u/penbrok

I remember the dip of your hips.

The place where there is a definite need to feel warm lips… a calloused grip—

The part of you that says, “hold me tighter as we fuck.”

I think of your lips, swelled, cheeks flush, and warm gasps draping an arm around my neck— down my back.

Nails biting as you kiss me so.

I am into it as you whisper praise and plead for more. Im taken by the way you look away as I say, “I need you.”

You can’t believe it, out of breath, bangs sticking to skin, and damn near falling apart. How could anyone need more of this?

I do. I need more of you. In anyway that doesn’t hurt. In all the ways that makes feelings— moments— landmarks— not hickies that leave ugliness behind.

No… I think of the dip of your hips, the lip of your panties teasing me… shirt pulled just high enough to reveal skin.

A part of you that says… “touch me if you dare.”

And my hands need to touch.

Baking cookies,

Keeper

I think you want to be happy, and that this is how you get to be happy.

And I know that road. That certainty.

babe— darling… lovely.

I wish you the best.

And when you find it in your heart to visit me, I will invite you to sit, share coffee, and show you the quiet places I’ve come to enjoy.

The mundanity of my life, isn’t glamorous, but it’s home… and if the cries of gulls, peace overlooking tidal pools, white, sandy dunes, and a place for you isn’t enough, then I understand.

I won’t evict you, you’ll just recede into the tide like a beloved sandcastle.

Stay… don’t… Im here.

-keeper

I went to a sex museum today. I was curious. I was not amused.

Fucking doesn’t constitute sex.

I can’t imagine it having greater pleasure than shoving a plug in an outlet and sometimes having a kid come out for the lamp. For lack of a better metaphor.

Maybe there is sensuality, maybe in the heat of the moment, there is a type of love, an Eros of an idea of affection.

But I didn’t see it there.

I can’t imagine fucking up someone so badly that they enjoy hedonism for its own sake.

Or maybe I’m the strange one. Maybe there is no one else like me…

And so is it wrong that I have this need to be gentle. To love softly. To be dastardly with only one partner.

Am I the outlier? The one that wishes for just one person who only wants me, not because she needs to possess me, but because I fulfill her too.

Who wants the suffering to mean something with someone. Someone I can hold without fearing to break everything…

I feel I could break as a flake of snow hitting salt at the thought of her arms folding over the back of my neck.

Melt from the idea of kissing the spice of sweat off her collar bone, and—sheer in Twain— as I speak such languages to her body, the most salacious saved for her clit.

But No. I don’t think I’m wrong. The world maybe wrong.

How could you do that with one person, then try to replicate it with another or groups of others? Why would you want that? Why is that appealing. Fucking isn’t so great.

It just Seems like the world is hoping the same experience, hits the same way, with every chance it gets.

And I need more than that.

Waiting,

Keeper

If you kiss me, sit in my lap when you do so.

I want to bear the weight of your consequences. I want to feel your whole being, I don’t want it to be chaste, friendly, kind. I want “dirty” to slip its tongue in my mouth and recite Shakespeare.

I want your hands in my hair, almost clawing frustration into my scalp. I want you to exhale this guilty need in a breathless moment.

Or don’t. And I’d like that too.

Cordially yours,

Keeper

Do I think of her often?

Not as much as I think of myself nowadays. I’d like to say I don’t think about her at all, but she fascinates me so…

You know. I do fantasize about her. I wonder if she’d hate me for that. Not in a sexual manner. But… the way the light caught her eyes. How she snorted when she laughed with me.

Her kindness… oh her kindness… how could I not think of her.

But I try not to somedays. It hurts my soul too much.

Sometimes, in the gym, I look at the strongest guy, who’s trying really hard. Lifting way too much, this look of desperation on his face. As if the pact he made with himself, if he lifts this 10 times, he could have her back. And I wanna ask, who was she? Why did you love her? What did she make you feel?

Cause maybe I’d find kinship in that struggle.

But I don’t. And we lift. Heavy circles, physical burdens, emotional strain.

Of course there’s therapy, it’s great, but nothing communicates to the soul, that “we move forward”, more than lifting what we couldn’t before.

And still I miss her.

Growing stronger to carry you easier,

Keeper

I want to meet you, the way they say you should:

“Not looking.”

I think they mean to say, “while living my best life”.

But I don’t want that.

I want you to meet me at a low point and love that man. So you may learn to love who he is when he’s happy, and not the other way around.

Because I will never not be unhappy. In fact, I will always be dour, moody, and heartbroken.

