Aren’t we just looking for someone else’s hand to hold, for their tender ‘other’ burdens to pass sweet between our lips. They were ahead of the snowfall and it just washed up on the lawn as rain. Still the barren cold suits us, the tall of the trees protruding from our hickory laden lungs. Wool coats and the dark scarf which smells of the warm smoke of you. Hard boots against the pavement. I used to be a writer but today I am mostly that small sad person who dreams about a pen in hand, who hopes you cry a little when you understand how far I’ve gone to break though everything, to get away from everything. To get into myself and know what that even means is so terrible and so difficult.
I do not miss you the way you’d hoped. I miss the half I resurrected in my simmering stove pipe mind. Pulled your image from the frozen earth and made you a kiss out of nothing. Magic, I would tell you. Magic, the way a body turns from flesh to object to puddle and back again under the proper gaze. And here you are, worlds on fire in your perpetual eyes, pretending there is no such thing as disturbance.
I offer you the pulse in my neck and you take your sweet long time. No hands. No expectations. And the mood follows the mood, the mood follows no pattern, fluctuates and penetrates invisible, without you. The mood slips off and hangs separate from you yet holds you captive. They are still breathing and I am what is leftover. To peer up into the world is crush and torture, this is the way of a mind that wishes perhaps for too much. We sit in small rooms waiting, showing ourselves for the little fools we are and we do it in secret and we do it alone and the gray sky light offers its bony arm for no good reason.
I clear more and more items from my desk — pages from letters and charcoal bits of my wind scattered heart — because I cannot stand the idea of ever going back, back to the way it was, back to the way I was, out of touch with myself. Groping in the daylight for something to destroy by comparison.
I used to love an artist who would make obscene creations larger than life as though thereby making them beautiful. As though the more gruesomely and intricately she could scratch her claws against the world, the more the world would bend to her and call her god. It was at this time she would become her most gentle, her most lamb-like, tender.
And the transformation was more obscene than the art itself.
Allison Marie Conway 