assouvi ton œuvre, accepte le silence

(archive)

[caldwell-63-deactivated20260526]

michael

adult, agender, aromantic

beware of my exceedingly complicated tagging system : asks are tagged #asks, the music is tagged #music, my writing is tagged #writing and the rest is tagged #. the poems i actually like are tagged #a banger if i might say so

[agodofabsence]

if you stumble upon old posts and asks from current/ previous blogs, please send it to me!

[a-sphyx1ate]

i love you an exposed nerve you keep brushing past carelessly so carelessly and i

cannot allow myself the humiliation of screaming

i cannot lose myself further into you

[a-sphyx1ate]

do you remember these blinding summer days spent walking to the ocean through the pines, light pouring through the canopy in long golden sheets.

how for a moment, the world was so full of brightness it seemed incapable of loss.

and grace, my love; it falls freely through the branches, gathers on your shoulders, settles in your hair, crowns your upturned face with gold, how the light keeps finding you and so do i

[caldwell-63-deactivated20260526]

i have loved; the light entered me and never left a mortal heart held high, purer than heaven my chest, hollowed out

[a-sphyx1ate]

the body is a lit thing, with every nerve a filament strung between two silences. but the moth is not less a soul for being only flesh and appetite climbing toward a window.

and regardless of the cases the mind builds against love, the body overrules the verdict. what inhabits past governance are akin to alchemy: waiting for the matter to blacken and run, surrendering its edges, the nigredo. the dissolving that is the opening of the work, rather than being death.

but none of this comes as a surprise, now. grace pools along the floor, and the ache the flesh kept calling wanting turns out, in the end, to have been a kind of prayer.

and yet i remain suspicious of illumination; i am of the dark, i have spent my whole life walking with ghosts, our light shines inward. you tell me the ache was prayer, and i wonder if prayer and haunting do not often arrive disguised as one another. as you may know, absence has always been a prolific theologian, and perhaps we worship different gods at the same altar. see; i can make relics from almost anything, a sideways glance from my sister, a friend fastening my coat in winter when my hands are too numb to move, the last ray of golden light falling through the kitchen window of my childhood home, the rustling dark-lacquered leaves of the magnolias in summer, the sickly-sweet scent of sea buckthorn on the walk to the ocean.

you tell me the body is a lit thing, every nerve a filament strung between two silences, and i have seen it; the trembling hand, the quickening pulse, the heart beating out of rhythm, the thickened, sluggish blood crawling through my veins, black as tar, a body that loves and aches, invariably reaching, room after room altered by the arrival of a single voice, years later : i do not doubt grace, i doubt my ability to recognize it, and so i wonder: is the kneeling hunger or devotion? i ask because i have mistaken many things for revelation, i have mistaken fear for intuition, contamination for communion, the wound for the hand that inflicted it, and when the light pools across the floorboards and i find myself kneeling, it is often not out of faith, but habit.

so tell me; how do you distinguish grace from patient longing? how do you know the ache the flesh calls wanting was prayer all along? my body does not know the difference, it reaches and says: more. it slams open the doors of every room and charges in; hoping the aftermath might prove sacred, bloodied and sanctified. the body, tender and stupid, lights a candle for what has already left.

and i wait. could that be another form of prayer?

[a-sphyx1ate]

i remember last winter, five years ago; getting out of class at seven pm in the freezing cold, my hands so numb you'd laugh and fasten my coat in the dark, walking hand in hand through the snow, a trail of fire; your cold, bloodless hands brushing the back of my neck.

and i remember, all through last periods all week long, your dark heavy-lidded eyes turning toward me every five minutes, a sharp kick to the shin whenever i'd drift asleep, walking home together, i'd spend the nights staring at the ceiling, counting your breaths, counting and measuring, deathly afraid of grazing wounds.

and outside, the air carried that solemn silence, that makes everything living sound temporary.

