Tag: solitude

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Spirits (audio)

The hands of the clock slide down the wall as shadows dance playfully in the quiet fading light of evening. Creaks in the floorboards remind me of haunted things, each sudden sound a touch on my shoulder and I could swear someone was there.

The silence gets to you, toys with your senses and knocks your sense of perception just off enough to make you wonder whether or not you are losing your mind. These days, of course, how would you even know.

Do you remember what it was like to be a kid in the backyard right before a rainstorm? How the little hairs on your tiny arm would stand on end at the first distant rumble of thunder, the smell of the earth mingled with moisture, and a rush of electric excitement would course through your veins? Those moments felt so alive to me, more alive than so many moments now all grown up.

Something of the magic falls vacant inside. What it feels like to have faith in a universe which can still surprise you in a way that you can hold in your heart forever.

How long ago was forever?

Sipping my wine, I look out above the empty street. I watch glittery specks of light pierce the dark as the stars come out all over the globe. The curtains blow in the sweet summer nightwind against my cheek.

When I close my eyes, I can feel something in the atmosphere as it is breathing.

A sound like footsteps in the hall as a kid lying still beneath the blankets in the dark. I could have sworn someone was there.

 

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Photo by Elia Pellegrini

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Flinch

Surrounded by vague-eyed people who don’t mean anything but the possibility of deadly infection to me, my hands are shaking because I’m nervous but I couldn’t tell you why. Haven’t even ordered my large coffee yet, let alone sucked any of it down. Well, maybe I could try to explain but I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t want to hear it, or you’d say you did but once you do you’d wish you never got into it with me in the first place.

I guess I’m just generally like this, just like this in general. Skittish, maybe you might call it, I mean, that’s one of those words that means exactly what it sounds like.

Jumpy.

Eyes which dart around the room looking for something that isn’t there, but could be. At any moment. The walls could shake, the towers could fall, the glass could break in case of emergency.

In the tight air of the coffee shop, sifting fragrant among the brown paper bags of ground coffee stacked neatly on the corner shelf, the various assortment of berry muffins, and the beat up burnt orange over-sized soft leather sitting chairs arranged too close in a dimly lit corner around low tables by the window, there is a kind of tension, an uneasiness I’m sure no one else detects but me.

All they can see are the lines on the floor which mark a safe distance and whatever those watches are that people wear now which tell you everything but the time. All they can smell is dark roast beans and frothy milk, while they can’t see past the ends of their pierced high-rise noses.

Do you see? I can. I can’t help but look and the more I do the more I see that unsettles me.

That’s why I’m so nervous.

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Photo by Annie Spratt

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May I Tell You About the Rain (audio)

May I tell you about the rain? It is now falling softly upon the grassy lawn outside my bedroom window, as the sun is gently trying to peel through a rough scatter of deep purple gray clouds. I can see the yellowed melon rays glinting along the drainpipe which runs down the corner of the house across the street.

I can’t explain why but there is this very real fear inside of me, throbbing in the center of my bones, that if I cannot tell you about the rain, I may as well not exist at all underneath this skin which tingles at even the tiniest idea, the smallest suggestion of the sound of poetry. Sizzles with the heat of anticipation, possibility, and dread, the clasp of an invisible hand around my heart whose fingers subtly press, squeezing tight enough to pump the veins full of fresh crimson concern.

I am alive with the rain, I am alive for it.

The rain, meanwhile, with its wide ancient mind set upon other things, has moved out across the fields away from me and I can no longer hear its tiny drops on the hot pavement. But the scent of its memory comes in a gauzy wave through the window where I sit, coffee in hand, head in an alternate universe.

I miss all of the things I have not yet written about. I carry the rain inside when it goes away. When I tell you about the rain, I am wondering if you can hear what I am saying. Are you able to listen beneath the listening. Do you understand that the rain is not a substance but a sensation, that it is an experience with which I am deeply involved, in which I am eternally invested. 

Some may read this and call it madness, obsession, nonsense. I am well aware of that kind of thing by now. But I feel it is important to note, that in one’s single precious life, there should be a very important difference acknowledged between what one is simply aware of and what one is willing to give one’s self over to completely, heavily, dramatically, wholly.

What altar at which one deliberately decides to worship.

And if you have paid me any mind at all, and I do hope you have because I truly do wish to exist, you will understand that I’ve yet to find anything, living or deceased, more worthy than the rain.

