Veils of sunlight sweep across the heavy naked trees, wintering. The clouds, indifferent, close again and sadness eclipses the hollow of time.
We are infinite except at certain points where we, too, must end in shadow, passing into gray light, peeling at the corridor.
I can hold death in a single palm and life in the other. I can show you a trick, do you want to see? You say the thing and watch the molecules disintegrate.
Each breath beating slow against the other. The dark animal heart of dark wet passage. Heart of influence. Heart at the center. The finality of stone.
A violent shiver in a driving rain. Trench coats. Vodka and cigarettes alone in florescent hotel rooms all across the nameless town that is you.
A litany of sorrows and desertions, all wrapped up in waxed silence now forever.
In your eyes, the sacred sign of the cross hairs. Trigger warnings and unmet needs. Hand to mouth, blood to throat to chalice. With angels all around.
You won’t remember so I will try to for both of us. Gin in the evening before you touch me the way you like to do at the end of a long hard week. Shadows falling along the walls as the dark caves in. I wanted to write something for you but I swear nothing would come. It was so many hours, baby, I just don’t know what on earth is wrong with me.
I can be sweet sometimes, I know maybe not often enough. The clouds grow thick and sink all the way into my bones until I am like a weighted thing, a pearlescent stone long buried among the wreckage at the bottom of the sea. You like a watery beam of light I can barely distinguish, reaching all the way down, down, falling all over me.
You tell me not to worry, everything will be alright. And I hear you, angel, I promise I am following every word you say. I watch your beautiful mouth move warmth around the sentences. Curves of breath which extend from the thickened groves of your exotic mind. I tug on them as if we were leashed together. Please give me more. I’ll do anything you tell me to, anything.
Somewhere far away from here the ocean turns black as the night swims in, velvet strokes of shimmering dark. There are surf sounds and there is freedom, I can almost taste the salt on my tongue. They will tell you you are only good for one thing but it is not true. My body is ten million ways to find what you are looking for, I promise you it is.
This little hand shining your shoe. This small soft frame against your palm, as though a painting you could hang upon the wall connected with hooks. Shadows now and again, nearly still, moving into one another. I glide like the open air, as though a portal, a vision, a river flowing out in all directions.
Isn’t it a funny thing, I try to tell you, as you stiffen my drink. This ridiculous life all around and through us, tossing us any way it pleases. I think about all the people who can’t imagine any other way to be and I feel sadness wringing my whole heart. There’s so much more to you and I. So much more we have yet to see, if only I could figure out the words.
It won’t matter in the end, not as much as you think it will anyway. But what do I know, I’ve not yet been. All of these voices, all of these people, telling you what to do and how to be, what makes you trust them more than you trust yourself? How’d the bar get set so low for what matters and what doesn’t?
Or maybe it’s the opposite problem. Somewhere underneath the scuttled noise of your arrogance or theirs, the bar got set so impossibly, irretrievably high that even to reach it became nothing more than the failure to clear it all together. We fear the fall and we fear the fear to take the leap in any case. Maybe that’s why you trust them. At least then they can’t peg any of this on you.
When I light the cigarette I’m not myself. When I swallow the gin I am more magic than sin. When you speak at me like you think you’re gonna teach me something I don’t already know, I spit on the concrete sidewalk and twist my thick heel against the stones. You don’t take the time to think it through. You take half the time it takes to make any sense at all and I wish somehow inside I could separate my frustrations from the wild tentacles of your charm. I wish I could untangle your endless wandering words from the silence I so desperately want to drown into in my own deep dark soul.
For all the “man-made” advances we congratulate ourselves for making in technology or science or war, an erosion takes place little by little within us collectively. I feel it in the pit of my stomach and try to numb it with all the wrong things. Looking into your eyes, I see blue skies which never end and twisted feelings which somehow always do. I’m unsure if I want to pleasure you or tear you apart piece by piece. Perhaps a little bit of both because what good is one without the other.
You’ve seen it before, you’ve felt it in places you’d rather not admit to anyone. The sweet, sweet anguish of destruction in the palm of your very own trembling hands.
In a dream, she was soft as a feather as her bare breasts brushed against the open heat of my mouth. She gives me a tiny book of matches with a darkened navy washed image on the front. I cannot recall what it was exactly, a typewriter maybe or a peacock, some wild, exotic, beautiful thing. We blew clouds of smoke into the velvet drapery and plush carpeting. We slid our fragile hands all over each others’ smooth pale skin. When her eyes flashed like fire on water, mine did the same in response, I could feel it. No words only laughter, only touch. The liquid of the dream giving way to pure ocean glow like crystal in sunlight, the soft hazy burn of the salt of desire.
