Let me take you in my hand -
maybe I’ll hold you too tightly,
maybe you’ll kiss me, maybe you’ll fight me.
This is a story far away from the big screen,
set in the glow of the exit sign moon,
the back of a deserted theater with a poster: coming soon

If I hold you too tightly will you say it’s alright we
have all night to do this correctly, please, because
I’m always afraid that you’ll slip away, back to wherever
you’ve been all of my life, and I couldn’t take that,
not again, not twice

If it chafes will it put you in your place
If it’s too rough will I finally be enough
or will I blink and find that you’re already gone,
slid out through the cracks in my fingers,
slithered from the door into the drain as it rains

With a flick of the wrist I can make your hips twist
With a scrape of my nails I can mark you as mine
But when you come undone can I be the one to never have to
let go, or wake up, or fall back asleep

If I sang to you it’d be off-key,
and through my life I haven’t held onto a single thing for more
than a year or two, not a job or a love or a grip on reality.
There is no special way that you make me feel; it’s not even the warmth in my hand or my heart or any other relevant body part: it’s that you make me feel at all,
that I am in fact not a statue of a saint,
that I’ve never deserved a pedestal,
that I am a person and not an artificial construct
held together by angry Bible verses and duct tape

I’ve never been moved by the torture snuff they showed
on Easter day as a misguided shove into the arms of God,
an encouragement to pray the long days away,
a botched attempt to numb my pain: a spiritual novocaine.
I’ve always been shaken, never stirred;
always forsaken, always disturbed.
And all of the time spent with angels wrapped around my finger,
my other hand was dancing in the dark,
blaspheming without any meaning, barely real,
furiously trying to find any feeling

So no, no one has ever touched me the way you do,
even when the pressure in my palm is not you,
even when the only contact is our eyes,
or those accidental bumps you never seem to realize, the ones you don’t see how much I cherish.
I still pray every night, still to things which may not exist,
but this time it’s your name escaping my lips