11.09.025 Soft Spot / Tin Mirror

What a wonderful thing:

enough time face-to-face

to know the curve of your eyes.

Enough space: larynx vibrating diatomic air

to cochlear-hair receptors;

communicating how, when, where, why.

More smiling in a day than I’d seen from you

across a desk, across years.

It can be a terror to be known; it can be a pleasure.

I can feel like a mess most of the time.

I did not, that day, with you

(I worry I seemed that way, still).

I worry too much.

I don’t worry enough.

I worry about the wrong things.

I don’t want to let the world in,

I don’t want to invite the future,

in all of its possibility;

I want you to be my world

for right now, in this moment;

I only want to know what Is.

Let us take off our shoes,

walk into the woods, breathe in

evergreen, goldenrod, petrichor.

Please don’t go. 

Don’t run and hide

if I am sad, or angry—

those feelings will never be rooted in you.

Please linger, here:

with me, in the green.

To someday see our faces

together, adjacent,

tangent in a tin mirror—

darling, that would be a dream.

I do not want to wake.

Please pause, please stay;

I have a soft spot, waiting.

29.08.025 How to Remember a Song Lyric

Flash, tap, woof.

I am a drain, a sluice, a dump.

Burnt nerves in a late summer prairie, roadside-adjacent.

The yearly cicadas (prime number of one-and-one) are louder this season than last:

broods XIX and XIII never having seen me—

thirteen and seventeen respectively

(is this my Roman Empire, falling?)—

this year is an assault: each, in sequence, moreso than the last;

yet I am here, in my bodymind as always, despite attempts at numbingsilence.

The sirens wail in the not-very-distant. Heli-propeller blades beat the sky to death above me;

all around is the scintillating song of invertebrates, the drone of broods, the cool sunlit breeze of impending equal-night changes,

and the synthetic-musk scent of a wandering hominid, attempting mute communication

(for which I long in carbon-carnal desperation)

as my burnt-nerve self (chemoelectricity incarnate)

oscillates consciousnesses:

carbon, silicon; ferrum, aurum;

brains and skins, chips and screens.

Where am I

(whole, or splintered)?

Where-I-am.

No thought will ever reach conclusion.

Iceberg Wedding 04.5.014

There is so much cold out there.
Thank god we've found one another.

Do you believe in luck?  No,
no I do not.  Do you

believe in coincidence?  Do you
believe we've come together

by chance?  No, my love,
I do not.  I do not.

Darling, I've waited countless nights
to be by your side.  Love, I've

nullified innumerable days
in search of your hand:

in mine, yours will always stay warm.
In time, you were by my side, and

I would not call it luck, no--
I would not chalk it up to chance.

16.10.019

I want you to see me naked.

Not for lust, but for honesty; to see and be also seen, to be human.

For we've no God-- nor any need-- and

Nothing can be unless perceived:

The serpent's self-voiding devoury, precluding all reality, necessitates a witness;

See me fully, or I will not Be.

16.05.019

Spacetime superimposition of flesh and dotmatrix formation

Speeding into the sky, I was uptaken, breezing by

Lands, other humans and their streetsigns

26.01.019

How to disappear completely.

Become ugly, take off your lower jaw, keep trying to dig things from your face while never hydrating sufficiently. Keep the blisters coming.

Need so much that you are shunned, that the greedy, desperate dark light in your eyes forces them to maintain a distance.

Detach yourself from electronic communications. If you are not pathologically accessible, you will not be accessed.

Find a special tree. Learn its crooks and grooves, its hidden spots, the upper crown. Practice becoming the limbs, feel the flow of glucose-laden lifeblood, sway as the winds comb their way through; observe. Do not observe too intensely or your observance will be felt.

08.01.020

Schooling taught or fostered in me a need to detect and recognize patterns; analyze. It took away the feeling, the gentleness, the human need to get lost in and carried away by a story. We had to smash beautiful things and pick them apart to find their atomic nature, the singular key to beauty, what exactly it was that made us feel. There was no emphasis on the feeling.

Recognizing incongruencies in patterns today gives rise to indignance and anger, and— because of traumas and life lessons (in kindergarten, I once killed a guinea pig with malice flickering in my veins and severe guilt and emptiness following after)— I have also learned to subvert anger into sadness, turning it in upon myself so as to not externalize harm.

I am now poised to let anger go when it does not serve me. I am willing to learn to feel it, and let it pass, without holding on to it. It is acid eroding my organs, voltage shorting out my synapses, hot metal crisping my flesh. I have ground away too many teeth, my jaw now misaligned (that may be from ten years of too much serotonin and not enough queering of the self: where is my gentleness, where is my vulnerability, where did I leave the child who didn't need to understand everything first, and quickly, and well-- where is the kid who was terrified to leave his mom and dad, where's the kid who could cry, who WOULD cry, where have my tears gone).

I learned to survive. I learned how to perform, to be not myself, to recognize and reproduce patterns for my then, current, and someday foreman-- I got rid of the feeling, and I want it back. And I've been made a weapon; I've been turned vitriolic, volatile, yet I retain that atomos-self; I have contained within me, all this time, the knowledge to rebuild.