I could not tell you where my dreams come from and I cannot tell you where any of the folds of my mind begin or end. What they will expect of you are answers you cannot give. Don’t even try. What they will try to trick you into spilling are the secrets you were meant to keep all to yourself. How many kisses are apologies planted right square in your dying mouth? It gets complicated like that, but mostly because we set it up to be.
And what is there really but fear and little breaks in the fear now and again.
In your mouth, the cold wet suburban streets calling for no one.
You trace the quiet desperation that rings itself around your week-old coffee mug and cherish the meek sadness of the rain which has gone on for decades underneath your skin.
You try to write but all the photographs are full of messages you cannot keep from weighing down your mind.
Time is always someone else’s.
Every person has a camera and each image is a waste because they are the same and never stop. The people, their hurt-filled eyes, the ignorance of their blackened words in constant.
A soft being dressed in white dances before the sun, they are setting into the sickness of green seaside.
I suppose I am afraid for all the reasons anyone would be afraid.
The deafness of silence and the way a scream fills the bathwater.
The fear which both bridges and divides one moment and the next as the evening comes but not carefully enough.
There is a moment I can feel in my chest like a song you wrote but not for me, an empty beach in December which drifts in the marrow of my bones.
You do not meet me and you are everywhere.
You are faceless without body or tongue, though all I do in these dead hours of sliding panic is imagine you exist.
It’s later, though not late enough for dark. Not late enough to drown the memory of his filthy words from her mind with multiple glasses of wine.
Not enough to erase the shame that burns in her body, making her wet in places she feels too guilty to admit to, let alone touch, let alone speak about. Not that anyone listens to her when she speaks in any case, but still.
It is late enough, however, for the descending winter storm to dim the neighborhood sufficiently such that the many strands of multi-colored twinkle lights click on, shining their holiday glow of greens, reds, oranges, and blues from underneath a fresh frosting of snow along the windows and trees.
She hadn’t meant to go so far as to actually interact with him online. It wasn’t something she normally did but, alas, quarantine seems to have blurred her virtual boundaries. Isolation, that is, along with the pale white wine she appears to have increased her tolerance for exponentially over the past many months while stuck inside with nowhere to go.
How many months has it been now? Eight? Nine? A year? Five, ten? Doesn’t matter, of course. The damage that was to have been done is done and here she finds herself quite alone, aching for touch, watching the heavy snow pile up on the street, pouring her precious liquid escape into a long stemmed glass.
The way the alcohol numbs the skin and tingles it at the same time makes her feel like she is flying high and sunk down as low as the Titanic at the bottom of a tranquil distant sea. Her limbs, heavy and light and chained to the ocean floor.
Looking up she sees little children coming out to play across a few yards down the block. Screaming and throwing themselves all over into the snow drifted hills. She remembers doing the same once in a tiny pink snow suit, little white boots with little white tassels. Her eyes like wide sapphire stars staring blurry into the heavens as she opened her tiny pink mouth to taste the falling frozen droplets on her warm protruding tongue.
How could a creature so innocent grow into something so grotesque with insecurity, so riddled with deviant desires and angst.
Perhaps that is how he somehow suddenly caught her off guard when they spoke the other day. Perhaps that is how he managed to skewer her right there between her near animalistic craving for affection and the jagged edge of her breath-taking loneliness.
The mouth of the world overflows with judgement, of course. She had been every nasty thing they called her growing up: a slut, an easy lay, a bitch, a snob, a brat, a loser, a loner, a nobody, a disappointment, a whore.
Sometimes they would say it outright, sometimes just with the slant of their prissy eyes. Either way she knew what they meant and how they wanted her to feel. Like an outsider. Like a freak.
The thing about certain older men was that when they looked her dead in the eye it sent her heart racing into her throat. With a gentle word, the slightest touch, they could send her fragile bones trembling with want, soak her head to toe with need.
When they spoke to her with sincere admiration it set fire through her thin pewter veins and made her feel desperately alive.
The addiction to approval. Intoxication by flattery, even if by calculated design.
In the dim light of thick fog, I reach for the moon and fall short.
The scent of damp soil, the hardness of stoic earth, rises from beneath my feet as my boots make tracks on the forest floor. I can see the little lights coming on in a string of small houses dotting the woods.
Electric candles, crimson Christmas ribbon, holly branches, shaggy low pine.
I was born in the dark of the morning, into the darkness of a kind of perpetual evening. This is what they told me. And in my innocence, in my eagerness to mean anything at all, I believed.
To believe is a way of holding onto time. I fold my soul into a sheet of paper, bargaining with chance, crumbled in the bottom of the pocket of my black wool coat.
