being older, now, i sit happy still and soak lear. as gently as. one can. and the scenes go and i wane. think defensively only an hour afterward. about being awake and open. the disc sips me momentarily sane. the tick and stick slow metronome. life. whirs. sometimes there is this. and i am thankful. for the storm. and for what i know about life and for the things that sometimes we get so tired we fail to notice. the tragedy. but first.
Look. Maybe I'm really not all that miserable. As this. I don't moan around my days playing at fine razors edges. Or brood around the window shades plotting ways to hang myself up in their wires. And maybe there are times when I am happy. Content. When I cook dinner and wash up and lull around in front of the tv with a glass of wine and cigarettes and my wonderful partner. And I don't feel discontent. At all. I don't think about the stifling ways that life can feel like, sometimes, lived under someone else's grasp. I just laugh a lot. Or say nothing. And switch the stations on all the commercial breaks. But even if you asked me a year ago what you might ask me now I wouldn't know how to answer you. So the-fuck-what that I'm attracted to bad words. That I can't cure the miserable way I like to play in and out of the universe of experience of the way my insides sometimes burn and I know the world felt like at one point. When I didn't have myself and the television and you to blame. It's like my attraction to bad men, only worse. Cause this one doesn't seem to want a stop.
i don't really know what to say anymore. and it'd be the wrong thing, even if i tried. even if i said exactly what you said moments before or millions of times before -- i would be wrong. and i'm sick of being wrong. the wrong name the wrong age the wrong disease the wrong clothes the wrong career the wrong height the wrong mood. always. in my pre-conscious mind i can barely remember what it felt like to be wrong in the absence of incurable rightness.
with your hand tucked firmly around my breast the sensation drifts. so familiar this sense. the stitch of your breath against the base of my neck. to shallow you to sleep. i can't see you, but i know you're there. could count every spot. every last toe and eye lash as my eyes blink the time and time away between beats of you next to me in the dark against the white cotton sham. not this night. not tomorrow. not with your familiar hand in my ribs or your hot breath in my hair. until i get lost between the then and now. and all my minds spills to blur. wrecks the dull dark of our room. nights. struggling for sleep.
when i think of you. stolid faced and strange. my bones ache. twisted protests like balled copper wire. so much tangled shape these thoughts. until i bend and swerve. let loose searching for fox. and i won't wait. be the gap. anymore. i am not your shoulder to shake midnight blankets. not me. anymore.
i had a dream that you broke my heart and when you moved away i burned all your tee shirts in the bin behind the house where we used to live when you were here before you became a foreigner again and gave up your right to live and work in a country neither one of us believe in and when i woke up and you were still there i thought it couldn't be real and the house smelled of coffee and you moaned the same way you do every morning and i thought about dog walks and adoption and the way we're becoming strangers to each other how tangible the way we canvas these muddy moments between love and hate when the wind howls madness against the house and the neighbors car gets stolen in broad daylight and the whole world feels like crawling into your warm waking mouth and then you were there moaning it real and i woke
when i play leap frog with your eyelashes and every word you say becomes nonsense and i stay silent safe and maybe lost only then when i sit in my lonely chair and wait and wait for nothing and you are more real than fake more fake than fuck and i oh me oh my oh i don't know who you think you see when i stand nights facing the mirror before bed anymore
lately, i resolves itself like the illiterate opacity of green glass spat up by so many ocean beds and fine grains grating. and i use so many words to say something too simple as this. when the i gets stuck and the i becomes the i of the dumb tongue of your bell when it's rung.
when every word becomes numb and my ears ring drums like bright fluorescent lighting or the way fever pitches then you and i resolve ourselves into more or less pornographic and if i could stop the thud the swell of the quake of your eyes nights pinning me into lifelike memories of myself six maybe seven years ago when i was less blind and more dumb then maybe these empty bottle nights might mean something more then maybe i wouldn't keep searching for you always at the end of all my fingertips
