fragment

eyes deep in dark poisonous pools

she stares straight ahead as if blind

but if you speak her name,

she turns her face to you

winterwhite and ivory

your question writhes beneath you,

across the floor and as you wish,

it scatters away like a many-legged thing.

you have lost all sense of truth;

if her face is that of the crone

or your lover.

you seek and she turns her head

a crimson shadow
a hank of dark hair shudders,
her breath fecund,
a whisper resonating in your shell-like ear.
It is her only gift,
whistling and low.

Your Wasted Voice

I wake and find the past has fallen over the room like wet gray snow. I turn my head and all the sweet names you called me under your breath fly into the air to sting my eyes and rest on my lashes. Moving the comforter over, I discover the feeling of your hand in my hair has crusted icy and thick across my legs. My feet are bare and aching beneath a spare and unfailing promise of love. Have I not mourned you enough? A glacial ceiling of white and blue formed from the sharp crystals of your disingenuiously warm hands slithering across the white expanse of my back. I lie in the cool circle of your wasted voice calling, calling, calling; your fragile wrists shaking beneath the weight you pretend to bear.

Everything they said was a lie.

Everyone here is amazingly kind.

A Letter, Never Sent

This is a letter that will never be sent. This is a letter I might as well write in the sand; I might as well write it in smoke.

You will never hear my voice again.

You will never spark with a bubbling laugh and spread your arms wide to hug me, your hair scented sweetly with clove cigarettes. You will never ever listen to another song with me and consider the warm melancholy of a dark-haired boy's voice. You will never shudder with joy, digging your fingers into the grass, in the summerwhite sun. Your grief will never fall into step with mine again and we will not weep together until a rushing river runs from our tears.

You have betrayed me, and your name will never again pass my lips without a taint of blood and earth.

I hope your grave is a comfort to you.

In Praise Of

This is in praise of your fine-boned wrists

and gentle hands,

of your arms laced with blue veins

and your long beautiful neck and pointed chin.

This is in praise of the sharp bones of your hips beneath the flat of my hand.

I sigh with my lips resting on your freckled shoulder

and I pull you closer to me,

even as you sleep

the strange architecture of your back working against me.

What I Want

They say there is a secret power in naming. In fact, in many cultures, you have a secret name you do not share so that others cannot wield it's power over you.

It is also said that knowing the most secret name of things is a sort of magic, that you are able to truly own and manipulate something if only you can speak it's true name.

There are some well-meaning but confused daytime tv type of people who explain that only by naming your wish, the universe will respond. Though it might be nice to think that a blind and wise system grants your heart's desire, it's a selfish dream.

But I did make a list, two lists, in fact. What I want from the future and what I want from a partner. My heart went cold as I wrote both short lists. You see, I knew it was too much to ask. But having made the lists, I then knew what I could not live without.

And somehow, instead of the universe responding, I did. I started to seek, and to feel. And found found everything I'd dreamt of, and more.

Lost

You were the gods of our childhood. As soon as your voice shook the earth beneath us, you must have known you were also turning the hourglass. I imagine our tiny hands, the fine pink blush beneath our minute window-like fingernails. I know you looked down upon a head like an bird's egg, delicate and whole. How did you not reach out your hand to feel the soft down of our hair? There is a particular smell to a small hot child, chest heaving from the frenzied joy of running wild. Didn't you want to lean down, pick up the wandering child and whisper a sweet word into their tiny shell-like ear?

Instead, your hand seized the delicate wrist, squeezed until tears slipped from tight-shut eyes. Your rage quickened and grew along with our tiny jerking hearts and bodies. Your voice, a dangerous whisper, raised the hair on our arms and necks, or as a roar like a blind waterfall, rang in our ears for hours.

You laughed, liquid and dark, while we burned with sorrow and fear. Blazing white hot, your violence melted steel until even our hearts were soldered. We hid behind a flimsy paperboard door, tiny shoulders shaking. With time, your very name became a curse.

The Little Boy Lost

William Blake

from Songs of Innocence, 1791

“Father! father! where are you going?

O do not walk so fast.

Speak, father, speak to your little boy,

Or else I shall be lost.”

The night was dark, no father was there;

The child was wet with dew;

The mire was deep, & the child did weep,

And away the vapour flew.

