abrupt

When we sat down to eat at the burger joint on Lexington Avenue, little did I know you had a history of divorce, crystal meth, HIV, and a son who has turned his face against you. My situation is the contrary -adrift, and afloat on an ocean of memories. It has been four years since I have seen them face to face. We try in different ways to reconfigure relationships; you crochet, and I weave, and yet the fabric is never seamless.

I walked into a closet of light bulbs at the end of yesterday. They were smooth cheeked, hallucinogenic, and timid in a way dimples burst across their foreheads. For seventeen minutes and nine seconds, I whistled bluegrass tunes, and scrunched fourteen bulbs using my right fingers, till I smelled mica in my blood trails. The day ended with the sun squirming into a horizon cushioned with dust pillows from the chimneys.

Abrupt.

Life has been whirling in a polychromatic spiral of possibilities and impossibilities, and the cataracts of unions closing in chasms of institutionalism. We see babies, and dead bodies swinging in the same air under the veil of ritual. And I feel the contortion of your cravings crackling and bursting across electronic paragraphs, where I imagine you, behind an illuminated blanket of pixels, reddening with lust, pulling your clitoris, shaking your head in semi-circles, the primal aroma of manhood pirouetting in your kitchen. I imagine the air suckling perfume from your apron, in front of a radio, playing Elvis Costello. And then you are laying on a rug, holding a book, your bright white legs splayed apart perpendicularly, reading about enema as you prepare for the night. I imagine a name for you. Eugenia Wallace. Or Hilda Koch. You in a corset. Your breasts squeezed into the shape of seedless raspberries, popping over the curvature of lace and leather. Standing beside your loveseat, you sing songs of fire birds and thunder. And when the clouds melt into balls of rain, you walk to the forest and meditate on where you were left behind. On who held your hand, who stole your shoes, and who measured your shadows. And rumination bubbles in your blood orifices a magnetic covetousness. A craving to be attended to, to be loved, and held beside. 

Shadows, from the outside, are short-lived. But the path you have tread, the gravel you have stamped, the air you have exhaled, have left elements of presence in the midst of particulars. This is an urge to refold yourself into happiness. To smile like a canary dancing in the sunshine. To buy yourself a compliment of strength and fidelity, and to tell yourself -this is a life worth living.