One of the falsehoods we carry with us into adulthood is that we are only worthy of love if we try hard not to break it. We break ourselves instead, as protection. Melancholy. Spiked. Reckless. Bones like steel and hearts like fire, foolish, fevered, desperate.
Our hands on our chests. Our empty legs, like the slim bare trees groping toward the white endless sky, spread wide apart and glistening.
Expectant.
He reaches for me beneath our warm winter blankets. We lie naked and join together, moving in swivels of curled hips and feathers of touch, until we become the rain which streams down along the grand windows all around, prismatic, the translucent pale color of tears.
His hands trail over my arms as he presses me deeper into the soft mattress. There is a kind of silence that swallows a body like death, a welcoming. The vacancy, the heaviness of slumber.
Of escape or eviction.
Beneath his heavenly pressure, I slide into the blank darkness of sleep.
Unsure of how to begin, I dive right to the center. Or the middle. Or the edges. I am never exactly certain which, but I begin the nibble hoping to progress to a full meaty bite.
Chewing on this life, this life the whole of which stands trembling before death as it has and does and always will on any given day of the week until the end.
The Rest. The Final.
I would tell you all about me but I fear it would shock or bore you so I dress it up as best I know how with a textural mix of sex and violence and drama and then try to weave my way back to the intricacies of the beginning so that you, and I, and we, the collective, can feel some sense of closure as we drift inside a tiny sliver of space within a world which is a never ending labyrinth of potential openings and doors, some already opened, some closed, some locked, some unlocked, though we never know this because the fear of the other side is enough to keep us from even attempting to turn the knob and see.
The terror of the blank page. The white blazing blindness of the vast empty and the threat of the desire to fill the void. To drain and fill the mind. Consciously. That of which we are aware. That which we deny.
To re-fill the mind.
To discard the old, not bury it, no dirty fingernails or ceremonial tears, but to stride deliberately into the darkness and set it on fire, thoroughly engulf it in flame and watch as the smoke rises into the hollow midnight sky.
The piercing through of the ancients. The cutting of the heart, the suffering which is cathartic, which is relief. I am asleep, however, and unaware until dawn. I am clean. I am pure as in the womb, voiceless, warm and alone. The blood is red in the open air, it runs the distance which is blue, which is the track of the tubes of circulation which is a prayer, the prayer of kinetic energy, the prayer of budding teeth, a rosary of extending bone.
The embers glowing as splits, flecks of eyes simmering out in the cold.
Looking down into my own palms, I am this body and this age. I am beyond this moment as I am under it as I am moving toward it and away. I am these dreams I am desperate to speak of, but hold back.
No more. No more, when there is no future whispering in the olive distance. No more, when the mist of this morning is a hall of mirrors hung upon the backs of doors which close and open, close as they open.
Look into my eyes. Place your fingers in my wounds. Spread your lips beneath the wet charcoal sky.
Hello out there, how are you doing? I am wishing you well, I am hoping you are safe and hanging in there wherever you are across the globe. I thought since we, well, many of us are spending more time perhaps alone that I would record this little something for us today. It feels a little bit more intimate, doesn’t it? Closer? To hear my voice in addition to the words? I feel so, I hope so. In any case, I was sitting with some wine last evening, or whatever evening whatever day in whatever month, and it was sunset and the light was fading out over the rooftops and the trees and I was just making a few notes here and there in some things I was reading, I’m reading some cultural texts, some books about current events and yadda ya all that madness. And my head was spinning in all of the mayhem, right, wishing things were different and knowing that it will be a long time before we crawl out from under the weight of what we are going through with coronavirus and grief and pain and the anger and the frustration and the fear and all these things. But all of a sudden my eye caught the reflection of just this small radiance, this shimmer of light reflecting through just some little houseplant in the corner of my writing room, and I remembered this poem I love, its a fairly popular poem by Charles Bukowski, called The Crunch, from his collection – I think there are multiple versions but the version I think of is the version from Love Is a Dog From Hell. You may know it, but it is a poem about loneliness, crushing loneliness and the state of a world full of neglected people, forgotten worn down souls.
So tragic but also, I am afraid so very real, right. And I think I will read it for you, first, and then I have a poem of my own I will share, the reason being is because it has been ages, ages, it feels like to me, since I have written a proper poem. I have been heavy with the prose and the non fiction and the story weaving, story telling, which I just adore, and I am so grateful that you are here with me for all of it, you hearten me very much out there. But poetry, poetry is where I come from, poetry is in my blood, it is a way of living and dreaming and breathing and being, a way of interpreting the world, outside and inside of myself. I couldn’t live without it. It has done more to transform and awaken me, enlighten me, than any other form of writing or art or expression. So I wanted to spend some time with poetry today.
