violent devotion

[text id: how did you get so close that i have to dissect you out from under my skin? / memory is a deathbed. remembrance is a grave. the memory of you is a scab that i keep picking so that it scars. a burn, a souvenir, something to claw at that claws back at me. / i refuse to be haunted by something less. / there's a sun-sized ache where your hands used to be. / and now that your place is empty, the blood in my heart pumps around nothing. / nothing. / nothing at all. / senseless circulation. / what am i to live for when i have made my body my casket? / where am i to go from here? / and i always knew longing had another name she wouldn't let me call her by — it's hunger. / my heart grew up to be far more starved than my stomach. / it's the things you learn in your childhood, from the words of your mother, from the hands of your father. / if your teeth do not graze my bones, i do not wish for you to kiss me. / how have i turned gentle love into such devastation? / such greediness? / i carry a coffin for a heart; everything i love must be buried. / plant your garden in the cracks of my skin—mud, gravel, everything. let my blood be water to cater to your needs. / terrible, terrible human, thinks barbarity and love are words of the same meaning. / a mad dog would be a far more gentle lover to the rocks being thrown at him. / and, my dear, i wouldn't ask you to fold me in the pages of your favorite book, just the embedment of fingers between my ribs. / how did you get so close that i have to dissect you out from under my skin? / GET CLOSER.]

[text id: how did you get so close that i have to dissect you out from under my skin? / memory is a deathbed. remembrance is a grave. the memory of you is a scab that i keep picking so that it scars. a burn, a souvenir, something to claw at that claws back at me. / i refuse to be haunted by something less. / there's a sun-sized ache where your hands used to be. / and now that your place is empty, the blood in my heart pumps around nothing. / nothing. / nothing at all. / senseless circulation. / what am i to live for when i have made my body my casket? / where am i to go from here? / and i always knew longing had another name she wouldn't let me call her by — it's hunger. / my heart grew up to be far more starved than my stomach. / it's the things you learn in your childhood, from the words of your mother, from the hands of your father. / if your teeth do not graze my bones, i do not wish for you to kiss me. / how have i turned gentle love into such devastation? / such greediness? / i carry a coffin for a heart; everything i love must be buried. / plant your garden in the cracks of my skin—mud, gravel, everything. let my blood be water to cater to your needs. / terrible, terrible human, thinks barbarity and love are words of the same meaning. / a mad dog would be a far more gentle lover to the rocks being thrown at him. / and, my dear, i wouldn't ask you to fold me in the pages of your favorite book, just the embedment of fingers between my ribs. / how did you get so close that i have to dissect you out from under my skin? / GET CLOSER.]

[text id: a mad dog would be a far more gentle lover to the rocks being thrown at him. // how have i turned gentle love into such devastation? / such greediness? / i carry a coffin for a heart; everything i love must be buried.]

"...the opening line of a poem, [Paul Valéry] said, is like finding a fruit on the ground, a piece of fallen fruit you have never seen before, and the poet's task is to create the tree from which such a fruit would fall."