a list.
i wanted to write something gently soft about the way life feels these days. but everything comes out always hard a's and concrete retaining walls. if ever i was lonely or alone things might be different. but this is a different kind of new. and everything that ever was like the way to spell the word color or the shape of my own face feels foreign. daunting. irresolvable. like public school maths. and the weight and consequence of my own tongue.
evidence of invisibility number 43 thousand
i follow the line with my eyes to the part of the floor where the door jambs. i don't know where you're going. on the other side of the boards. where i hear the bare soles of your feet. scraping. and when i wait for the bus, later, with your hand next to mine on the morning concrete sidewalk. i want to howl and howl this slow driving loneliness gone. if we had time until. you'd wrap us up in bedsheets and palms.
this morning i caught
imogen is often times difficult.
sometimes the only thing of the old apartment that i miss is the radiators ping
today and everything feels wrong. like there's too many words for tea cup. and my arms are made of cinder blocks. and every time i try not to sneeze. the world collapses into a pile of polished marbles. and my glasses break. and fiction starts to forget itself in the world of what makes all people real and not at the same time today.
sometimes, i don't know what to do with you.
asia dreams of lost kids named arnold. the perfect lip gloss. rain coats. she doesn't know a lot about finding things. mostly she sends boxes filled with other people's stuff, sealed and wrapped with sticky tape, back before the sting of remembering them gone sends her headlong into a sickening spin. asia dreams of stick and seal tape and the way desire can feel like a firm pull at any end of the lip to lip cardboard opening. the sound so strange. and stinging. asia dreams of moments. packed and sealed. to save. like picture postcards. and invisible things. like arnold. and her.
on any rain soaked week day on a day like this one i would. and in those moments when sight and sound make that wood and everything in between goes so violent and echoing. and the world filled warm like spearmint schnapps. and i cave and cave again against the scarlet tone of the back of your neck. the curves of the bones beneath your feet. and we sink into tepid water. of baths and memories and things that go cold so fast. like spite. and when you say my name it sounds like the same name that i call myself. and everything around me feels like falling. damp right this rain. would fall me down.
so taken was i with these words spun images in my head, that i found my scissors to snip
when i was about to leave you. the whole world felt dissolved. then there was only me, contemptible and resolute. and everything i felt and ate and feared kept getting stuck somewhere between movement and the lack of movement. and i wanted to swim in a glue of sin. and cigarettes. to stick for awhile. and not feel so goddamned ashamed. or alone. or lonely. and then the wind was rattling the edges of my windowpanes. just like this.
and now the dogwoods start to bloom at the back of the building where i work. each morning the buds swell and promise to break. every morning. and when i walk the sidewalk streets and stalk the memory of your lips on my lips the distant taste of your skin. i think about the soft acrid taste of grapefruit. pulp.
