Thoughts of Love While Being Cut Open

A Poem by Jared Orlando

I’d rip out my lungs so you could nest inside my chest cavity.
You can sleep and dream under my rib cage and use my weak heart palpitations as a noise machine.

Listen to the blood bubble and rush through my veins and use its warmth to make your eyelids soft and lazy and you can stretch your legs out into my abdomen.

Let your head rest sweetly, your hair sweeping long across the organs I’ve spent my life destroying through bouts of liquor moments and you’ll find if you look up, there will be alcohol spilling from my tear ducts like a toxic waterfall.

Darling, I ask only that you don’t use my intestines as a noose and instead whisper in my cheeks that the view from my own eyes looking out is wondrous, like in the belly of a submerging ship, like the gardens of a pharaoh, like the outlook from Mulholland Drive when it is clearer out than a wine glass fresh from a dishwasher.

Use my spine as a ladder and climb into my skull.
Listen to the sounds that beat around and echo, now that I can finally prove you are the song that’s made a home inside me.
Sing it back to me in a whisper while my synapses fire and you become a permanent place in my memory.

Burrow deep into the marrow of my bones, open up a book and rest your feet up on my carpals. Let your words drip into my dreams where we are dancing to the music of my stomach grumbling while using a small light from my mouth as a disco ball.

Oh, how easy it would be to sleep at night knowing that you’ve had adventures inside me, that you’ve traveled and seen the things that I haven’t seen, the parts that make me. That you’ve been to the core of me and still ask if you can stay.