how do I start sleeping again, angel boy?
Author’s note:
I have always had this dream where one eternal man with puppy eyes keeps coming back to bother me. Not every night, but enough. Just enough to write a poem.
I wrote this poem because I did not know what else to do with him. He kept showing up, and I kept waking up, and somewhere in that space between the dream and the morning, I fell for him (I am sick I know).
This is not a love poem for someone I have loved. It is a love poem for someone I keep dreaming of.
I do not know his name. But I know he keeps coming with a kind of devotion, and wants me to remember him. Silly boy.
So, this is the remembrance of him. Whoever he is. Wherever he is.
I hope he finds me before I run out of sleep.
He is already there when I enter my dream. Kneeling. Always kneeling, like he has been waiting his entire life just to press his mouth to the arch of my foot.
He does not bow because I asked.
He bows because I am the only altar he has ever believed in.
He calls me god. He seeks divinity in my eyes,
the specific, unhurried devotion that lives in him only when he looks at me.
He worships the language I speak like every word from my mouth is of feminine serendipity.
He keeps learning me.
Like it’s the only language he can speak.
He writes haikus with the last drops of his blue blood.
He tattoos my name into his eyeballs, so that all he can see will be me.
He drinks the salt of my tears like I am the only scripture worth carrying inside his body.
I did not ask to be someone’s holy text.
But here he is, memorizing me,
dog-earing every page.
He holds my ankle like it is something gold. Turns it over in his palms slowly.
Slides my anklet off with two careful fingers and places my anklet on his own head like a crown.
He wears my gold like a king
who knows exactly who made him one.
He traces the bone of my ankle with his thumb.
Kisses the indent my anklet left behind.
Works upward to my knees, the inside of my wrist, the dip of my collarbone,
like a man who has studied the map of me and knows exactly where he is going.
I run my fingers through his hair.
Pull him gently, just enough for him to forget his name.
I have been touched before.
But I have never been read.
Read.
He lays his head in my lap. Looks up at me like I hung in the dark, like I am his whole dream.
I light a cigarette.
I blow smoke curls into his face. He does not move.
He just blinks slowly.
He keeps all the butts I smoked, every single one, with my lipstick stain.
There is a particular kind of power
in being someone’s idea of home.
He finds nirvana in the simple fact of me,
not in what I give,
but in what I am.
I did not know I could be someone’s religion
until he made me one.
He comes to me even just to pour alcohol on my burned wounds.
Sits beside my damage.
He traces every scar on my legs with such unbearable gentleness that I forget they were ever wounds.
This is the thing nobody tells you
about being loved by someone devoted,
the willingness to be present inside your wreckage.
He worships without being told.
He is patient. God, he is patient.
like he would wait a thousand years at my feet just for me to look down.
And when I do look down,
when our eyes meet,
he smiles.
Smiles.
That smile.
Even in sleep, it wrecks me.
He is my angel boy, and nothing has ever felt so filthy as plucking the wings from his broad shoulders, undressing his softness one feather at a time.
[I am so filthy. He is so filthy. So is our love.]
He says his prayers between my thighs. And I dig my red heels into the base of his spine until he blushes the color of my filthy tongue.
He is grateful. Endlessly, embarrassingly grateful.
Like I have given him something sacred by simply letting him kneel.
God, if you are out there,
if you are listening,
he fucks loves like a seraphim.
With his whole wingspan. With everything.
He tucks the persian blue flower behind my ear.
He says: you are the most divine thing I have ever put my hands on.
And I, who have never believed in god, think ,
this must be what the devout feel.
This terrifying, enormous, ordinary grace.
He holds me like I am water and he has been thirsty for days.
He tells me all this with his face buried in my hips.
On top of him,
I am ancient.
I am the only god he remembers.
I am the name he says when he has run out of other words.
One day I taught him how to hold my throat in one hand and my heart in the other.
He learns. God, he learns fast.
Holds both with equal tenderness, equal terror, like he knows the weight of what I’ve handed him and refuses to drop it.
That is what happens when someone holds all of you at once.
I press my lips to his temple.
I want to learn all of him.
He says: I have been looking for you in every room I have ever entered.
I say nothing. I pull him closer by the collar.
Let him press his forehead to my knee and stay there.
Some prayers don’t need an answer.
They just need to be heard.
I will ruin him. I know this even in the dream.
I am not gentle with the things I love .
I am consuming, I am total.
I am the kind of woman who leaves marks.
And all he will say is thank you.
and all he will say is please.
He will offer himself up like he has been waiting his whole life for someone to finally want this much of him.
There is nothing more devastating than a man
who meets your hunger and raises it.
Who looks at the enormity of you and says,
yes, more. All of it.
Morning is already pulling at the edges. The dream fading, his hands growing lighter, his voice going quiet the way candles go quiet before they go dark.
He looks at me.
Just looks with such pathetic puppy eyes
filled with adoration.
I wake up reaching for something
that is no longer there.
My cigarette.
The blue flower.
My anklet on his head.
The weight of him in my lap.
The sound of him pleading.
He has stopped coming in my dreams.
And so I have stopped sleeping.
People will see his reflection
in the curve of my smile.
They will not understand
why a woman who walks on shattered glass
keeps smiling.
But I know.
Somewhere in the dark behind my closed eyes,
he is already kneeling.
already biting my hips,
already sitting in my lap,
already touching my feet.
I just have to find my way back to sleep,
so that I can dream of him, again.
So tell me, my angel boy, how do I start sleeping again?
oh god rishi, that's a good idea actually. thank you sm, hehehe <<3
God give me atleast 10% of her addiction in writing.
Maybe get some sleep instead of writing he might comeback into you dreams Arch.