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.