Im always falling into things, like twenty main characters in the coffee shop, curiously alive and fizzing. A crowd of personal fireworks in little booms, quiet to the background under electric drums and caffeinated sips. A little you for a little me, lost and found.
A silhouette of the softest black, thrown to the asphalt from two lights at angles that never meet, pooled to a puddle dark. The new scar on the parking lot, perpendicular between white cars. I’m lacking definition, like a free-float with loose edges, open borders. I let everything in when I’m scared of missing out.
That I should need the thing. That I should chase myself around, tired. Sticking to the edge of every thing. That I should need at all the constant queries voiced and hiding, little against my voice, loud against my life.
That I should need the thing is the fear of a Wednesday, horizon smoked from the north, and my entire future balanced itself, dry on the edge of a glass.
That I should want the thing. Because the thing delivered me, spinning An Orange and A Blue. Because I’m in love with reverie, I’m in love with remorse.
I didn’t even want to go to the mall, but life is an endless errand. I don’t normally get followed through meaningless pursuits, but I must look extra kidnappable on Saturdays with a fresh wound bleeding black ink to my ankle. We made eye contact, two humans, utterly unknown and I saw your eyes wide with old friend familiarity. Luckily, in the biggest mall on earth you had half a mile to consider the past. Down the hall, down the stairs, in the store, through the food court, up the escalator, out the door, words out of my mouth. I called your mark and the clear confusion spilled from your face. You thought yourself a shadow, you thought I’d choose silence, now I’m left with questions, like - who was I to you? Who the fuck are you? Why are you wearing a Christmas sweater in June? Did I look kidnappable?...all of life’s biggest universal queries. Now I don’t go to malls on Saturday. I stick to the internet where I’m only stalked by manageable monsters, like trolls, and ads for things I only thought of, and porn I didn’t ask to see.
I want it in the way that only I can remember. Unhinged a little on the edges, blurry moments snake-like swallowed, everything at once because it’s the only way I know how to move. All at once because there there’s nothing else to breathe and even though I’ll remember today-tomorrow it was all one fluid movement through. I want it in the way that only I can unlock, while driving, staring into the spaces between raindrops imploding on the windshield with the same lyrics I’ve sang a thousand times but always seem to change. I disappear for a few minutes at a time, taking it in. I want to feel everything in the way that I wanted your affection.
My body remembers all the things I need to be reminded of, like why I keep staring, discretely into the lights waiting for a prayer to find me. Holy in half-time, present and accounted for with the tabernacle bones of my youth. Stiff white memory etched with panic prose, and the cracks of every other lifetime.
Today I’ll practice avoidance. I’m avoiding the sun, and even though it’s cloudy it was my decision. I’m upside down on the couch avoiding the green viper sliding through my dream. I wanted to hike but the internet said the rain was acid and felt like Ohio so I’m avoiding outside too. My dog stares at me, plotting, expecting, so I’m avoiding looking him in the eye.
I'm always falling into things..like the eternity between thought and action, suspended
There must be something borrowing
my body in the low hours
thru the dreams I never remember
Bearing mysterious bruises I never forget
And I’m always tired
in a suspicious way
Like my loaned-out body’s broken free
to run divine
the night streets
Slow lucidity, as I realize the black of the grain of the doorway. Answering questions about my identity in slow speech for the sterile inquisition, and all my answers fall heavy on the air between gasps, searching for my breath. My body is a liminal itch, simply leftover, in waves of coherent disappearance as I melt into fluorescent brights under a halo of hospital signs.
I sat here to stare, and eavesdrop, six inches from the eastern bloc and conversations I can’t understand. Spy stories only. I shook my notebook open and a star fell free, with faint recognition for this dead-drop relief. A nod from the past, awake among Sunday’s dirty dishes, remembered in their clanging dirge. The plot thickens, bright in spring noir.
Even at my stillest…
…I am running circles of suspicious intent.
I am the river, arterial
I am the tributary
twined with many others
swift in one direction
at times I overflow
Sudden debilitation on a Monday, mid-morning. I am not here. Staring into faces of the future as they appear in the ceiling tiles. Because what you think of me matters and I hate that about me.
Ornate and open. Fixed gold on the wall, fixed faith aesthetic for all my secret freedoms. Fixed frame memory for all my screaming one-and-all’s, my sex and silence, tears and falls. My inhibitions, intuition, blaring blues and favorite songs, I’m angry, anxious, tired, small…and always there you are. Looking back, invited into warm voyeur. A reflection of quiet conspiracy and Delphic disclosure.
Mirror.
Mirror.