Thursday, June 24, 2010

Knowing how not to miss

title suggestions welcome. From 3.23.10

























Beautiful solitude. You hold your breath, letting the blue green waves wash over you. Your body becomes thin as a wafer, connected to each movement of the water that tucks in and over you, enfolds and couches you. You sat at the bottom of the ocean, dependent on it for life for 9 months before it let you rise out of its womb above the waves to breathe the stale air of this old world. You figured you had no use for the mundane, so you leaped back mouth first into that water world which birthed you so you could again revel in its mysterious currents, letting it take you wherever. You are free from social contract, for you know no companion but the tug of the now. You are blithely alone, distant from anything which would impose upon you. And yet your mind is made up for you, inasmuch as you let go of your mind, forgetting it, surrendering. You are so beautiful, like a rainbow or a golden ray of sun. You are the uniform choreography of a school of fish or a flock of birds, you are the king and queen like wind and moon. A humble beggar and a prophet with wings come to pluck my eyes out so I may see.


How many times has your name been uttered, absentmindedly, as if a kick in the gravel, or the running of a hand through one's own mussed hair? But I will no longer forget you, or speak about you in passing, offhandedly, dismissively. I will touch your inner folds and capture your essence the moment you come near, as if seeing into the heart of a comet as it blazes across the firmament, visiting me graciously, bestowing upon me a great boon with its wayward glory.
Where did I last see you, I mean, really see into you and know you to be a dream made real? I must've been drunkenly stumbling down an alley, cursing at invisible women, hoping that my doorstep would elude me a while longer. Or maybe it was when I was perfecting my verse, scribbling notes while sitting on a wooden bench, seeing but not paying attention to children and lovers and old folks and buskers who populated the park but made no impression on me but to act as mise en scene.

What other pertinent information had I left out when I last thought of trying to describe you? Maybe it was raining and I had no umbrella, I had no one to call, no place to shelter me from the pellets of God's piss. I strolled endlessly, aimlessly, frustrated but not angered, not rebelling against the circumstances, I was happy to have that experience, to feel the discomfort of wet all around my ankles, pools and puddles forming in the bottoms of my shoes, my jeans clinging to my thighs and knees, my hair a dripping mess, my body closing in on itself. But I was open to the rain and I let the world beckon to me, I came and opened the door of my soul to it and let everything but the native population make themselves at home inside of me. I was a rotting old Victorian manor. I had all my doors open and let the ravages of time and nature decay and trample throughout my distinguished halls. I rejoiced. I was silent and expressionless. I was coy and dissatisfied. In this there was peace, and I think I found pieces of you there.

This time there will be no grand declarations, no alarums, no popping off of the cork, no buoyant celebrations or the sound of a package being ripped open. Only a slow and easy capitulation. The emptying of the belly of all desire and appetite. Just a swallowing of air and time, chewing it then spitting it out, tasting nothing, feeling nothing but one's own sickening tongue, but thinking nothing of it, being neither repulsed nor invigorated, only floating and waddling, wading and waiting. No way, no waiting, not even weighing. Biting one's own finger and not feeling it, not expecting to feel nor feeling the passage of things, only knowing the finger is there between the teeth, all else is useless speculation, as distant as a planet we cannot see, as elusive as a savior we cannot be.

No comments: