Yellow Peril

but we loved with a love that was more than love—

[1wc]

most nights i stand in the half-light seething or this is what i would like to say. instead i listen to people on the street, coughing. they know nobody else is around. they raise immaculate voices in anger. for who could forbid them? certainly not i, i, who, also unsleeping, rise, to touch the cold windowpane and gleam beneath the auspices of a streetlamp.

behind me, only the sounds of breathing and a sock which falls from the clothes-rack onto the floor.

[1wc]

i didn’t have anything to say. long time since the last poetic thought-- it was easy to think of romance and squeal too close to the hand for distance to intrude, the kind of lover i longed to fall asleep to

with time, what face did that bright boy evolve for me? still a high laugh, a passionate word but not for me--for me only subdued touches, a murmur an exhale, embrace turning into embrace, night shifting into night-with-outside-lights, breezy curtains, house dust

what if i gave myself up, then, to rationale? all my life, reserved, for what eventuality? until when would i decide to cease eating words, the act of suppression so deep my mind distills nothing, a clear surface, an anti-wind, a non-existence so exquisite i settle into the future which i, in some other universe, dreamed for me?

[1wc]

someday i would like to know you across a long expanse of ocean. the kind of knowing that does not come cheap or guilty, a luxury swallowed through the tongue. the stomach is the first desire. after that, misery. i crave skin the way water cleaves to coastline, a fiction so real i can seize it with my hands and bring it to my lips. i have no taste for patience, only the sort of removed immediacy which comes with absence. leave me be, i cry. and in the fine, hazy distance, i see the cavern of your mouth, cradling your teeth.

[1wc]

images from an early winter

more the taste of cinnamon than the look of it: i sat in the chair listening to cheerful music. i wanted to say, it has been years, but already i am forgetting the look of your face. really, only your small mouth remains with me, your brown eyes, your long nose. the memory of your hands, which still fills me with disgust—or, no—only some sort of gut deep refusal, some sort of sorrow. it is easier to write about you than to think about your face. still, i perform. still, you are a part of me. or you have taken a part of me; you possess me, the way that i have been possessed by everyone who has ever touched me. and what a word—touch. and how i shudder from it, at odds with the sound of the song, the unyielding wood of the chair, the cold of this house in which i am cheerful, when the heat has not yet turned itself back on.

[1wc]

images from an early winter, ii

i have not said anything in so long. i touch your skin, blue beneath moonlight—what a marvel. i obsess with looking at you, the high colour of your cheek, the deep ridge of your spine. i said, for so long, don’t give me a literary love. now, i want to scream. do i love you again? you have taken from me, you have corrupted me—i am not who i once was, and i see myself, the other version of me, who still lives walking down the old path. didn’t i love her? don’t i want her? i know nothing of grief, only of envy. under white lights i search your curls for the colour of your hair: a dishwater brown. but your lashes shine, turning lead into gold—and couldn’t you be beautiful if i made you? couldn’t i cease to have second thoughts? couldn’t i perform the trick of myself, for an old friend, frustrated and poisonous, obsessive in the way only i taught myself to be, dismal at the thought of the future—please,

[1wc]

I forgot the first line. The second was that I went so long without weeping, And each breath was like a caress From an angel of dust.

I wanted to say that I, too, had read the superstitions In the blue carpet of the train seats And nowhere else, for I was too afraid to look I could not bear the mysteries of your face, Voluminous and voluptuous, your fragrant stare Which must have lingered, like mine, Always elsewhere.

[1wc]

I would know you at the end of the world. Still, love is never easy. In a few months - spring I do not even have to look out of windows to sigh Eloquence escapes me, especially when I want it I have no poems for how quickly I throw myself into delusion, or bitter sorrow Even the birds would not swallow my wild feelings with their warbling throats LOVE - LOVE - LOVE - all the time! It frustrates me More emotion that I can speak - the touch of a shoulder, a house trembling beneath my feet Sleep has never been so elusive, I am making myself sick, but do not feel it. What is hunger? What is hunger for the intangible appetite? I have nothing to do with my hands, nor do I know what I would do with them if I did have to do something but too afraid to do it It would possibly be better to launch myself into space And still I think of nothing but you & you & you and sometimes I (The point of love was probably to drive people mad.)

[1wc]

i don’t think of you anymore. or rather, i don’t think of you often, and never fondly. mostly perversely, wondering  who you have become, whether you are still alive. whether you are happier than you were before. but here i am, writing. not to you, but about you, and maybe that is your last laugh. your triumph, brown eyes, sharp light, soft mouth like a crow, always cawing, cawing. 

mostly i am sorry about you, but not sorry enough to do anything about you. i wonder if you heard that i was leaving. but i have left you already, and now, i think, you are leaving me too.

[1wc]

how do i say that i am the happiest i have ever been?

i am almost afraid of it, but that, too, is an old story. were we not taught to fear the good, the way others are taught to look up at the blue sky and fear god?

eighteen years, and only now do i feel like my own person. i walk down the street and only look at other people’s faces one face to another; and after a while i start to see

the same eyes, the same nose, the same corners of the mouth, hiding kisses, or wishes, or missing or not missing somebody else. don’t you? don’t you, too? i do. i do, and then i long 

for my own reflection, in a way that must be obsessive,  but mostly leaves me unsure. still, i am happy. i sleep at regularly odd hours of the night, and i do not dream. 

and i confess, i think of you less. the old house, after all, is too far away to touch me here.

