Sexual Abreaction: Sketching Sleeplessness

My chin
is raw
from the earliest spit against
your half-day past clean shaven face all
masculine, instinctive, fundamentally passionate.

I studied the structure of your face while you slept, the force of your eyebrows, the set of your eyes, the pattern of your hair, and the systems and procedures in your body’s orchestrated movement through every breath.

I see in you, the faces of a hundred generations of searchers but yet a man giving way to happenstance and a hope that we’ve evolved a way to convey what we need, to tell with eyes only. To harness the obstinate beauty of a man walking strong like a street monarch marching in forward nobility, recalled by those who could not comprehend that love, aching behind him for eternity, like a thousand summers gone, like a symphony, languid and sad, their passions leveled by the enlightened moment of a final understanding that love that has slipped through their fingers like my hands through your hair: an abbreviation of all that has worked to invent you. And there inside you is love, a volatility in mercurial indefinance.

So give it to me.

Twenty one hours later, I still taste the beauty of your name in my mouth.

Diffusing Light: Dayrise As Devotional Closure

I have grown to enjoy the sun, maybe because it’s one of the only constants between us both. Even if we vowed our lives to combing the darkest places of the Earth and of our hearts, it wouldn't matter. There is no place on Earth where we will be unaffected by the interminable rise. And in that rise, we are offered life, but you just give it the blind treatment. I pray to see a primal sketch of this resolve, study it's movements, and learn the methods necessary to recreate the moments of opulent humanity – you know, the blinks of the eye that are made into movies. But you, like good weather, wouldn’t come or stay, no matter how much I needed you to.

Suddenly, through a sensitive squint, I see. Your eyes are not simple, objective organs to stare at. They are a spillway into your soul, telescoping a vitality equally vandalized as mine. And I see a certain proof. A proof that of our perceptions perceived as truth, proof that we are unbalanced. The unbalance is urgently genuflected and plainly, my happiness will never rise unless it does simultaneously with your own. My struggle is your struggle. What was done to me, was done by a human. What I did, I did to a human. Now, I know. You are human. Words have so long been my sword and shield, but here and now, I abandon them for your eye-contact, for the tremble in your voice, for the smell of a sweating anxiety in wanting closure ["Please, let this be over."], in wanting a setting ["Lightly, take cover."]. Tandem, we rise.

It’s light now. I find myself again. I can see ahead, I ask “Where was I?”



I hope daybreak gives you faith.

Valediction: Living By The Rules of The Primal

There are mornings I dive deep beneath my consciousness and hammer until solid at the things I will say when I catch you unguarded and surrendering without choice to my presence (as I surrendered to you). Hypothetically, this moment is ours. But, if I will simply approach you from behind (as you did to me), with my hands on your shoulders (as yours were on mine), and lean in to allow the light to reflect from my eyes. Cheek bones in slow contact, brushing you with terror (as yours brushed mine ["So close, but how?"]). Valediction. I have nothing to say, I only have to remind you that you were never up to me.

Quitclaim: Hands As Default Bilingualism

You will tend to him
The way you tend to lie
Always
A turnstile of compromise
Turn to him,
Turn to you
My turn to
change me unrecognizeably
the one you fucked inside out
My turn to
Acknowledge everyone before--
the participants of my jaded heart, they are
Apologetically their own for precursing a
disaster in already troubled regions
Telling a story of intuition,
Of heartbreak, of a long time coming

like the gestures
of human hands
Because I do not possess
a word that will ever
make a difference
In compelling the
human in you
to rise

Sunday, July 01, 2007

I would like to return, to that time when I was too small to know that the world that we're living in is breaking apart, continuously reforming, never to appear the same. All the time, all around us. The same way that natural disasters remind us our earth is broken without a safe place, you remind me there's no such thing as a solid emotion or a surety in intuition. When I drive past flooded fields, highways, parks, etcetera... the air through my windows numbs my arm cold, wet, but underneath, burning. And I arm my heart for the aria of love.

What flooded first? The river or that deep heat from my eyebrows to my cheek-bones. After the sun (and after reality) can burn it all away it's clean to see that the water was never a sky blue ocean. In fact, the only thing I saw in it in the first place was the sky. It was reflecting something else to want. Just looking in the wrong direction. The enigma in all of this was slipped neatly into the horizon, like the letters I sent you, slipped neatly in envelopes.

