What the Longing is Like/What the Desire is Like

I confess that the desire plays me like an instrument; this longing feels like the sound of octaves: a deep, root note, heavy, with a tectonic mobility that feels monumental. A feeling of an ocean washing at my edges, cooling, relentless, an erotic ecology: waves and sand. The second note of the pair, singing together, the higher twin, a note that rings with the reverie of a choir, with pathways that contour among the beating wings of birds. This note, a reverberation, continues, I can feel it inside my chest, I can feel it stirring certain memories, repetitions that my longing dances with. The note playing inside me incurring the lightness of raising anchor--trusting, finally, the winds, admitting a faith that the sea is best to offer.

Yet this musical longing can also know; this desire has a potent sentience that directs me, moves me across distances that I am anxious to travel. This longing gives me an electric sense, makes the wine that kisses my lips doubly-savoured, the evening stars doubly-lived. I experience twice: once for you as a place-holder, for everything I experience narrates the story of your absence.

And so, my longing is also something visceral, to be seen, and your absence, the absence of the eyes most wished to be looking, conducts my performance of desire. My skin feels like anticipation, the moment before the stage lights and the play begins, that imperceptible interlude is where I inhabit, voiceless but desirous for that particular audience of one. "I want you here in this house" is akin to my body's prayer; with you so distant, the chanting whispers become more insistent, and the shadows in the candle-light more suggestive.

My hands always feel empty, they want to know what your hands are doing. My body knows a secret it's unwilling to divulge, it wants to tell me where you are in this world.

I wrote this before:

I am learning, here, something, I think, about love. That time breaks down in my particular brand of solitude, and that solitude is best shared, and here is where love begins.

A narrative.

A listing, a writing structured by the numbers, a leaning, a sinking down, a tenuous narrative, a doom. Writing, reading, not to get to the end but to be being within the writing, the reading, the seeing. I'm finished obsessing about death; I pick up my pen and fend it off--not really doing battle, but rather forgetting there was a battle in the first place. The mark on the page is alive and so am I.

Love.

Early on, I said insistently to you: "I won't belong to you. I can't belong to anyone."

I think we both hoped I was lying.

Heat:

I'm talking tension. Under a summer sun, alive, how tight can the skin become? It feels good, movement becomes something liquid, something connected to the world. Everyone knows how hard it was to die, people still think about it, talk about it. An accident, a sudden smash, then my skin, unravelling, loose. Then that loss of heat that signals something. An ending, liquid dispersing.

--"It ain't bad--easier to suffer in this here hot that we know than some cold we don't." He said. He lifted his hammer, vigorous, living.

G/hosts

...that slow, ghostly, intermingling; that incremental encountering: this is the suggestion of time, never heavy-handed, but always insistent. I am driving through the mountains in the summer of 2008, alone, past the wooden wreck of an old mining shed / not anywhere in your chronology, but a moment that matters because it was the beginning of a deep lonely moment, opportunity for a new plate of time to edge up into the space.
Unknown, an inscription there, an authentic happiness: a rare material that we can rub in our hands, a space where you were--an invisible consolidation of spaces, blurs and future unknowns, certain classrooms with forgotten glances, certain dark pubs with nearly lost conversations; spilled drinks and thoughts and time: all dripping off the edge. /I'm driving on the edge of a gravel road, trying to get off of the mountain as the storm is coming in./These are all moments without any beginning, every raindrop insisting in its quiet, esoteric way. Time not beginning until we decide it has begun to stir, to matter: when it all coalesces into something not to be forgotten, a kiss in the dark, a collective laugh in the cold, a closeness in a warm kitchen. // Crossing one time along another, allowing more light to come through, how absence seems to make sense as the most formal of presences, not a long time but a time always there.

April 11th / April 12th : the 24 hours never end.

Across a line that disintegrates even as it merges with the page. A habitude: une étreinte de désintégration, une bête, un romance. I am living here, it bleeds into my sense, traduit des monstres: this is what I am, a dirty, sauntering acceptance. An arrogance that lives, a tongue pressing against an incisor.

****
Two people holding each other in the dark. He rests his lips on the back of her neck, in a warm intersection. In that kiss is the warmth of two bodies, an occurrence coalescing at points beyond that which is discernible. A mutual darkness, for contentment is always coloured black.

****

Not pleased with this duelling improv. Let both halves die from senseless, inarticulate wounds.

April 6th: 1:44am

There are the points of the compass; burrs, attached brutally in the fabric of my clothes, but digging deeper, beneath the skin, into beyond the shadow(s) of undiscovered alleyways, village squares (squares, cutting them out--certain memories, town wells, deep memories, shadows beneath the skin, splashed with water). The shadow around the mountain, the shadow in the mountain: we all voice something, and it is a something. It does not want a name--slashes hard at that brutality disguised as a charity. But a voice wonders if it may be time to embrace a something. There is the sound of a bell ringing, but not one of faith or fidelity, there is no bell, only a bell ringing, just like there is no place, only a place being. It may be time to embrace a something, to circle in without enclosing, killing finally the last vestiges of poetry (that strangling), and instead dancing along side song that sings like singing.