i remember on the bus in the morning, my head lolling against your shoulder, nothing changing, your cold fingers grazing my scalp and behind every kindness, every touch,

you waited, patient as death,

a cold darkness pressing its face against the windows and i have forgotten entire years of my life

but not that burning cold

[caldwell-63-deactivated20260526]

i think about my sister; and i think love is written on the body in blood. my childhood rested in her hands; her tender, cruel hands; holding me in a chokehold through nights thick with nightmares; tangled legs under the sheets, her cold feet pressing hard against my shins. we spent years so close to each other i almost forgot where i ended and she began; whenever she fell sick she always held me tighter, because even infection, especially infection; was to be divided and shared between us, and love travels through the body like fever.

i remember my first love climbing the jungle gym to reach me at the top even though she was terrified of heights; the metal bars slick beneath her palms. i remember her gripping the back of my neck on the way down, nails digging into the skin, eyes squeezed shut, hissing in my ear as she cried. my little love; the cruelest heart i've ever known calling me mean as she pulled me apart. i remember years folded together; two bodies leaning so close the seam disappeared. i carried her hands everywhere; her fingers circling my wrist, searching for my pulse as if it belonged to her. a love devoid of distance, intemporal and permanent; and if i was whole it's because you were with me, and your absence left me open.

now i carry your hands around my throat everywhere i go. every breath rattles through your fingers. the love did not leave me when you did.

[caldwell-63-deactivated20260526]

the thing with grief, is that i don't grieve. death doesn't register to me, and neither does loss; my love is a god of absence.

i walk through the fire, and the fire walks with me.

[agodofabsence]

Who is your favorite anon ever ?

( the answer )

take a wild guess, little clown

[caldwell-63-deactivated20260526]

my love is oppressive constriction turned inward, the vacuum pressure of a hollowed heart collapsing in perfect silence, a persisting void; my god of absence.

[caldwell-63-deactivated20260526]

your love is a noose tightening around my throat

(and there have been many hands that could not hold me down) but i felt your

vines climbing the ladder of my spine

tender tendrils pressing inward, burrowing in the dark for purchase

taking root where the ribs part

a bruising light slowly spreading

your ivy seeded in the hollow of my heart

threading through bone, curling closer to the pulse

patient as breath withheld

borrowing life from me

[a-sphyx1ate]

i woke up with your name coursing through me— frenzied as fever.

and there is something humiliating about needing you

i carry that desperation nonetheless like a lit match inside the mouth.

[aserenesclerosis]

and you came into my life --- a hurricane, a catastrophic flood : incoming apocalypse sudden and unannounced and there were no warnings only : the birds disappeared the barometer falling fast the sea withdrawing everyone knew and i was misreading the silence, ignorant to myself

(and see; storms have names, and categories projected paths cones of uncertainty but no instrument has ever measured the pressures of your presence) and loving you is standing in the wreckage turning over pieces i catalogue future losses, weeks of standing ankle-deep among rotting corpses the carcass of what used to be home,

the mold and the silence.

i count the windows i measure the waterline against my own body i look for survivors and there are none only the remarkable silence that follows after the world finished ending.

(and see here is the first law of catastrophe: the aftermath begins before impact and soon ivy climbs fractured concrete moss grows between the cracks and i remain alive and breathing

inside the disaster and survival never was rescue and we were never meant for interruption

[sunredamancy]

i reread that letter, and think about it often, i revisit the question of containment in my mind at least once a day, my daily exercise in panic, oscillating between your seductive interpretative generosity and my own anguished epistemic caution. for a long time, i thought both risked turning the other into a conceptual object rather than a (often tragically) resisting subject, and that we might have been trying to avoid the one thing love cannot avoid: the friction between irreconcilable readings of the same person. and i think i have come to accept that i should not attempt to resolve that tension, but instead sit with the discomfort of it. perhaps i can extend my hand into the dark and wait for your fingers to wrap around it, perhaps we can sit together in a room without collapsing. what i lack in common sense, i amply make up for in faith. -🪽

Instead of responding to your most recent ask, I shall reply to this one ( and keep the other for my eyes to see, since it is quite cute. )