And you will witness that change. Over time. Over you. Over me. I will become happier as time moves on, and you will somehow learn to love me when I don’t write. I hold your hand. Where I won’t lament, ruminate, and hold pain, but just smile and mean nothing when I answer, “nothing”.

I want to meet you before you know my name, possibly between your legs or the trail of kisses along your spine. I want to find myself in you, so that you may lose yourself in me as time passes. You can find my name in there if you look hard enough.

Meet me here. In the depth of my ache.

Love me here. Where no one but I can.

Find me here. Before you know me as something else.

Yours to lose,

Keeper

I don’t say more than what obligations demands.
Hi— hello, how are you?

Insert polite refusal to talk about religion,
Money, or politics.

I don’t want to speak about those things.
But if someone asked me and they were more than a captive audience— thank you for being here by the way… ahem. If they asked me about what I thought about anything, I would say:

I would want to know what she thinks and oppose her, so she could argue with me at all times. If I felt cold, hungry, or tired, I’d try to ignore those things, and focus on the matter at hand… admiring her ire, her flame, the way her finger points, the slight curve of her frown, and the way her eyes narrow.

Because I have found that when you agree with someone— they move on. They don’t want to stay and chat more, no… she is a fighter, forced to wear a dress, but wears the dress she wants. she came here in armor, and I have asked her to unsheathe her sword… so she may focus all attention on me— as image commands all my attention on her.

And if she stays, she may get to know me.
That is how I plan to fall in love with her.

In a crowded room talking to no one,

Keeper

Often, I am on the shore,

But you arrived and I wasn’t there. It’s like… planning a party you don’t get to attend. But I’m glad you were there.

I hope on the beach you got to hold the warm sand and imagine me doing the same. Because I am in my head.

Just an echo following an echo.

Did you have that dream?

The one where I ask if you regretted things?

I hope I get the chance to ask that. I really do.

Feet in the tide pool,

Keeper

They said: “you have an air of sadness around you.”

And to my utter dismay, I thought: “my life is lived in half moments. Half in love, half in despair, half in, and half out. All in darkness.

When I think of what I’ve lost— I cannot help but be overcome, ramparts raided, stores burned, and the people, my wealth, all lost.

You see me alive and yet, I breathe so shallow, you may say I don’t breathe at all. I am the last of a life I hated, and I am in the beginning of a life that seems so infantile. It infuriates me that I am but helpless to be so.”

But I can’t say that. So I just replied: “divorce changes a man.”

Smoking at midnight,

Keeper

You were never meant to understand this pain.

That is why existence hurts.

---

Wisdom was never meant to be your guide or anyone’s guide, it’s a tally of every scar and every hot stove you’ve touched that imprinted the knowledge— that you should never do this again.

Yet, you live.

I can see why God loves that tenacity that makes you human, and the strength it takes to move forward.

Love isn’t all consuming, but it in itself, is wisdom one must touch the stove top of.

What purpose for this you may ask.
I don’t have an answer.
But we try.

To you— from me—

Keeper

For all my flaws, I choose to be defined by the woes and worries of my tides,
So I may give forgiveness for the worries and woes of others.

To deny that, I myself, am a slave to my baser instincts— is to fight them in every man, woman, and child I meet.

Faces shadowed opposite of my lonely light. Painted with a darkened moral grey that demands me to challenge them to the moral death.

Wherever a person agrees that they too are elsewhere instead of human, there will always be conflict and consequences for their inhumanity.

We are the worst things to exist, it makes it easier to be kind to others when we understand that.

In the dark,

Keeper

I’d like to be loved with a lust that thirsts for rivers.

Where I feed many of the hungers and feed to satisfying ends.

It’s a nice fantasy. Shallow and deceitful. Because its purpose is to slake my own thirst, and satisfy my immediate hunger.

It’s not what fulfills me, heals me, or feels good.

Nope— but I would love to be loved by my worst traits and qualities. The ruthless ways I play Catan. The insistence that black coffee is the way coffee should be drank. My inattention to the news.

I want to be loved in the dark places. Where our demons dance and my heart can be safe.

I want to be loved by the knowing of me, in private, little moments that don’t ask to stay.

I want so much for that it breaks my own heart to know that I may never receive any of it somedays.

But I know I deserve it. This love that is to be known and loved for the knowing of me.

If I wanted sex, I’d try to have sex.

But I want respect, intimacy, kindness, and acknowledgement.

Cold wants that don’t necessary want me, but will settle in me for want of home.

From the ash of a cigarette,

Keeper