I Know It’s Hard to Do

Time is running sheer all around us now, sweet thing. Look me in the eyes. I know it’s hard to do, to look into the love which you are terrified you don’t deserve. Like an abyss, like a falling which is blind, which is without end. Soft like forgiveness. Heaven and hell all around but not within reach. You are falling at a speed incalculable, which doesn’t matter of course, but it grates on you that you do not know. Cannot know.

Stick figure. Paper cut eyes. Six hundred and sixty six ways of playing God. Go ahead, taste me. Go ahead, drown yourself, end it all like a murder, like a suicide. Love and death. Like you can handle it.

Promise me this: you will carve out a space where only you make the rules and then you will kill the rules off one by one. You call the shots. You say the things which need to be said. There is a voice you carry within you which is beyond this world and its fixtures and fixations. Your voice, your world. The likes of which they have never heard. Couldn’t possibly fathom. But you know of deeply, intuitively, instinctively.

Words carved into your palm, onto your lungs. Poetry etched into the way you move your curved body, like a breathtaking storm. Like a tornado. Like destruction. Like a deep oceanic sound. Haunted. Hunted. Charted. Mapped. An invisible vibration of color, of darkness.

Please understand, no one told me any of this. Not directly and not anyone I could trust but somehow I learned it along the way, or I knew it as far back as the beginning. No, no, not of me but of time itself, of life itself. The dawning. Surely you know what I mean, even if you don’t believe in anything other than beginnings. That’s all God is. The Devil. Something penetrates, wets, agitates. Some kind of life swims in the womb full of the heavy blooded blackness. Death all around. Death as beginning. Beginning as a terrible light.

Please pay attention, my love. Note the number of times you think about time. In the coming hours how often you worry about the hours. How you split yourself, turn into yourself trying to make the calculation. You pour your coffee. You turn the key in the ignition and the day is too clear and too cold and the windows a fogged frost, thin.

Traffic as time left. Red light, green light, the turning of the eternal, tires grinding skin.

You say you do not pray but you feel the sickness in your bones while waiting at the intersection. You open the glass doors into the glass building from which you stare out at the swaying spring trees as the boss needs and the phone rings and the hollow man in the side office is talking at you in a voice you cannot understand. You type a letter you delete.

And somewhere far, far away from where your life is breaking into silent pieces blown away on the stale wind, you are standing in the dead center rush of the middle of that intersection, twenty five lane highway as the cars and trucks blast past your tiny fragment frame, like standing among the wildflowers, you are soft, supple, drugged, alone. Let the sunlight take you from here. Let the beams of little dust light all around you make like a thousand points of potential impregnation.

At the beginning is the end and so it is, too, the reverse. Look into me, sweet thing. Life as blessing, life as curse.