourself.

Remember on the right night and under the right light any idea can seem like a good one and love love is mostly ill-advised but always brave.

Your tears cannot affect the weather. There are wars going on. The one in your body is the only one you can be sure of losing or winning, then losing again.

I miss you in tiny earthquakes in little underground explosions my soil is a hot disaster Home is burning. You’re a lost thing.

I keep getting the feeling that if you look at me for long enough you may see that I have a thousand fears

I am the kind of woman who is already teaching my body to miss yours without craving. I am the type of woman who is already teaching my heart to miss yours without failing and I am quite sure that you will find this unnecessary but I am already searching for a place to run to and hide when you say, Uthando lwami. I’m ready. Are you?

every time you leave the room I worry and think that perhaps I have imagined you and maybe you have imagined me.

I like the lines you use on me they crackle a little, like magic. I cannot pull my mind off you even though I do not trust your hands.

Look for yourself, because it never helps to hear from anyone else.

Know that if you are hungry for something but you can’t think what you are, more often than not, only love-thirsty only bored.

I said nothing, thinking of all of the things yo understand and all of the things you don’t like how I will love you forever but probably from afar not in the way you want and how you’ll find somebody new to be with. It’s only fair.

Truth is a beauty, whether pretty or not. Love doesn’t always mean you should stay. Sometimes the truth has to punch you, twice. Love doesn’t always mean you should stay.

You’d better learn to forgive yourself. Forgive yourself instantly. It’s a skill you’re going to need until you die.

There are parts of you that want the sadness. Find them out. Ask them why.

One day I will tell you what I’ve been. It will scare you.

Days when I so want to kiss you but your mouth is sour and my thoughts are bitter and I’m angry, just mad, just crazy with it all but we are each other’s home sweet home, Love.

The worst thing about somebody who betrays you, somebody who turns out to be a completely different person to whom you first thought, is the love that you still feel in your heart for them, embedded so deeply into the narrow spaces of yourself that you cannot access it to try and remove it.

Self-expression is a tricky thing. Just as you start to feel comfortable with yourself after years of not, you then have to justify yourself to other people.

Or that your Auntie Amy’s a man- stealing, cheating, back-stabbing bitch who can’t keep a man so she has to steal somebody else’s. We just don’t see eye to eye anymore, that’s all and he wouldn’t stop eating cashew nuts in bed.

Is this me?!

You are one of life’s anomalies and this is how I fell.

Stuff that you remind me of. Home. Wherever that is. I’m confused

Core loneliness is a terrible thing. I suppose we all have each other, but only up to a certain point. I suppose we all die stubbornly and separately, in the end.

I hope that there’s someone to tease the knots out of your hair. I hope that good is good and right is right and fair is fair.

I cannot find the God you serve and I have been known to stay out all night, searching.

but something of a different kind left me. no. left me I don’t think so left me I don’t feel good when . . . left me or honestly they were never mine.

If you’re afraid to write it, that’s a good sign. I suppose you know you’re writing the truth when you’re terrified.

I am somewhere between eight and twenty and she is somewhere between nineteen and thirty-five but I am not completely sure of the ages. They are melting into each other, swirling out of reach because this is a dream, you see,

Seize that loveliness. It has always been yours.