hot to the touch

kiss me and make it go away!
convert the pain i live with every day to a new pain
it becomes discomfort and shifts in my belly
a knot of heavy dough.

the truth is, i don't want you
or anyone, tall or short, introvert or extrovert
to kiss me. i want to be
free and happy and only then maybe kissed,

or alternately alive and okay and not touched (anywhere).
please ask permission before you put your hand on my shoulder
i have already been thinking about other things in order to survive this normal event
i am a million light years away while your skin is on mine

i might become part of another universe when i dissociate
for months when i learned the word dissociate i called it "dissassociate"
nobody really corrected me
now i know, but i am too tired for it to matter any more

i am told i am made of stardust and moons
i am human and i will rot, but then i get to return
your body begins decaying faster than cells regenerate at a certain point
i wonder often if i started decaying long before i should have

and so my story of sensing and life and existence these days
all of the time, one hundred percent of my seconds and minutes
spent wishing i was somewhere so different
exaggeration, or maybe not, since still i choke on this sweet spring day

nostalgia burns beautiful and bright, i question why
each time i breathe in too much it burns and destroys me from the inside.
i take these golden moments and i collect them in places
they were rarely golden until they had already happened, i will admit

years ago i was a person everyone seemed to like
i have read things i wrote years ago. i do not like the old me.
so i guess, kiss me and make it go away, push me into delirium
each day it gets a little more blurry, fast, a little bit harder to live with, a little more hot to the touch.