wild nothings, wild somethings

by ashli w

These are the things that burn up in a moment and we never touch them again because they don’t make any sense. Like laying in your bed in just the right way for you to kiss me but before you can I’m already turning my head and smiling suspiciously because it could have happened and it would have been perfect. But now it’s too late. The moment dismantled, the former feelings all fractured now, all sabotaged, and so we move on. I think that always puzzled you about me. How I could take something before it even happened. So excited and stirred that I can’t even let it unfold - no, I’m too busy eating up the possibility that I consume the opportunity. Always panting, forever distracted. All those things you used to tell me wildly and carelessly, waiting for the world to gobble us up, spit your love out like sunflower seeds in summer when the days go on and on forever. These are the things that break days, guilt and moments, the stuff that makes poets and fills notebooks. We believe in things so drunkenly in the glow of hope. We love things stupidly. Our jaws full of dragonflies, which like humans don’t learn how to fly until right before they die.

But this is what I’m good at. Picking apart that level of uncertainty in everything and putting it back together again the way I always wanted it. Curving light and wondering about how lonely it is chasing things you can only get so close to. How is it that I was always the bravest when I was also the most naive? How can I keep smacking into the words even when they shotgun through me leaving holes in places no one else can reach? and I can’t stop, I won’t stop, I want more. Like that feeling I get in the pit of my stomach staring at the string of buildings in the city emanating fearlessly from the top of the ferris wheel. Because like redwoods I burn from the inside. Fighting constellations I don’t even know the name of just to walk away with bruised eyes and bad dreams about moon tides pulling the people and the poems away from me. Like those stars that get so hot blooded they burn themselves out, pow, right in the middle of your red giant you’re just a speck, a moonlet of your could-have-been, your ursa-almost-major. Humans are so sad and strange. The things I do make no sense. It’s like how a building is called a building when it’s already built. How I had more bones the day I was born than right now at this very moment— and sometimes I can feel them grinding up beneath me like all the things I never did. I am waxed and waning, always ready right when it’s a little too late. I am the side of the moon that the earth never sees because sometimes it’s hard giving all of yourself to something that might not get it, that might just pull its self away. Tell me, could the chaos ever accept you and me?