I wait all night for your horizon, and even as I do, I know you're not coming. I see heartbreak rise with the setting sun. All of this is nothing new; it's used, recycled and renamed. Same misguided affection, different history, similar feast on illusioned pretenses.

I'm bought and sold.

The Soldiering

There is a strange comfort in the point of your life when your face becomes so familiar, catching your reflection becomes a second nature vision of something you've slowly tended to for nineteen years, a unfinished masterpiece, your eyes play to a tune of things that you say you won't do but in a few years, you will.

As we are all constantly changing through a mode of generosity and reproach, forgiveness and forgetfullness I am trying my very best to remember the girl I owe a few very important things. I owe an argument, I owe a reparation, I owe a silent night of windows and rain and dinner with no conversation. I need it to become clear to me, how long I wait. How long I wait for the steady missing to drag me down into a well full of naysayers telling me that the salvation of our friendship is non-negotiable. I say to their nay that we must first acknowledge there are so many loose ends we must committ ourselves to loom together the salvation of eight years a friendship unraveled in one night by third party hands.

And then I remember that with or without you, my chest raises a heaving, breathing breath. With or without you, I hold my jaw a profile to paralell azimuth. With or without you, we both continue as the soldiering, sharing no difference from condemned men.

We could soldier either way.

The Anthropology of The Machinist

It is often I find that mirrors function as checkpoints in the question if you or I are even real. And the ardent crying is an expulsion of you, much like vomiting is an expulsion of indulging in an excess of wine. And I indulged in wine to to expel a solicitous loneliness, the quicker fix.

You should feel venerated [dishonoris causa] that you are a prime exception of the deficit in my attention as I have exhausted months working through you. The heart is a pump. The lungs are bellows. And what I am working through is attempting to understand what comprises your heart. It is a remarkable machine, apparently omniscient and hurriedly competing over scarce resources including but not limited to love by way of lust. You are the devoid of power, devoid of control, snatching it wherever you find it unguarded. And this, this stands a barrier to your ability to participate in love. You live love with a suspect heart. And your latent dysfunction of love has manifested itself a dramaturgical analysis of love within love - we humans so highly variable.

As you read, I'm sure you feel me like you haven't felt before (won't feel again); the cold disconnect of my words (I've reserved passion for things worthwhile, of which you are no longer a part) you can come and then come and then come to the same conclusion as I. You have given evidence that you do not possess love. This is no longer (about) love. This is no longer humanity. This is anthropology. This is science. And I conclude the solution to your loveless love is a redesignation of the entire infrastructure of your heart (as it is operating from finite resources including but not limited to the bodies of violently loving young men). The solution is volcanic. An eruption for disaster. A heart blue, then olive, gray, orange, now black, but soon steel. My obsession with your machination could prove to be detrimental to my survival, you see, as I will find no meaning, no truth in your mechanical, metal heart. It functions to offer a reflection that yes, this, you, I - no, not us - were real but more importantly a reflection that my time as the tortured hearted has become outmoded.

Sex Changed

Sex is a strangely unnecessary thing, no longer in my realm of worry.

Just to get you off my chest: (it's time to bring in the dirty laundry) the love I grew for you was an evolution of my love for myself and the passion I convoluted with you was an extension of my desire to fuck a being as moving as myself. And to know, to know this, is freedom.

You will do what it is that you do to someone more violent than I, as you force your way in smooth mastery. So to you, I drink, a toast to a life I could never lead, as your pedestrian love will always have the right of way.

I will change your life lest it take a lifetime to change me.

Again, Aquarian

Tonight is one of the harder nights. Last night, I taught myself to hate you just as I taught myself to love you (your flaws as reasons for both). But tonight, I'm back at square one, feeling pushed aside and defeated. I'll never know what I missed out on - hazy Lawrence nights strung together with hands full of substance abuse. You'll never know what you missed out on - warm hands on shoulders and coffee on when you wake. As much as my pride could never pause for such an admission: you broke my heart (and you didn't have permission).