*

A tautness across the span: a black trampoline. Diving in, irrevocable.

if history of a person:

(>>>>>)

A request to move closer, always ignored.

(>>>>>)

If history of a person:

: if history of a person, then when the cells divide, the time spread (>>>>>), the opening of fingers, making history, moving through it, making it? Through a catalogued space, a series of located times: a history? Space, never existing, but dying at one second intervals, never existing again: a moment, a moment: just this.

:if history of a person (>>>>>): if history of a person.

If history of a person:

:then it would feel like this on the fingers (>>>>>), scales and indicators, it would give notice of things coming, cataloguing, stowing away. If history of a person:

1) Sleeping in a van in winter, can't sleep and shivering. Wanted this.
2) The severed man, raising his arms, soon gone.
3) The clouds foul with stirring, tornado coming to murder, flatten.

etc. endless, or expanding:

American Midwest. The warehouse flooded since the roof didn't get finished in time and the rains came persistent and early. The sun had not come up yet, and not for another hour. But the reflection of the steel structure doubled itself in the black rainwater, soaked shadows angling across steel. Sped through it all, dangerously fast and alone in that vast doubled cushioning dark. (And thinking: I'm so tired, and I'm never able to sleep. This work does this. This work.)

Or later, in summer, watching the tall golden weeds splash in the winds across a noonday sun. A quiet and I closed my eyes. I felt a history. I felt a history.


(>>>>>)

A memory.

Brevity, like all memories, tipping over, like all memories, so delicate, so faint. A laugh in the dark, I will keep it there in that perfect dark, that dark, keeping it.

Sad and Cigar

Let me tell a story. And this one might be true and the I being I. Or maybe it's best not. Let's just say the nothing and say the story because we want it out. A funeral. Let's maybe make it the one of my grandfather. And a father, drunk and alone, left alone, mourning in a deep colour that showed on his face, sad, vengeful somehow, mocking his mother, the widow, by shifting the coffin, open around in the room. Moving his dead father around the room. Can this have had really happened? And perhaps then taking him outside around the side of the funeral home, if raining it was icy and hitting at him until some blood came out. Dragging him back inside and cleaning ourselves up in the small gaudy bathroom. Sitting him down, now silent and sobering and dabbing at his nose with a dark handkerchief. A sick shuffle and scuffle, and, perhaps, I witness and teller of a story for no reason other than to say: in the end, I am sad for this and smoking cigars for all of them, the now many dead and the at last mad.

I want to be made felt better.

I enjoy the company of strangers--we always find each other whenever in need, you always accept my brutal silences that neither ask nor care. I have recorded the twist of your eyes particularly, and how they say that something that strangers always say. There is lonesome in your glass.
Of course I've felt the drafty rooms where strangers try not to meet, something always moving in, something always on the way out, sliding out. Nothing truly belongs, strangers in coats but no forms, but it is so silent and dead and perfectly empty: warm, tumbling and happy.

Reticence

Bang! Bang! Is this what we name it? Surely some kind of assault? Stuttering, faulty, reticent? No amount of theory can restore me here. Observing the ruins.

A waving hand in the winter cold/street light and the word "apocalypse" she said, driving. My memory is perfect under these conditions, can cut through those kinds of ashes. Dashing back and forth. But I can name the best detail. The Colour Brown, momentary flashes, idealized and prescient.

One: full sun; two: full dark. Dark always fares better.

design

The supreme advantage of excessive re/design: this is my world after all, no tolerance for that breed of mayhem; opting out. Vocalized in spectrums: from the light: how it colours things not meant for new impressions, the water, the snow, the glare in the windows; to the rare silence that belongs only at this time, a face glowing with that low, compact hum. Oscillation, yes, but fidelity across the width.

I know what delicious means; I have hands to find it and eyes to produce it. Belonging: belonging: belonging.

Falling Leaves

The leaves fall and the sentiment blushes a red melancholy. It's in the piling of sediments, the layering of past actions, living things. It's in the chill in the air, forcing us to huddle, keep still and grit our teeth, to stumble into the grave of survival. It's a mourning for the momentum of a summer body, but now, settled and still. Things fall back into place, the arc of motion seems absurd. We are all now in the process of raking the leaves up among us, in the spaces where time was moist with voices and determined limbs, where fires were to dance around, to broach the subject of how we appear naked--not to devour history in shameless disarray.
I don't know what this means, but I'm suddenly dressed against the cold, and the smoke.

Dark.

Pulling the covers over. Sewing myself into the dark. An act of self-defense that converts me into an insulator of space, a material to keep the drafts out.

Renovation

In the snow, pulling down the walls, exposing old wires, standing still, shivering, staring at the moon. No one else around for miles, except the waters silent in the distance.
--"This is not the way to do it" sayz she.
--"Says who?" I sez.
She gives a impatient huff in the cold air, a shifty cloud disappears in front of her face. She walks away to stand in another dark. But I own this bit. Mine, my personal little cold-land. I continue to tug at the panelling, resigned and breathing.
****