Too much talking
how about
I listen
for once?
a thought
formed in a head
led
by the tongue
as map-maker,
(dubiously Daedalusian)
eyes as eternal indriyas
of elapsing energy
etching rivers
that whisper
around the point;
where silence
might have
once dreamt of being a sea.
-
I draw coastlines
round each wound,
scratching
around the scabbing
naming every inlet after
storied sorrows,
handing out keys to homes
I have never slept in
while longing
to fall away
in any bed
Other than my own.
To awake
in front of that first mirror
that father-shaped phantom,
tersely teaching
the art of absence:
a marshmallow delayed
this git
right here
desiring the fruit
without action
so, I turned to him
in tasting stone dust,
and called it nectar.
-
Love arrived
as lecturer
and as textbook;
Can you receive
without performing?
Can you desire
without disguising?
answers written
in the margins of my pulse
where I learnt
to parse
all that longing
into footnotes,
to file desire
beneath “future research.”
I called that scholarship
(that tickety
would call it nothing at all);
Murti’s mirth
would call it a cage
built from definitions
that fear the thing defined.
And then
And then
And then-ing
The later echo;
the anima-twin,
a meeting
between breaths
(my
analyist mind
noticing only)
black cats
slinking
across our paths.
I, held safe
by a biography
that fit
like a borrowed coat;
warm
but wrong at the shoulders.
-
I named that warmth
on my body
in the mouth
"metta"
but Saule’s glare
showed sentimentality,
that sweet near-enemy:
loving
only that glowing
of recognition,
not the person inside it.
-
In such a state-
where all that looking
had done me so much service
he held my gaze
the way a lake holds a star:
intact, inverted, unreachable.
I nearly stepped in
forgot the surface,
forgot I am not made of sky
that there is no-one
on heaven
or earth
that can possibly save you.
To stand between
the other’s storms,
translating
thunder
into treatment plans,
spinster spinnin'
all that gold
from grief
(because alchemy is easier
than feeling the fire)
hand painting the blaze,
mind graphing the heat;
both immersed in,
but neither sitting
in the dancing flame.
Anyone
(ANYONE!)
but The Speaker
whispers again:
The observer is the observed.
So I let that falling
that I've been resisting
happen
to me,
taste the
unworded
ache
beneath all of my virtues.
It is not a metaphor;
it hurts
exactly
where
it
happens.
-
It is time
on this loop
to close both mirrors,
let the dark reflect itself.
No thesi(u)s,
No ship
No myth,
just pulse and breath—
the raw, ragged room
that is
my own body;
where experience begins
before
the tongue
arrives to count it
jacobvanloon
andulkaphoto
theartofmadeline
annaxmalina
snowghoul
baratheonpilled
germansingergirl
kianamaiart
dailybridgerton
tangentwithtanner