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Photo by Esther Ann

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Chrysalis

I play with fire and burn the house down to the ground only to raise you up again from the ashes and use my own tongue to lick you clean. This world we’ve created is madness. It is hell on earth brought down like a curtain, like a veil draped over the faces of eager virgins. Faces obscured. He wanted all of me and I gave him the few slivers I had to spare after dividing up the bones and discarding the filth. While I’m soaking in the bath reading poetry aloud because the way my voice reflects back into itself as it echoes against the tile walls is a turn on, he kisses me when I am drunk. I kiss him back because I like the taste of the liquor on his beautiful lips. He has the most wickedly talented mouth, I can’t deny that. With it he violates, penetrates, and dismantles me entirely. He reaches a strong hand beneath the water and touches me where I open like the gates of heaven, warm, blushed, honeyed. This is how we breathe at the bottom of the ocean of uncertainty. We close our eyes and grope each other’s bodies searching for something we need to feel but cannot bring ourselves to lay eyes upon. The burdens of the ages they try to fasten around my neck are their way of telling me I mean something but I don’t want any of it. I don’t want to mean anything, I want to be free of definition, left to my own reckless devices. After we make love, I sit in our small garden beneath the bedroom window naked, smoking a cigarette while watching the storm clouds move in across an apocalyptic sky. Please let the rain come down hard and heavy all over me. If there is a god please don’t let it take away this exquisite pain which threads itself in my blood. No one’s aloud out and no one’s aloud in. We have only each other to degrade and to satisfy, to feed and to fuck and to sink and to swim. I am gray as the others fade to black. I am the ghost of my haunted past and always have been but the trick is that none of it matters now. Taking a deep shredding drag of my smoke, I run my hand down my body from neck to breast to stomach. Will we ever get out of here. How do we ever get out of here when all we ever do is keep turning back.

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// shape shifter //

It’s about the time of day when the curtains seem to move,
the heavenly eyes of an alien silence watch tenderly as I undress.
The way you’re about to touch me won’t remember the way it was, we don’t talk anymore, just light matches and feed each other fire
until the end of time comes sliding down these afternoon walls.
I miss you even when you’re still here and you’re on the biting heels of leaving and I can never stop walking home with cigarettes and mantras burning holes in my mouth.
When I sleep I try to memorize the stars just in case the world turns upside down because I forgot to look after her,
and I need to recall how to travel alone.
As my hair comes undone all around you, my fingers are sifting ash like rain and I’m searching my tears for clouds.
How is it we can crave such love, when love tells me she’s already here.

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// people keep talking //

Lush disordered worlds are breeding and collapsing upon my mind every time I close my eyes, even if you can’t hear the sound of this dance or this death or those thoughts of yours I’m invading.

People keep talking, glistening mouths, crushed pearl teeth. How readily we abandon one another, how easily we misunderstand a thing and leave it there. Please turn around again, the world has grown so cold. How each wispy staccato breath is brushed forward and disintegrating; you can’t feel the tilting of time toward the precipice but they keep on with their speak and I am falling farther and farther away from the gravity of their distraction.

They ask me why I write about missing a thing I cannot name, why I write about making love to immortal creatures, and then they tell me how it all lingers too long, probes too close to the beauty behind the sadness. It’s not that I don’t want to give away the answers it’s that I don’t want answers, I want questions like white lights hanging in the trees. I know they think I’m writing to find fulfillment, and they feel sorry for me, some of them actually do.

There are no tears on this side of the wall but I see it in the coffee houses wearing sweater boots and talking through me like thin snow flakes painted on glass.

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// cringe and cages //

 

All they ever thought I wanted was to be myself but I’m only myself so often. The selves, I sort through them with expectant, humble, delicate hands and wonder: which face is it you wish me to pull out and put on for you?

In the place where we came from, out of the resurrection of a thousand suns, I can slip inside your movements before you make them, as you thread your fingers through my plush and thickening mouth, one by clever deliberate one. Another of the selves kept quiet: I stand off in the fog of the distance timing my heartbeat to your hesitant receding; this is how they taught us to be available and remain untouched.

The voices of those who want in will not leave, they reverberate inside of me, they are clamor, I am a skeleton of distraction unto myself, a splitting of the mind of my infinite selves. I search the expansive black for an entrance, an exit, a hallway into freedom from these exhausting dreams.

My own heaviness wears thin within the marrow of the bones, the crushing suffocation of my own voice.

And it is my voice I need to return to somehow.

The only solace is lush and secret solitude. Letting go gradually, gradually, all this light is chaos, all this sound is the nectar of a synthetic womb, all these hungry gaping mouths are a world gnashing in constant against a reluctant house of drawn windows, this hurts me, too. It makes me into someone who needs the need and this is the fevered spiral death of all creative things: obsession.

The animal in me is headlights flashing across endless muddy fields, I crave the energy of the smooth spinning earth, to bury my tremors in the sweet cool of dark forests and replenish my veins. The flow of all creation is to pour forth from an abundance, a ripeness, an overflow, to be bitten, sucked, devoured by the material design of the fabric of the cells I carry, the stimulating vibrations of the seeker; the tear-laced dressings of melancholy desire.

I am at odds with the corruption they bottle and rupture me with, this skin, this skin, they have imprisoned me in, I have given it everything.

And a voluptuous song continues its turning on the tip of my soft tongue.

And these many, many souls and I, wander alone with the rest of me.

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