I believe in Nothing, after This is all over, before Everything began,
So if This is Something, even just a little bit… it matters who I spend my time with.
You’re so in love it sets your eyes on fire. See, I need to feel that too. I’m simply not falling in love with you.
So take back your gifts of golden bracelets. I don’t feel comfortable giving them away. Though soft and made of finer things…
They are chains all the same.
-six pm
Paige Six | 2021
*a draft I’ve been aspiring to finish since I’ve sought to build off of the final stanza since 2017. It’s still sitting on my chest. One of the mornings I’m going to rise and sing the right companion verses. Until then, we have this.
⁖ Wish you could love me As you loved the sunsets In California. I never trust in anyone But for some reason I trust you. And if you fly to the other side Know, one day, I’ll follow you.
I wish you cared enough about me To watch the sun rise in the East We’re New Yorkers, it’s in our blood Staying out and running the streets before the dawn. I’m always on the run And you should be too. There’s a place out there for us to grab I am waiting for you To lace up your shoes
But you, you’ll sleep all fucking day. I don’t care, I can wait Trust, I have the patience of a saint. I’ll always love you, somehow anyway -six pm
i. i had a dream there were polaroids of us. developing sunken and strewn across my pink comforter.
(a soft cosmos.)
i saw how happy we were, you tall and in your glasses, arms around me and hunched to envelope your frame …around mine.
behold; my real smile. not where my controlled lips stiff; cover my gum line, to feign the sort of “elationship” i experienced only when we would speak…
ii. shut the curtains. i don’t even want the sun to filter in through the fabric & change the tone of my pale skin.
i want to stay the same, i want to be exactly as i was the day you reached across, felt me, and i touched you.
iii. i hope to hold our whole world and hand it to you in my palm.
(even if mine crumbles.)
Atlas bent & crippled i am devoted to holding you up. i will not shrug.
(oh, i must move on)
iv. (no.) cleanse my home w. white sage & string along my bedpost bewitched apples cored. finally biting into you was like biting into an apple that hid a star.
and *omitted, how i adore stars. i lose sleep surrounded by them, counting them, staring into mirror telescopes until my eyes burn and my vision blurs.
i will hold you in my mind’s eye forever. i will dedicate and devote every motion onward towards the path which leads back to you.
(even if it feels eerily, like eights.)
(infinity.) behold infinity within the iris of your half-m∞n eyes smiling back in a beam.
v. i’ll race time to the future, at the far end of our solar system. first steps cracking untouched crust of Pluto’s nitrogen snow, at the center of her heart- shaped crater. look back into space as the glim of Earth is licked (–flickers)
(the moment of our first kiss.)
like these memories, no more than a spectacle, a twinkle, in the otherwise steady shine of Earth bathed in our Sun’s overcast light. filtered and shrunk by distance and gravity as a star–finally, a star i had never gleaned before. (oh!) how fortune smiles upon all…
Stars crossed the moment our eyes met, but at this hour when the sun set herself upon the meridian, casting us both aglow in gold each other’s gazes are all we two did behold. It was six o’ clock P.M. and Autumn had set the air to chill. Wind-span of air from the Earth’s lungs rustled the golden leaves mimicking the distinct sound of a deep and endless ocean. He was truly remarkable, 6’3 and tanned like wheat with honey brown eyes and thick curly black hair faded high and tight. He smiled at me brightly, and I did my best to breeze past him, but truth-be-told he’d simply rendered me speechless. I don’t believe before that moment I’d believed in first sight love, even then I don’t think I understood what had just begun. In that moment I only hoped that if no one ever chased me down for a second chance again, that this man would. And he did. -six pm
today i purchased einstein theories in hard back. no. i did not need another copy but my first three are already full of poetry in the margins and in between spaces. my husband reminds me of a beau tiful black hole the way his darkness glistens. i love him. he’s done some shady things; he is my her o. i thank him for his service. he thanks me for loving all the parts of him that are broken; he thanks me for allowing him to lick my places that tas te like good woman. sometimes; i want to wash his eyes of all the slaughter he saw in war; no. i want to sink into his gravity and know more. no. i want to unwrinkle time tidy like his dress blues that a freak fire burned. i want to travel back in time and tie together pinky fingers w. ribbons he has earned. i am not a genius. no. but i know the difference between general and special relativity: he and me; we’re something especially special. our love affair is a continuum… -six pm