Penance often is evidence entered against the self, deed presuming the crime; it corrals the breadth of the cosmos into the eye of a needle. So atone forward; let the amend be the lifting of the face and not the deepening of the wound. I tend to find flight utterly unbecoming of my nature. . . With the multitude of destinies rupturing open before me, even the abyssal ones in which I may lose, I am a creature to whom loss is permitted, who has nothing left to guard, and a creature guarding nothing cannot be made afraid. ( And I must remind you once again that the fearless and the flayed are the most formidable of forces. ) Do recall our shared pilgrimage through the ossuary of yesterdays, our synchronized footfalls upon the burning coals of the present, striding inexorably toward the future. Have I ever neglected to hold you close, whispering against your pulse the exact nature of what has been wrought upon you, and what I foresee for your culmination ? My friend, my dearest creature, my most beloved interlocutor destined, perhaps, to ascend the opposite side of the chessboard and wage war against me. How laughable the thought that you may be incapable, unknowing, casting me as a cowering sovereign hoarding my strategies in the dark. Wherein lies the delight of the game if my adversary stagnates, denying me of my own metamorphosis ? ( I do not fear Change. ) But observe for yourself, as we once spoke of demonstration, the gulf separating the faithless void from the perforating faith, mutating your flesh anew. Be lit up from within, capillary by branching capillary, by all the verities and realities of your existence. There, beyond the caress and the lash, is the engine of unity and violence, genesis and slaughter, at once strength and annihilation : the whole undivided substance of life. Nothing you raise against it, no barricade nor turning-away shall move the hour of sunrise by a single instant. Be fortified by faith, and fear not the encroaching future, for only those who reject tomorrow are truly paralyzed ( the truest of cowardice ). Such is only heresy, severing the umbilical tether to the breathless cycle of becoming, a pathetic retreat. The Sun consumes the night, reducing the terrestrial crust to cinders; it resuscitates the buried seed, a tyranny of life’s momentum. Await the hemorrhage of Dawn, where you will find the sunlight breaching barricaded windows regardless, commanding you to slither from the dust-choked underbelly of the bedstead and ascend into my arms once more. Acknowledge, then, my inevitability. P.s. I will tell you of the difference between Holbein and Winsor & Newton after this. They are my preferred brands ! One is milled dense and secretive in its binder, pigment held close, surrendered slowly to the water and grudging its own brilliance. The other is more soluble, willing to give itself away at the first drop of water. Take a guess at my favorite.

[a-sphyx1ate]

Again, hello to my interlocutor,

On reading, where your reply was finest: reading as co-creation. I grant all of it; a window has two sides, and the reader's face hangs faintly in its glass. Love happens, then, across the abyss between two discontinuous selves, at the single point of contact, not by abolishing the gap but by the touch that lets the distance show.

Which is why I must fondly refuse you your one humility, that you call yourself the least interesting thing about your writing. Yet you know how I am, for me everything has always been about the Other, so I do not agree. But both are true, yes: you are not contained in the work, no person is recoverable from his pages intact, and yet as I said before, "we reach nothing directly, you and I, only ever through some form, so the form you move in is the very surface at which you become reachable at all."

I do wonder, however, when you say you are the least interesting thing about your writing, is it humility, or is it the showing of the face in order to hide the face? Do you set the work between us as an offering, or as a screen ? ( As I said before, "fidelity and evasion, from the inside, are formally indistinguishable." )

( 🪼 )

hello again, my dear young friend,

i suspected you might pick up on that part as i was fleshing it out, yes. as you know, i hold mameha's words very close to my heart, and i have wielded my transparency as a very efficient shield, and that is why i have never quite trusted people who claim complete transparency, it seems to me that every act of communication involves selection, emphasis, framing, and even confession is a form with its own conventions and disguises, i suppose; our virtues and our defenses, braided together so tightly that separating them eventually becomes nearly impossible. for what it's worth, i did not think of that statement "i am the least interesting thing about my writing" to be specifically humble; in fact, i thought it might be quite presumptuous of me to say. i am neither hiding nor showing my face here; i am pointing at the work. if you wish to know me, then speak with me, but do not mistake the fragments for the person arranging them.

