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The title came from a line in a poem by Alicia Keys called “Everywhere is Nowhere” from the book Tears for Water. The phrase “shapes of hunger” came from a poem by Carl Sandburg called “The Road and the End”.

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quietly,
not with questions
or demands
diluting his personal expectations
within my thin and pale
liquid willingness to receive him,
a love so deep he
receives everything he gives

trusting in my heart and
its capacity to learn
to love by example,
coaxing my commitment and
the naturalness of
my calling this
relationship as my own
by the consistency with
which he remembers to make me
a part of everything he does.

His thoughtful actions
and attention fall in
divine plaits and folds
around my daily movement,
timed to my needs
with room to breathe and
be free. The place
by his side binds me
not with platinum chains
but with the way that the
tensions of his life as a man
melt willingly upon contact
with my skin.

He projects his needs’
fulfillment onto me,
touches me a certain way
in gentle posession, like
a cupped hand sheltering
a flame from the biting wind,
then tells me how good
it feels to him, as if
he borrowed my heart and
were living vicariously
through me.

He taught me how
to understand beauty
by calling me beautiful.

I recognize the promises
he never promised out loud
because he keeps them.

My heart has no maps and
no choice but
to instinctively move
through the path of
a sweet secondhand memory;
and can’t remember how or why
or when it even started
knowing how
to love him so well

but whenever I’d look at him,
he would read in my eyes
exactly how well he has
taken care of me,
then turn right around and
thank me
for making him happy.

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I love how hungry you get
for me in the mornings,
as if I were the sun
as if my love were
a longer day,
a summer solstice that
vetoes any current season
I love the way you
intersperse your thoughts
with my own, while you
drive to work
through icy roads,
my presence through the phone
the only warmth you need

how you stack
your hours around my needs
like a fortress
you’ve always been a busy man
but I can always cut lines and
how you can easily find
spaces in the crowd of your
responsibilities through which
to guide me forward, from
the sidelines to the center
like an able tango partner

how we live by the day
one legend at a time
and use each free moment as
an opportunity to fall in love
one shade deeper
to the tune of
the shifting sky at sunset

and when it’s late at night
and the glitter of neon
has faded,
how you and I fit in
the hushed darkness,
how our dreams for
the future are in sync,
and how cutouts from
our conjoined light
permeate the shadows,
like a promise in
the process of being kept.

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the same prayer
worn thin by praying
the old desire made weary
by wanting
over and over and
over
the sheer number of days
made all the days the same
and I came to accept that
this is what’s real

while I kept dreaming.

I wanted to tell you
how often I prayed for you,
how badly I wanted
to find you.
But when you came,
shouldering the lion’s share
of sacrifices to make your way
to me, flying against winds
of fear over cities whose
names you’ve memorized and
histories both written
and perceived,
you made of my past memories
of nights of yearning,
once votive and earnest
offerings in the shrine of my
naive persuasions, and that
later got reduced into nothing but
an old habit that died hard which
I only wore around my neck
like an amulet because
it defined me once,
merely a few minutes of words
and a windy afternoon’s worth
of kisses; and every other day
that followed, a beginning
of things unthought of.

Oh, how little my faith was
all along, and how weak
and tired I was of believing,
and never even realized, until
I knew your love, and
we shared a breathing reality
with a future that’s
rock-solid and tastes of honey,
and our faithful promises called
my attention to the fact that
they are too big to fit within
the margins of what
my wildest hopes had been.

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tonight
everything is new
that I’ve done
a million times before

as I face my reflection
in the mirror
twenty-eight years familiar
and prepare to make myself
beautiful as deeply as
my deepest love will let me,
step out into the night
and entrust my bejeweled spirit
with graceful feet and no fear
on a white cab whose intentions
are camouflaged in traffic under
a polished black November sky
the night city flowing around me
like a phosphorescent tide
headed towards a destiny
that I’ve never seen
but always believed in
and never forgotten once
in the distance
from child to woman

way past what it would
take for someone else,
if it were someone else,
to get too old
to not know better,
beyond all chances for
a relapse into innocence,
I knew what to do
when the fairy tale
came knocking on my door,
as if,
if all the world’s a stage
this is the performance
I’ve faithfully attended
all the bad rehearsals for

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the ideal who, as you grew older and knew better,
you learned to accept didn’t exist;

but somehow, by some kind of miracle, you found anyway—
that’s the kind of man he is.

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at night
when nothing whatsoever is wrong
even the possessive dark won’t
claim my consciousness
I lie in bed untouched
by sleep and thinking
about the comfort
of your presence
and it’s my own space
my boring old apartment where
you and I stashed our things
that day
when we flew to the island
my breakfast ingredients
perfectly sliced and
partitioned in containers
patiently waiting for morning
inside the fridge
the fridge making that
low humming sound
and the clock ticking
kicking its paced pedals
to sunrise
and all I can think about
is, people are not meant
to go to bed alone
ever again and listen to this
listening
to everything
in case I left water running
somewhere or forgot to
turn off or unplug something
that might go boom
or they might need to
evacuate the building for
some emergency or other
and I’d better be ready
making lists in my head
of what to bring,
ID, keys, purse, phone
a sweater since it’s January
and where I can grab them
and

and I should slow down

it’s just insomnia
no need to go crazy
I just need your touch
to give me a stick of peace
and you’re not here

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