[1wc]

god sits in the parking lot and says don’t be a stranger. in my language, this equates to betrayal. blood is thicker than water. blood is viscous, vicious. blood courses through my veins like a curse. do you know how the story goes? spread out your arms, nail them to the ground. obsequious, obedience. my language rolls within my mouth. a foreign object; i learnt all the wrongs things all my life, but how could i help it? in the parking lot before god i am unsteady beneath led lights. no sun-disk glow, just him with black hairs on his big toes, an enormous birthmark on his thigh. i did not choose to be born, i say, and god replies, but you chose every moment of selfishness after. he is unrepentant and slow as the world, but we both pretend that i don’t know it. after all, my language is his language. he gave it to me, whole. 

but if you cannot speak, and you cannot understand - then what do you have left? 

[1wc]

i’m in that strange place between packing and leaving and it’s still too early to go. do you understand me? i realise i talk too much about the wind. but only because i notice it all the time - mostly i don’t mean it. i try not to mean anything. i play music at odd hours just to fill my head with other people’s loves. i sing in voices that don’t belong to me, and perhaps never will. do you see how i blush? no, you don’t, because i never do. i’d have to run a kilometre, the gravel vanishing beneath my shoes, my lungs swallowing themselves down like madmen. i’d have to wound myself, but i don’t do that either. i lie awake at night, listening to the words you and you and you. i think i am warm enough on my own.

[1wc]

see, the wine was bitter to follow but i walked with my eyes bowed to the glass i said the words, too, ten years in a holy place, and nobody looked not even once, not even when the wailing deafened.

see, i only wrote middling things sat with my back to the wall and heard the sounds of satisfaction gluttonous and savage, tearing at the soft wet flesh of the throat a full bucket or two, the brim red; plastic and pearlescent.

see, yes, i took back most of it, gladly better to swallow than to leave out for lost; the child in the wide green streets, still there, expecting something, a silence, a quick glimmer a hat, a freely opening palm-

[1wc]

it’s an awful wind that blows i dreamed i walked in the yellow night and it howled in my ears: the sea - the dead - the lovers who cast themselves from the precipices of passion - fools, maybe,

but i was the greatest fool of them all i allowed myself to be borne across the streets my hair snatched from my eyes hands pinkening, remembering the sort of fancies i fancied as a child and i grew suddenly afraid of the moon her still face in the dark sky untouched by the cacaphony

[1wc]

i’m sorry i dropped the gun i was obsessed with the other life another you, another me, you know there, we stood on each side of the harbour our gaping maws, for once, tender

and i mean, this was meant to be slow i speak in the only way i know: weeping, my mind dissolving i thrash, ophelia again, in the river my skin bejewelled with spring, and pale

[1wc]

a bad phantasmagoria

a girl sits down and opens her mouth:

i wanted to be sad, all the time! i took my head in my hands and threw it against the wall! i could be terrible! i could be a tragic hero! i said these sorts of things and did not know whether to believe in them. it became christmas very quickly. i opened all the windows to let in the hot night air and stayed up thinking about my terrible political opinions. how did anybody ever manage to speak about inequality without being beaten? of course, very many people were beaten. the streets had not forgotten this. but not my streets. that was the main problem: any complaint i had was only bitter. i could not even see properly out of my eccentric and bulging eyes. i drank sweet water out of a secular mug created by religious privilege. there were several fancy words in my possession, which i liked to take out and display like ill-gotten jewels. the funniest thing was that it was very easy to be sad all the time, even if it exhausted me. i wanted to talk to nobody. i craved an audience. i imagined a few enormous and terrible things: a blue whale speared by the centrepoint tower, a government which desired to radically change society. in my dreams my mother was standing in the harbour with the water up to her knees. the skin of her neck was loose and patchy. she said, bring me the heaviest stone you can carry. i don’t want to swim.

[1wc]

it’s not carnage if you leave well alone. i haven’t been out of the house in days. maybe that’s just how it goes: i keep piling and piling and piling and piling up books i’ll never read. reluctant to shave the back of my head. excess hair, at the nape of my neck, clinging. a disgusting feeling if i ever felt one, only i’ve never had to feel anything worse. desire, maybe. but mostly nothing to do. you know. just the sound of lawnmowers and leaf-blowers. children screaming in the park. nobody pounding at the door.

[1wc]

a catalogue of 3am thoughts.

in another life, maybe, we sat here with our mouths unhinged. everything said has the potential to wound. a universal truth if i ever knew one. at night i could not sleep because i kept thinking about the injustice of extinction via artificial super-intelligence. don’t touch. we had maybe five years left, fifty if we were lucky. i tried to impart these things to you, but i think you were only able to understand that, for some reason, i was very afraid. like a dream. bad things will continue to happen even if you fall asleep. perhaps that was why i could not bear the thought of being alive. if i were offered immortality, i would take it and damn you, no second thoughts. sorry. also, i was terribly proficient at lying. i did it all the time. and how many alternate universes existed, in which we never met each other? say none. the march of time does not mean progression, and by march everything will be decided. i spent so long masquerading that i did not realise my mask was that of a fool’s. an itch at the back of the throat is the prelude to a cold. how do you know the choices you made were happy ones? flap, flap, the gossip rags. there were so many things i could not say to you, i didn’t even think to try.