perhaps that answer to your question will frustrate you (as you well know, i am the Frustrater); is the work an offering, or a screen, then? i would be tempted to say both. a screen conceals, certainly, but it also permits projection, it catches the light, makes visible things that might otherwise remain unseen. similarly, an offering, however sincere, still allows one to decide what remains in the hand and what is placed upon the table, and to give away something isn't to lose it either; it's a tether, a connection. and thus i do not believe the work can fully disclose a person, and i remain deeply suspicious of readings that treat any piece of writing as though it were merely a coded autobiography waiting to be deciphered, that much is sincere. but i am also equally suspicious of any attempt to place too clean a boundary between a person and the forms they inhabit as well. if we are only ever reachable through forms, as i agree with you is the case, then it would be absurd to pretend those forms tell us nothing at all about ourselves, and others.

in the end, i think what i resist is not being seen, but being concluded upon. i hate the thought of being pinned in place and neatly categorized; here is the poet, here is the thinker, here is the clown waiting on a text that never comes, here is the estranged child of the family, here is the lover that woke up one day and decided to leave the country, here is the awkward reader, the exhausted researcher, etc etc. to be seen is a gift, to be mistaken for something frozen, some immuable essence, is another matter entirely. categories are cages, and if i walk in and out of them so freely, it is perhaps because i have never been particularly good at seeing the bars, as you well know. so yes, there is evasion in the work, but the evasion exists in service of the encounter, not in opposition to it, and you could say it renders the encounter possible at a scale i can bear, in a manner i understand.

[a-sphyx1ate]

i can feel the static blooming under my skin. every room i enter vibrates to the frequency of you. vigilance turns to devotion turn to violence; my body a poorly calibrated detection tool, a faulty counter measuring exposure in false tenderness condescension

countless hours, countless hours and i see :

hairline fractures propagating silently through every load-bearing structure. the body registers what the mind refuses to classify as accident phantom seismic activity under stable ground.

the geiger counter keeps singing softly in my empty haunted house.

i brace for you as the alarm misfires; i register impact seconds before collision. and we are creatures of contact,

born for impact the impact never comes. (i love you, and you are already gone.)

[caldwell-63-deactivated20260526]

breathing has never come easily to me. my heart slips without warning and leaves me stranded between beats; my throat locks and refuses passage, i choke on air. whenever someone asks me to describe that particular sensation, the words never come out right; the body turning against its own momentum, a constant struggle, my daily dose of mortality. i have woken on the floor more times than i can count. there is a strange familiarity in that position, the sensation of uncontrollably falling, time collapsing.

the pain itself is unremarkable in its consistency. a dull, inverted pressure lodged beneath the sternum, as though a blade had been placed there long ago and carelessly forgotten. not piercing or stabbing, but slowly working its way out. i don’t dislike the sensation. i imagine that’s what a hand squeezing, manually pumping my heart from the inside would feel like; no rhythm, only frantic pressure and panic.

what disturbs me is not the pain; it is no stranger to me; but the interruption. the moment the body forgets how to breathe, the terror of suffocation without cause, life faltering without permission; less injury than submersion, as though i have always been underwater, and the body only occasionally cares to remember. the reminder, always cruel.

[caldwell-63-deactivated20260526]

i remember the golden hour in my old apartment back home in june, two years ago, sitting cross-legged on the floor, my love howling with laughter as the clippers broke halfway through shaving my hair; our annual shearing, he said; piling a fistful of my hair on top of his heap of discarded curls, eyes locked on that spray of blood on the white kitchen wall.

i remember the cheap black lacquered wood of the kitchen table on new year’s eve, the sharp edge digging into my arms, one hand braced on the corner; his fingers threading into mine minutes before midnight, long nails digging into my palms. i remember the ground slipping under my feet, waiting for nothing;

    hoping in vain,        no recollection of          that crushing weight

his hand on my chest, his fingers pressing in, tender and deliberate, parting me,

his hand at my heart, reaching in, lingering over the pulse     but       there was nothing          there