It struck me in this unfreezing and unexpected cold in Louisiana: whatever problems there are are not mine alone; the body clinging to mine knows as little as the body to which it clings.

The usual cluster of notables peopled my dreams and lifted me into consciousness on a fat red rug ably designed for rest. The twitter of my soul and a blink of light behind me that was no blink but where my imagination thought it brought me to a rousing desire to snuff more wine outside.  My wife--any other title would be inept--came into the room, twirling with the spangles of an angel's sleep, replete with a mouth upon whose motions calm and excite a sailor as do waves, and said the smoke polluted her. We respond:

When you burn a piece of paper over a campfire it alights to the wind, carrying it upwards in a rocking motion that reminds you of the seemingly arbitrariness of butterflies, of vultures circling the sky about to drop.  Lunging into the air as you dream a butterfly might, gratifying, you make your way. Detach, then, from myself, as you would the deft cut in the air left by the remonstrance of a butterfly following its instinct, and consider the unlikeliness in our care for smell and sound as matters to no less my soul than the next boy who dies today for lack of water.

My digits type frozen and every misstep a likely hazard. Send me in all ways but not onto a balcony because you, delicate smoker, couldn't take a whiff of the poison you work to buy.

Gao, to.

When it surprises you that most of your beliefs were a chimera, hanging slick and fork-tongued on the penumbra of your life, blink twice and then let it go.  I've taught you to trust, stand readied with one fist of text balled in one hand; in the other, a sword. Every father asks for his son to bleed for his beliefs exactly to the extent that he would for his own. If all things are equal between us, and they are, bleed only for the father you know as you; bleed for compassion or for cruelty in whatever measure your conscience tells you; and know that your conscience lies if you're not listening very closely. For that, go to where no one can hear you; you, anyone; and care not for the world then. Everyone will laugh and shake your hand; and shake theirs; and then look on the form and essence of life.

Sometime, circa. a couple of thousands of years past, they say someone died for you.

No one has died for you. Everyone has died for you. Decide what emphasis you'll choose to guide most of your life; but never, for anything, let your life be in vain, a passive mark of biological passing no more remarked than a slug's. Never that. Safeguard your life until you reproduce; your soul until you can stand it. If in conjunction with the love I feel for you, that will be forever.

Your tongue will never exceed your heart. Follow the latter with the former in faith. My legacy to you is you; my love, as truly  unbounded as the universe. Kiss all you see, if only in your mind, at least once. Kiss those things you love frequently and forever. Destroy the first hint that your kiss will be interrupted.

Wend wisely, Dearest and Truest Chum. My blood's yours. Remember that it is as powerful as the oldest of things.

Joycean death, realistically interpreted

The suspense surges, unlike drums from Africa, much like the pruned Celtic misstep of their communique, that fatal hiccup rounding the Isle of Man and beaches near Kent when squinting at the slate-melt of sky and bay had nothing to do with the sun and everything with the rain pelting out a message assuring you you meant to be rhythmic, once were, knew how two-stepping stones beading a creek was an homage to bestiality, knew how distance and literacy had converted the primal into "spirit," another homage, paling, nodding to the home of old with the keenest eye for the one ahead, for that old lady peering through storefronts, your death, your sure death.

I'm sure you understand almost nothing that I'm saying, Brandi and any happenstancer happening on this post and most of those preceding it. I haven't earned the privilege of Joyce to write the most intimate dreck and be heard, a la Finnegan's Wake.  An irony surfaces about Joycean disdain for lesser wordsmiths: for all his hollering at nation and identity and order, how he bent for it like the greatest whore as he decried it, for that next potato, for the five shillings that would make his day, for the tool he became in rejoicing self-loathing. The hapless, poorly spent, beguiling fuck. Had Stephen lain the blade against the sun and soapy suds near my porch, a fifth of my homicidal self-awareness and a third of my reasoning, would have ended the tome before it began, the only fit abortion. Stomaching the purest self-defeat is hard; watching it lauded by reviewers rejoicing in the self-defeatism for the ease it grants their own victory is harder yet. How any Irish person could think with pride on Joyce disturbs me. If ever a trojan horse...

A moment in the life of

You reckless, feckless pustule of slag and drool, try! Jus' try! Say your name gravely. Don't wait for that faraway bell promised to signal the cavalry of you into battle; it was a lie you ought to stop tripping over before you break more than a hip or head or relationship. The brugh you thought never spent has emptied and another has to be fashioned from the drawn filaments of will left you, unnamed inheritance, bundled in fist to pull yourself out and over for something else.............the holy place is spent...................

A boy named Joey or Jimmy decided one day he should leave his house, never deliberating a goal except the one of leaving. He emptied his father's suitcase, packed a whitebread sandwich of peanut butter, a can of pop and a few curios that he'd once imagined magical, though for all the world they were the cheapest trinkets: a piece of copper wire, one smooth stone sized the center of his palm, a sheet of paper he had found three days before, wet and yellowed and smelling of dung. Fingers curled around the suitcase's handle, dressed in his Sunday school clothes, he flung open the door to his first floor apartment, felt the burst of sudden sunlight, smelled the smell of nearby bushes, gasoline city air, things unknown, and briskly marched out onto the street.

A car knocked him down, squashed his head into a crunchy mulch, and Joey or Jimmy died. The car drove on to meet the intersection, rolling to a slow stop at the red light,  the driver wondering if he should go right and then left on the next street, or wait out the light and continue north. He had an appointment with his dentist.

