Maybe my boundaries could come down
and not unravel,
not fall with a crash,
but slip past my shoulders
like I was being lovingly undressed
by someone with
careful hands
and maybe you could lay your head
on the part of me that
somehow stayed soft
no matter what made me hard
anywhere else
and we could be like that for awhile
with all the lack of hurt
we were supposed to have.
Stranger things have been tried.
Stray embers from a fire
tumbled in a path
strangely burning in control
and cleared the way.
How the hell did that happen?
I can't really say.
A random thing
with purpose,
chaos with precision?
Or am I reinterpreting
my own few decisions?
But I know why
they were made;
a glancing spark
fell in the dark.
I burned, then I rose.
That's all there was to it,
I suppose.
I distract myself from the calendar
as if the march of time doesn't
even go down my street
and ignore the clock as if
the pendulum has not one thing
to do with my beat.
I perform the slaughter of hours
with a thousand and one
tiny little distractions
knowing I can't really get away
from the consequences of my
actions,
behaving as though
the linear course of Zeno's arrow,
infinitely bisected
can be though ritual and ,
poorly-thought-out hoping
be somewhat misdirected.
I know it can't,
I procrastinate in vain,
just trying to control my reactions
making skidmarks in
the sand trying to stop time
with my distractions.
The poem I never wrote begins with his name, although I have said it aloud with no one in the room, and my pillow would tell you the same, and so would the walls, and so would the gloom that his name has warded off in all the corners of my mind--except one.
And just like his name, the story is unwritten.
Find someone else
outside of your head
and hear at least another voice
that is not your own.
There is only noise in being alone--
you must be a sender
and also,
to receive.
You make
only so much
static, beeping,
and squealing,
without sense or feeling.
You find your own meaning,
but it exists somewhere--
and in living it,
so do you.
What if my words were steam building up
in a boiler that might
explode?
Or scratched on a parchment
and placed in an urn
and left 2,000 years
to corrode?
Imagine if my words
bled out, through my pores,
drawn on my skin?
Could I get you to see them then?
Would you wipe them away
before you'd even
begin?
I hold them in.
Oh, I hold them in.
The Dawn loses sleep over the creaking of Tithonus,
although she no longer knows what he chirps about.
He last said he loves her still, before at last
the form of an insect took him over--
Does it matter? It all now sounds like recrimination:
Why? and Why? and Why?
The problem was hers: her nonfatal decision
to prolong his thread in length but not
to preserve his form. She forgot and so,
unevenly yoked, she glowed with aura celestial
as he dwindled to a shrivelled husk.
And now his ceaseless calling haunts her
both sleepless night and working day.
She sighs and admits another mercy--more for
herself but perhaps also for he--and turns him loose.
He can not be a god, but he can be free
and serenade another.
