Recoils (for Allegra)

My skin recoils. Touch it with finger tips, cool or warm, it contracts to a point, a whirl of brown canvas speckled black and peach. My skin knows love, the love of belts, of switches, branches, fists, the love of kicks and falls, scrapes and jabs between rib cages. It knows the love of soles crushing ankles, of back hands to the face, hands larger than mine. My skin knows fear, of a tender brush across the ear, fear of pecks slight and wet, of arms around its center and gentle compression. Apprehension at a smile and the panic of sweaty clumps we use to greet, my skin knows it well.

When you talk, the tender caring voice that quiescent my spiteful din rings through. But I wish I felt safer with you, that our hugs were damp grass under cottonwood shade, not a pop quiz on personal space. If I could speak with the elegance that I feel when you mock me for being too kind or tease me for having an absent mind it would be ok; but I can’t. And my skin crawls when met with soft pulses of sincere affection.

I wish I felt safer with you, that your hands were lemon slushies on my cheek but dermal softwares calibrated for concussion; but still . Te extraño cada dia, cada hora, cada vez que veo fashion forward gutter punks in drawing 101, with big smiles and industrial silos brimming with quips.

I never had, for you, the love that spoils to hate, that equates admiration with possession and cannibalizes passion to shit out as regret. On days when I can’t leave my bed or hear a human voice, that isn’t a formless critic ripping me to shreds, I’m glad you’re far away and that the me you picture is stronger and less combustible.  

Sometimes I stare at welts from thin edged steel and think of cigarette burns at parties. And wonder, if you know that bridges long neglected can not be burned and conflagration sweeps my countryside on 5 to 10 day cycles. And ash collects and clumps around my joints and where my skin is pasty white and gray it recoils.

I know you don’t remember. We held torsos and it felt so real for fiction for so long, a bus ride, a wind soaked cliff and glassy expanse. Our hugs were damp grass under cottonwood shade when oxycoton pried my cage and smashed it on mafic shores. And I saw you, closed my eyes, woke in yellow California sun and felt my skin, and felt it burn.

And though I left you when our homes pressed me in, know that your love is my measure and that none have made me not feel cactus pricks that fissure this brown box which holds me in.