The Center of the World

I remember your hands hovering
like sick satellites over my reluctant hips

I felt you flay me
night after night
imagining my suffering
would somehow draw me to you

and your monstrous magnetics
made you the gravitational
center of my world

undated, around 2002

For VS

I explain to the quiet Russian boy
that the streets of Moscow
have lingered long in my dreams
their golden domes glittering in my imagination
he stares and asks
if I plan to go alone
and if I have a gun

You see, here, the two questions
are hardly related
so I laugh when saying
yes then no

With a tired voice
He explains

His uncle, whose name he shares
who still lives in Russia, in the fabled city
was walking home at five p.m.
not two months ago
his own gun nestled in the soft cloud of his down jacket
and he stopped to cross the street
without a threat,
a single sound of warning,
a crowbar or lead pipe was
bashed into the back of his skull
splitting it in three places
and as he hit the ground he saw
frightened women drawing paper shades
looking away

2002

Ancient History

you went on and broke
our agreements, paths, pacts and promises

somewhere along the line
instead of screaming
wailing and wearing your sorrow
on your sleeve like a bloody rose
instead of pulling the emergency brake
you opened the window
mangled and pulled yourself
out, into the wind and onto the rocks below

I could have saved you
we speak the same language

but you didn't want saving
you wanted the swift hum and thrum to

end

You Find Me

You find me on the rocky shore of a dark lake, the quiet wound round my heart, a gentle serpent I have learned to bear. So long now there has been only the hush of the water, and the hiss of the wild wood behind. Once there was the staccato crack of my own footfall, now silent as I am washed and still in a moonless night.

First there is only the idea of you, hazy in the winter light. Sleeping, I do not want to wake. The idea I could turn and pull close, my hands empty and searching. Then the gentle call of your voice, elucidating want without exception. I remember your voice, and follow, my feet bare and blue. Now you are as close to me as if your lips were brushing my ear and you whisper back my inmost heart's secret want but as your own. Now knowing you, I know your breath on me would set the day afire.

It Will Find Us

I must tell you now, it will find us. It will not be the spark of metal in the night, the pool of warmth wasting away on asphalt. Despite your fears, it will not come pressed against a car in a poorly lit parking lot, your cheek a dark smear on the glass, the stars staring dumbly down. It will not be the delicate pop and whisper in the night, one pupil dilated to bring on a longer, shivering sleep. You will not clutch your heart in the lukewarm tub, left hand going brightly numb as the weight of oceans crushes your ribcage. Sadly, you will not scream the name of your beloved while kneeling in the turmoil of a bank lobby, the hiss of radios wild outside.

I wish I could say you would clutch the hand of your youngest while a kind-eyed nurse administers that sweet final injection. I cannot even mention the possibility of the dark heady smell of burning oil, the constellation of glass spread before you as you realize the radio plays on but something vital inside does not.

It will not come any of those ways. Instead, it will come down a brightly-lit corridor and it will not reason, it does not know. We comfort ourselves with the words, as the incantations our watchwords, chanted over and over again at night; virus, prion, bacteriology, deoxyribonucleic acid, immunosuppressant, and so on until sleep finds us again. Despite this, it will find it's way out of the shaft, the airlock, the sliding glass doors. You will carefully tape the windows and doors but even then it works within you, as in your neighbors, your children. And before it's over, you will beg and beg for the claustrophobia of the car trunk, a warm tailpipe burning your leg. You will count and re-count the small blue pills, even before the television reports flicker out. But you too will start to feel the tell-tale signs and know that nothing nothing nothing you have ever thought or dreamt will ease this end.

"So Lovely was the Lonliness" - Antony Hegarty

I swallowed stones
to fill the ache in my belly.
One caught in my throat,
weighed down words
so that they gathered in the dark canal of my pulse.
Others were ground to dust
and with each heartbeat
ran wild, surged within me.
As a spider web, as antique lace,
delicate cells
replaced with stone and ash.
I felt myself become brittle
and finally broken.
My eyes, blank as granite.
I heard marble crack as I opened my hands,
white-cold skin seeking yours.

The Scent of Ozone

I could not help it. I could not keep myself from it, I did not know then it was not wise. I opened the door, stepped out and into the storm. There was only the wild wind lifting my hair, the scent of ozone and the whipping water. If you had a voice, if you said something, it was lost in the chaos of that downpour. I did not know that to stand alone there was to invite something more, to tempt the gods too far. I thought then, that I was brave. Instead, I tasted steel and all was white and I was lost.

No happy ending.

I feel as if I'm wasted and I've wasted every day.

I Invent the World

I fold my arm again, smoothing the soft green blanket over my chest. The past comes whispering out at me, and with a snapping blink of wide-open eyes, I will it away. I have a world of almost-sleep, I build it every night as I turn and turn in bed. I go to it now. It once was the dream of a dream, much less than a world. Now, I spend many hours outlining every golden leaf, painting the scent of loamy earth in the air, imbuing even the lichen with a strange green surging life. One part of me screams for sleep; the other goes on, dressing flesh on ideas, spitting out a sun-lit shaft of golden hair. Characters here die and go unmourned, until the next night, when I reinvent the world again.

I dreamt of loving something used

I dreamt of loving something worn
a sodden cardboard sign
dissolving in the winter weather
I dreamt of loving something used.
I dreamt of loving Athos
of his eyes blazing bright with drink.
I laid my hand on his fevered cheek and
He whispered a name

It wasn't mine.

