Saturday on the lowly with Ketchup and other life accessories. Blossoming nights chitter chatter away, and our sky will reckon with us if we stay up on it. When she comes. She goes. And where he leads, she follows through with her lightness of touch, an iris torch to paint the saturated night of his tribulations into the green and grey of her becoming.
I conceived you in my heart. Nine months was nine lives riding on an eternity that was nurtured in us. Seven times before I went for mine, to spin jewellery and the world, and your head is gone. Half the time between the world and you. You thought it was. You. And I. The World is yours. Don’t lose your heart. Again.
Cutting in. You want out. Got off the chair, and you’ve been racing to the start. It was never yours to own. A fault like a bone, you were never theirs to scorn. Just backed up in decisions and the barb is a wheel to the wire. Closest shave was the kindness for his kind. Yours in kind and candid to the skin that a blade would kiss.
Crying skies can’t hide from the sight of bredrin’s backfaced accusations played with the mute. Shift work. You got all the baggage in the skin hanging off her lies. Do you know how the thief negotiates for the crimson kiss before closing time?
I’ll tell you a secret. An open heart dies before it learns to close its eyes. For bad. And lives before it overstands to keep you out of mind, folded and tucked away from the words she didn’t keep. You were right and wrong to not keep her broken jar of sugar and fantasy. Empty words. Selfish belongs in the ocean with them and other strings, wounds and things of unknown possibilities. She goes this way. You go that way. Out of hers. Closed. For good.
Where to. Going. Expediently.
Where from. Coming. Cosmological.
Where now. Owing. Everytime you leave is a return.
A banker. Loaning a teller. Waiting at a table. Tailor is sacred as cloth talk for dress made face time.
Savage.
Time lives rent free. And richer still than a free man who is owned by home. Running to pay for permission to live by licence.
Lawful. Unwedded bride taken by the L. Lawfully cold to a touch.
Found. Racing to die by returning the favour.
Pleasing is the plated tongue. Golden. You’ll house me and the thighs that spread like the gut of a gluton.
A believer. Till undone. All lives in a sentence to command the fool to stop. Landing is not the feat. Foot in arms, not so fast, I’ll be on time when you get there.
Here. Is fortune. Lost. For certain and unsentimental.
A hanging leaf puts its heart on the line to be noticed.
We’ve only made eye contact.
Soon to touch.
I wouldn’t dare to try and save a hanging leaf.
Soon to fall….
Please don’t watch.
Inside. You are an outsider and the room knows it. You do not belong to them. The walls stiffen in defence of the inflammed human heart that is present. You will never be of them. The wall knows this fate you bet your fears on. Too swell. Tooth picked. You tilt your hat before they turn you down. You haven’t asked anything of them. Yet. The floor sucks on the sole of your swift footed analysis. Daring you to overthink the feeling that is stirred up in the forest of invention. An idea. What is an idea? Just like us. And nothing alike.
Wet of eyes, the paint sounds the welcome. They despise her too. And her ghosts. Colours come for real. Want all the sparks. All the action that imagination can fire up. They want you to want them too. And you know how they like it. The thickness. The trust in the thrust. The oh so bitter sweetness of us at our worst best. You would buy them if you didn’t already own their desire to have you or the image they paint of you in reflection. And what are you?
Outside. You are an insider with no throne room for Benin’s bronzed hypocrisy, but space for double bedded love making with case sensitive words for a thousand books and one. You make the way, they see through you, what they think you are and never were. Rust of Scarlet, blood conscious to a fault, who would have doubted the waters that ushered you into this world? If you were I and I knew how to speak, I would not paint you into the absence of mind that silence suggests. You haved loved loudly in your time, and the ground will not forget, even if you are never spoken of. All love is memorial but all is not lost. Except to time, when bound to art and held captive by the memories of those we have longed for. And have hungered to know intimately, the internal walls of our lover’s throbbing heart without the shades on.
Breaking through to be inside of you and all you aspire to breathe out into damnation when you dreamed us into the merciless canvas of mortal life and the infinite glory of Agape. How cruel, the truth convicts the dead as though they were sentenced to life in unfinished paragraphs. We have only fallen in love with ideas and risen in the acceptance of our fallacies. The multiverse. The continents. The ocean of oceans that we are. It carries all the Hell and Heaven that resides in us. With us. For we are hung up in the awakening terror of love’s gallery for the broken and torn apart.
The double drummer accents the beaten heart. Take a deep breath and inhale. Perspiration crawls out our eyes for what we have dared to see, enduring the years locked in a moment. Not of wonder. How much better to survive even when you cease to be necessary. Father’s words were never mine to keep. She turns the head as he learns the hard way home. Never cease to be necessary in the bullsweat of silence. Enduring love holds you hostage to freedom. A twinkle of an idea that winks at your foolishness. You earned it too. Your coffee is late.
He was looking up, sky was looking down cast, hunched over the lessons it was teaching the young man who was closer to eternal life than the riches of mortality.
Sky always wanted legs and would trade places to feel what it was like to stand on ground, manly and rooted to core truth, womanly and mother to the men of war.
Once upon many moons ago, I met an elderly Japanese Haiku poet in Borders on Oxford Street. A favourite hang out spot of mine in the olden days. He told me his life story in the little English that he knew. A fast friendship was forged. He didn’t have a place to stay so he would spend his daylight hours in the book store and rely on the kindness of strangers, then at night he would wrestle with the odds and chance at finding somewhere to sleep, with all his earthly belongings in a bag for company.
I’ve been thinking about sleep a lot lately. I think about the line in Act IV of Macbeth. The lady’s inability to sleep without the light around her because of her fear of the dark. I’ve been in a dark place too and I have been awake through much of it. Sleeping with the light on in the dark. What light? Sometimes I watch the moon till my eyes tire enough to turn in. I rarely sleep without some light on inside my head. But getting back to the poet. He said to me “be the moon.” What did he mean? Light a way for yourself or someone in need. Perhaps that’s not what he meant but he wrote those few words in a book of his poems that he gave to me. I still wonder what became of him.
To be the moon. To turn the tide. An idea. Light as possibility. Light as love. Uncovered by night. Unbroken by morning. Even as we mourn through dark days and tread lightly on the minds of those who are dear to us, not wanting to hurt the gentle soul that has been pressed down to the bare bones of indifference in the war of being human. Naked enough to be badly disguised by the masks that silence sees through. And does the light come through when we lie? To each other? To ourselves? And do we die if we do not grasp it? Love. Light. The Moon. Us.
Napoleon Dozier's Dabbler's Hand 