So here is Charles Bukowski’s poem, The Crunch:
too much too little
too fat too thin or nobody.
laughter or tears
haters lovers
strangers with faces like the backs of thumb tacks
armies running through streets of blood waving wine bottles bayoneting and fucking virgins.
an old guy in a cheap room with a photograph of M. Monroe.
there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock
people so tired mutilated either by love or no love.
people just are not good to each other one on one.
the rich are not good to the rich the poor are not good to the poor.
we are afraid.
our educational system tells us that we can all be big-ass winners.
it hasn’t told us about the gutters or the suicides.
or the terror of one person aching in one place alone
untouched unspoken to
watering a plant.
people are not good to each other. people are not good to each other. people are not good to each other.
I suppose they never will be. I don’t ask them to be.
but sometimes I think about it.
the beads will swing the clouds will cloud and the killer will behead the child like taking a bite out of an ice cream cone.
too much too little
too fat too thin or nobody
more haters than lovers.
people are not good to each other. perhaps if they were our deaths would not be so sad.
meanwhile I look at young girls stems flowers of chance.
there must be a way.
surely there must be a way that we have not yet thought of.
who put this brain inside of me?
it cries it demands it says that there is a chance.
it will not say “no.”
Mmm. That poem murders me, it kills me with its terrible truth. But somehow, sometimes, when the truth hurts so badly we just want to hear someone say it. Out loud. We are not good to each other. Anguish in the form of poetry.
And I think about some poetry I have written, and one poem came to my mind to share with you today, it is titled “Remember Me” from my book Luminae. I wanted to read it for you in the hopes that for a little while it keeps you company, whatever you are doing.
Here is Remember Me:
Has this been the hurt inside of you these cuts on my hands the crush of broken promises. Your static mouth a shrieking fog
buzzing in my head, humming – you like grains of sand scratching a desert in my throat.
Remember me a grapefruit moon
hanging in your rear view mirror love in the back seat melon. sunset. smoke. love
took a back seat.
Now the morning rolls down her sheets silicone heat waves sweat across my tongue. I listen for you but all that moves nails along the wall are reflections of an empty afternoon.
(my arms reach for three corners from this corner)
The windows are swallowing sunlight the sunlight is dangling through trees traces of a dim lit landscape you used to speak of
in dreams.
And so with this I leave you for now. Please take the best care of yourself that you possibly can. Please be safe and well. And thank you, always, for spending some time with me. Until the next time. Cheers.
You tell me that when you read the poem I slid underneath your office door you had to take a seat and read it over multiple times. You enjoy the way the words taste like the sin of flesh and bone and youth.
You do not smile at me and I do not smile back. I don’t want your happiness. I want to tear you into a thousand small pieces from the inside out, set you on fire and leave you there to burn.
As you say encouraging things to me about my work, your gaze travels over my body slowly, drinking in my subtle movements, the crook of my wrist, the bend of my hip, the cocky way I tilt my head against the paint chipped door frame so my long wavy hair falls over my elbow just enough to skim my waist. Your eyes like two beautiful blades slicing me open, exposing me without even a touch, coming back up to meet my eyes.
You stay there forever etched in my brain and even all these years later I recall you sat back like a very bad man who wanted very bad things. I miss the poetry and I miss the high of seduction, intrigue, play. But I am not me anymore and you are not you. Now the world is upon its knees as angry mobs line up together and demand their own execution.
Make it grave, make it public, make it hard and make it hurt, how bored we are of the lives we don’t even bother to lead. Now my dreams are screams, I can hear them so clearly in their vivid colors. Sex and death. Bright fires flaring up along the empty streets of my skin, my soft blue veins engulfed in thick tongues of flames.
My image fades in and out of a mirror which stands still against a blank wall, as the wind moves shadow into shadow. Intercourse. Dark moon. Nightgowns on pale women, singing on the lawn in the haunted hush of night. Their black eyes reach out like claws, they touch one another. The clutch of a bare hand to my chest. A fist of long fingers gripped tight around my throat.
I need it, can’t you understand that? There is a cord which runs invisible from the pulse in my neck to the heat of my sex. I need to feel something which honors the fear. Something which penetrates the veil. I have such nightmares of late, and wake washed flush in a sweat, in the kind of glistening tears a whole body cries. I have these mad times threaded through the hallways of my ricochet mind. We cannot return to the way things were, but I’ll be alright. I don’t miss your eyes. They are with me all the time.
Allison Marie Conway 