We get so high that I keep inviting someone into the conversation who isn’t there. He’s laughing because it’s just a wrought iron chair and I’m laughing because I don’t like to leave anyone out, and somehow my sudden grave concern is that this empty chair feels rejected. My heart is as big as an ocean and my mind is as free as the little birds which flutter about from tree top to tree top in the sweet evening air.
As I lay back and watch the colors of the sky change, he tells me it’s all in my head and I tell him to shush because when he talks I can’t hear the electric peaches and lavenders as they spread out like gigantic fuzzy fingers across the wide open expanse. I take a drink of his tequila while he’s off to get a beer and somehow the start of a new season doesn’t feel so bad at all.
Somewhere very far away, but not far enough, disease grips the young and old people alike and snuffs them out one at a time or in droves all together. Death is always around the bend but we cocoon ourselves in a secluded garden and play like kids who haven’t a care or an inkling that whatever this is which surrounds us in natural beauty and majesty is nothing more than a breath away from near catastrophe if not complete and total annihilation.
Feeling the effects of everything I’ve done to escape the world around me, I think of a man I once knew who was so hell bent on looking on the bright side that he fell right into the trap they set for you from the beginning. If you peer too long into the abyss it will swallow you whole, along with your entire sense of reality and what’s left of your magic. I don’t want to stay and I don’t want to go and I want both at the same time. I want the warm smooth grass under my feet all day and the stars above to come kiss me on my soft pink mouth one by silvery one each night until my entire body explodes into celestial galaxies which expand and expand forever. For each light, there is a light gone out. For each new beginning, an ending of impossible wonder and exquisite pain. And so it goes on and on like rings of fire blazing out into an endless night which you cradle in the very palms of your hands.
Allison Marie Conway 
Reblogged this on The Reluctant Poet.
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“For each new beginning, an end of impossible astonishment and exquisite pain,” you write. And in that sentence, I can guess fugitive memories and immense pains, a deified twilight lost among the hours… I can also imagine those Chemical Baby’s eyes: they are vast vaults like heavens and through them parade barren jungles, nights of passion, uninhabited worlds. Her body seems to levitate, she wants to lift it above the beginning and the end as death beautifully envelops her word and the cosmos stands still. I feel she inhabits all things, I anchor myself in the garden of her breath. I know she can create light where nothing exists.
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Oh AW, your words and visions here are mesmerizing… thank you so much for sharing all that you see and feel from within this piece. “…she wants to lift it above the beginning and the end…” ….yes, this is just so insightful and beautiful and true. I’m so moved and so grateful by your connection to this work.
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My God, that is indeed the word for this: exquisite. You are so talented in being able to take time and space and play it deeply. Your words expanding and contracting at the same time. The body exploding into celestial galaxies in a verse that culminates in the palm of a hand. You guide the reader outwards so very far, yet bring him back in to a bare, simple yet infinitely significant moment. It is a wonder.
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However on earth to thank you for such depth of vision and understanding and insight as yours, my dear George… as I read your gorgeous words here, I had the sensation or idea of what it is to birth a thing, a life, be it human or divine, a creation, a living breathing ecstatic thing, and it happens just as you describe the way this piece moves: contraction and then expansion over and over again within my being. How very fascinating – I did not think about it consciously when writing this piece but perhaps it was there all along. I am so grateful to you, you open up worlds with the way you see.
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