So now, I need you to re-arrange every star in my sky (just as I left it) so that I can recall the world I lived in before the astrological shatter, again aquarian. So when we drive past each other, I don't feel like I've had a drug to last me until our next chance meeting. To last me until the next time I know that you're still living. And that when I see blood stains on the highway, I can know that even though you're an asshole, you're still safe somewhere regardless of whether the face that brushes yours at night is mine or another willing, able and vulnerable a participant, and if in the morning, when that face can disgust you in the way that mine has, you can securely exit their life taking your love with you like a priest takes god.

I have been the fire.
I have been the one.
And that, is enough.

For now.

Long Distance Winner

I'm beginning to think maybe there's something admirable about the ones with hearts that don't heal. Like soldiers on long deployment. They're committed to the war but can't explain the cause. And they can't go home until there is a declared winner.

I recollect through pictures to pine; to get what I gave back. Your face was good for a photograph. We were the good ones, who loved, each part, every heart. I love all of who I am and can kill for opportunity to enter whole into a love like that which I possess as I will never be the same again.



You gave me false love. I gave you an hour.

We're On The Surface.

As the last I will write about you: When eighty years have passed, I wonder if I can still hold onto our shared history then the way I hold onto this shared present, this shared now. And if you will still make my heart burn shudder stagger through the rest of my life. And though we have lossed, will the universe still proceed in perfect time within the chronological record, as you and I are logged in exacted details between stars in the glacial gelidity of a timespace known only between the two of us. And if there God himself would grant opportunity to re-live our accident (the same way I re-live you daily, weekly, minute by minute) would I alter any facet? As I acknowledge this as my journey that I have emerged victoriously an escapement of the undertow of loving without love.

I have risen to the sobering surface to see warm, dark and silent a life as I have lead before and will lead again. And you may stay under forever, wet as though it was not so long ago that you were loving me. If you too can rise I will be here to show you, tell you that love exists in this place for you too. And that I am sorry for myself for participating and that I am sorry for you for initiating the exchange of stolen hearts. We, who will give that love from ourselves unending (yet it will still belong to us, as ours), we are waiting on the surface.

Gasconade: A Threat

I will commiserate everyone else who bears your name,

because I am a permanant shudder at the sound of anything like it.
And they must carry the weight of my memory of you.

I wish my mother'd
have taught me the value of limit,
so I could have averted this
entire yarn the way a captain
wishes a cartographer would
teach the rocky,
uncompromise of
gasconade skirtings of the shore.

This city is small enough for me to haunt you
and for you to haunt me.
I fear running into you
in the same way
that I fear waking my sleeping beast.
The way I fear missing my turn.

Recurring

It's recurring. One week ago, I dreamt that we were in our familiar settings. Where cedar is high and morning light leaves shadows as long as my face. I couldn't remember the dream until three days later. Or more importantly, I couldn't remember who you were. The only thing I could remember was that feeling. I felt ancient, terminate and raw. And now, now that I finally saw your face in the constant replay (rewind, play, rewind, play, rewind, play) I realize I don't remember you at all, because we don't know each other. You are that peripheral man-boy who can assure himself, comfort himself, love himself because there is no other. We acquaint and you board a plane back home.

If you only knew the brushfire in truth when you trail through your life, ignition of hearts when you walk through people's lives. Arsonist ad-hominem. You exist before the light. Retrospectively, you're the misfortunate puppet of my psyche. Cast down on strings to deliver the morse-code message from my brain to my heart to my heart to my brain. This is not about you, you give us this day, our daily intellect. I will cling white-knuckled and tense shouldered to your truth. And by dream, you were knee-bent, open arms professing love. "I will love you, give you security! I take you at face-value. I know you've faults. You are so valuable. But I need you to need me." And in a rather maladroit moment, I offer a clumsy dodge to your vow. With simplicity, I reply, "Hm. Really? Well, that's weird." I suppose you should know, I've searched for a decade for what you gave me in a dream. And in a swift and cagey move, I circumvented what would have integrated my heart and mind. But if we were in front of each other, male faces, beards and eyes like razors our exchange would leave us in arms, tears. I knew your first impression and I will know your last. Consummate, infinite and raw.

Eyes open, wide-awake, in mourning. It's a dream. Time stops. I have no idea who you are. I know what you have to offer. I refuse. It's everything I want and I refuse. It's then, I feel peace. Comfort and peace. The most volatile, temperamental, violent peace. In my reaction, I feel peace. You give me everything I asked for.
It underwhelms me.

