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.