Unravel

Will every part of me unravel? Seams unroll and drop, trailing into puddles behind me. Will my hair start to fall out, in damp hanks into shaking hands?

I'd give whatever throbs within me for a single taste of your skin; if every time I opened my mouth to speak your name, I'd have been satisfied if a memory of my childhood escaped.

While sleeping, I grasp for your naked foot, your flush cheek, your outstretched hand.

When waking, instead of reaching, I turn away. Turn towards a distant hill, a brightly burning star, the horizon, each equally unreachable.

I search through stacks of yellowing pages and crumbling books for my most secret name, now long forgotten.

Thomas Wolfe Might Have Been Wrong

You can go home again.

"I've shed selves since then, like a snake sheds skin" she said, her eyes whipping past me. I nod and agree but say only "I allowed it to happen, I made the choice, and live with it even now."

"What?" The question a Rubik's cube.

The answer is out of me before I can close my mouth, it has slipped past, and unfurls like flag. "I have always always loved him."

In the perfect world, I'd have fallen to the ground, my eyes rolling back, the shivering seizure taking the truth of it from me. She'd have been struck deaf by god, if he'd been kind. I should have let out a scream that went on till I coughed blood, I'd have torn my hair and thrown myself on the pyre of the past.

Instead

the miles keep flying by, the forest is not the skeletons of char after a fire, the sky blazes blue instead and I close my eyes and cover them with my hands.

There is a creeping joy in knowing, and now I do know. "I could never tell him no" I whisper. "I have looked for him always, and defined and redefined love by what he had to offer, though it was so much less than love."

She is silent, then a small burst of laughter, like a child.

"Now what?"

Waiting

Where have I felt happiness?
I don't even know now what to seek, where to find it.

Joy slithers in

It's true - joy and fear all at once. So many changes in the works - a plan to travel beyond the distant horizons into dreams I've not yet dared to weave, a plan to sit in silence and pain for a number of days (dazed and mute, what will I think up?), and more even.

I watched a movie in which a delicate child, two months premature, died for lack of medical equipment. How can I not be moved to inflict some change of my own onto the world?

For TNB

I warn you, now wonder what his hands hurry to hide
I warn you now, beware the faulty fruit this love should bring
Eyes certain, will certainly stray
What warning would you have?
Build what you can from those fickle fibers
those half-laughed lines
I swear, give it time
and you'll choke with the lie

I bear you nothing but witness.
A heart as dark and sickly sweet
you'll find is filled with nothing
but raspberry jam.

For KL, because I have nothing else to offer.

I wonder what parts of myself I'll hide without even thinking. I wonder what I'll conceal and pretend, how much of myself I'll be able to swallow down or push away. I wonder what will slip out and what I'll sell.

I peel skin in layers, shedding whatever part of me I feel is attaching itself permanently. I wonder if you can even find something within me that is me, something solid within the gelatinous pulse that endlessly renews. I'm beginning to fear that there is no skeleton below, nothing hard and solid for you to grasp, nothing immobile to set your heart onto.

I wonder if disappointment will flutter ripe and willful through a heart borne onwards towards treachery. I wait, breathless, for the pale wash over your eyes, for the rush to speak, to cover what you first thought with a kind word.

I tread by an uncertain rhythm towards whatever fate has in mind for me. My heart and hands, endlessly calculating probabilities, the painful geometry of reality. I manage to convince myself that any possible outcome is, in fact, desirable.

I also wonder how much of the hunger for love is the longing for death. Because surely, what else makes me feel both more alive, more vibrant and flush and more dead, more wasted and gnawingly empty than love? Is it licking the grave or giving birth?

In an empty apartment -

I walk down the hallway, close the doors, turn out all the lights. The soft breath of the central heating sighs on. Otherwise, it is silent. I flip on a song or two every now and then, but the silence only seems more acute after they're over.

Sometimes I'm sure I live with a ghost, or maybe I occasionally slip into an alternate universe. They say it's easier than you might imagine, one wrong step and a new horizon blossoms out of the old, or this reality simply slips away out of the corner of your eye. Your voice, the incandescent incantation, breathes life into the transparent figment I conjure. And you are there, in a bright burst of hope and color. I know it would be too much to ask you to stay.

So you go, with a hiss like electricity, you slip away.

Picking through the pieces...

And trying to find the best. The ginkgo is an orphan, did you know that? Last of it's kind. Such a lonely beauty in that.

A while ago I saw a friend who hadn't realized how things had ended and she asked about you, her face as innocent and open as a silver dollar. How easy it was to smile and say it was for the best. I still reach for you in an empty room, but it's better this way. I hear your voice when the telephone rings; this is best for everyone. The world we created drifted away as easily as dust, you can't want any more than that. In my mind, I reach across an empty table to feel your collarbone like the strange sculpture of a wild genius; this is better, much better.