And now I lay down to sleep, in pitch-dark, recurring. With this on repeat in my mind, I smile.

Wreckless

I think, maybe now,
it's all been unfair
to you.
I expected a lot
and perhaps
in our friendship
agreement (oftherelack)
I skipped the section
detailing that you
can still call me
when you need
something
(elsethanme).
Because,
You.
Can't.

Admittedly,
I was still proud
glad humble fragile
dark yet refined
and it is gratifying
to help you
(handinhanddownstepssmiling)
into your own slightest,
out in the slightest.

Letter To No One #1

I'm not very good
at letters to no one.
But she's taught me
a few things for you.
So I'll try.

Dear No One,
I wish you'd stayed.
This is it. This
is the life
I'd been waiting for. This
is that life
that devalued the nights.
If I died before today's sun rises,
persimmon gold & holy
the only thing I'd regret is that
I have not felt
the breathlessness, the
asphyxiation of love.
I really wish you'd stayed.
All it took was eyes, nothing
more, nothing less. After
all, it's not like I could
give you the complexity
of the doubt.

Today, I learned
that the reason you
weren't there was
because you were in
Mexico. I think she said
you were with your family.

When that persimmon
set in my West
I suppose it still set in
yours too.

Your flight comes this morning.
I really wish you'd stayed.






In Mexico.

Knives Don't Have Your Back

I put that photo of me everywhere, just for you to see. Staring straight ahead, I'm trying to cut into your soul. My eyes are paring knives, and I watch your heart beat under your chest, ready to peel the tough, thick hide your heart has grown. You can't keep me out any longer. I want you to look into my eyes and feel something hold you, feel something cut deep into you. When we locked eyes briefly across the table tonight, after prostituting to the intellectuals, we locked our wounds. You cut my hand, I cut yours, clenching, holding tight until this is real to you. We are sharing this.

And then, once you know, it'll be done. You can go, freely. Tend to your wounds. Because after you feel this, I voluntarily amputate this from my life. I refuse to continue to feel the disconnect. I will cut you. I will cut you out of my life,


and I will do it with my eyes.

Tigers

Now, I know why tigers roar. If I could push you at the center of your chest, instant, without reflex, with enough force to push you out of balance. Force equal to what pushed my heart out of balance. Then, I think I might feel like I'd given something back. To reciprocate this jaded anger and this short circuit of rage that has been forced into my body. I work these muscles for you, my arms for your eyes, my shoulders for your mouth. I will make you want this. I'm not even certain passion exists within you. Or if it exists within me. I have fire in my fingers, and my heart is a torch against my rib-cage. Your backdraft blows at the flames in my heart as you walk past. You do not deserve the love I give. In slow motion, a turn of your head to remind me you're still smiling. And in that moment, if we were animals of a different breed, I would lunge for your neck, open mouthed, spitting with the viciousness of a tiger to rip your body apart with claws and give my eyes a rest.

But I smile back, ask how you are and in the time it takes for your condition to slip past your flat teeth, I come to know why tigers roar.

One, two, three.

So I suppose the next step is just to forget you. One, two, three. Erased. Even as I wrote to you, giving the option of disregard, I didn't think you'd use it. I never thought you'd use it. Maybe I caught you by surprise, and maybe I didn't. Maybe you were standing with gun cocked, cross-hairs aimed on my beating chest. And I'm not sure, but maybe, if I forget you, you can forget me. Then you can forget that part of yourself that is the part of me. The surreal bond we share. A likeness that doesn't fit into any simple space, sundered between waking and sleeping. The part of us that is lonely in every crowded room. The part of you that feels alone. The part of me that feels alone. In a sea of noise I turned to feel you speak my language. Everything is foreign, and yet you made me feel like home. And I feel as I felt in a 10,000 piece puzzle; subjectively. I'm pounding incorrect pieces in to the picture, because I have nothing else to work with. I will continue to dig and exhaust myself on broken pieces, damaged pieces and independent pieces, I'm trying. I'm scared. You said, in every situation, you were you. And in the value of your words, you imply that I was not always myself. As if I obliged an alternate version of myself for you, and you alone can warrant all the moments of doubt facing the mirror. There was a desire for something to fit you much better than you could have fit me. Because you saw my dignity and commanded change. As if it even required change. That you deserved that from me. I think you're flattering yourself. I was just in love with you.