Colgate traded three points above expectations that morning. The driver's dentist read this and smiled. His teeth were white. People said "pearly."

The dentist's wife came. Joey or Jimmy's father sighed, spent. She smiled. Her teeth, too, were pearly.

Innocence pursues

The night idles. A mellifluous harmony between soft gusts of wind and colluding leaves makes everything pensive. Even hiccuping engines flow rather than castigate. Why the sense of danger, then? What is this thing that is upon me? It looks like death but death's not its name. Though it shares the same property of eternal suspension, death is not its name and what is this thing upon me? What is this thing like death but not that always courts me while I, reluctant lover, court by rote, dragging my soul behind me like a sack filled with food that never rots, Sisyphean chore, bloodying feet that heal only to bleed again, what is this thing upon me that is not death though death will vanquish its power? what is this thing that is upon me, incorruptible, mute, blind, stoic, carrying the sickly sweet smell of decaying pomegranate? Don't say dasein or yahweh. Say it's personal and intended. But what is this thing that is upon me that is not death but like it that gags and nourishes in bewildering equilibrium and has no name though I call it, nightly, with all the futile bleating of rage and love wrought from quartered dreams no longer as strong as once though somehow stronger still, what is this thing that is upon me?

A page once brisk with creation, made limp by rain, grown brittle by sun, palsied now by wind, balances on the edge of the squat green plastic table to my right. While I transfer it to the floor on my left, I am stultified, unblemished, unfed, never hungry, summarized as the last smile to be had, wondering when it was I first lied, and why.

Bridges

You lurch and stumble into a place, blink, and recognize everything. Relief subsumes you. Had a year passed? three? was it as little as the last rainfall? as much as when you stood exposed for the first time in front of your house, the sith pulled from the heart of the eternal tree to be lain out for consumption?

Across from me she sits, sat. Struggling from confusion to articulate the time-travel of waking up to oneself at 41 no more grown than the nervous child, the tinny squawk of music reverberating through speakers in someone's car or house not far off graciously gives me another venue for establishing clarity and normalcy to the morning; I tell her how the sound depresses me, downplaying the vital experience you feel when music is intimate, near, heard by you alone. You can't share your essence without losing it; the soul suffers no external scrutiny and recedes when drawn out for public display. Could we ever tell each other something, I wonder. The bridge, do we construct it together or cross it to get to the other?

The Convalescent

You sleep, the motions of your synapses always energized by the current of playful compassion best defining you and animating that listless, expressive mouth, the little suckling and nuzzling creature upon where I read all of your character and misgivings, the tut-tut puckering of disapproval or innocent consternation as well as Pan's sensuality.  

The morning cools my fingertips, winds carry the memory of many like it, where I threw my unwilling body onto a broken chair to fasten my eyes on a name that had remembered mine while I slept, said "Good morning, Love," a few words with all of my future's meaning, pulling me further away from my spiritual torpor. 

By will urged and love encouraged, I sit here now, convalescing after the frantic race to repair a body self-flagellated when, keenly aware of my servitude, I meant to make the chains visible. The scars tell a story, you said. 

The scars knitting now tell a new story, told by effort and hope inspired to pull and push and strengthen rather than degrade, slice, pummel. Told in a whispered good morning launched in the dark, confident in its humanity and by its godliness with equal humility. Told in our intimacy, alone together in the world yet representing altogether that world. 

In the cocoon of the space we have carved for each, my bones crack back into their original form, my mind looks for streaks of blood and finds only a white canvas that is ours, I smile and smile and smile with the old lust now better informed, and I wait with anticipation for that small perfect visage to peep out from between the slid glass door to say, "Good morning, Love." 

Drunken Ancestral Memory

A car, discordant in its abstruse, rash beep compared to the rhythmic mewling of the cat we heard earlier, tells me for the umpteenth time...

The lot bustled earlier, Love. They wove in and out in pathways determined by the glint in the eyes of an ancestor so very long dead, an afflicted moment petrified while searching for water by its clash with sun and rock. With sun and rock, inspired and sated, he moved on and then into her and then they begat and so the begatting went until a slew of people unknowingly seeking the same glint in the eyes sought it from bulbs posted in geometrically-defined intervals between parking spaces. Amen, can I hear a halleleujah.

Galeno, all sprite tonight, you know proved the torment of my day. Were it only the memory of him rather than his here and now, somewhere I can imagine (were I unable to imagine!). Loving you and him are not at odds in me. The two twine in my alchemy of need in a way lovely, innocent, far more a flower found wedged unexpectedly in cement than what rank economic cunts such as myself construe.

If we went away when ourselves and found at the end of a dock in glowing, simple sun the remembrance and remedy of our long lives from when blue flowers at the foot of your windowsill stood, representing all of dad's love and escape from the horror of a neighour; or at the edge of my home's path, near the hedges, a ladybug landing on my tiny arm sending the same message from a blue flower its own ancestor's had once known; if we, you and I, walked sturdy, arms linked, and defied fear for just one minute, do you think our hearts on the other side of a wall find ourselves? do you think if we, with your precise turn of head intrinsic to nature's gentle order, said we know no discontinuity and accept; if we believed we met in a moment and recognized its perils in the palms of children squeezing balls of mud for laughs and to live; if we believed, you and me and I, that the rules only matter where we are, do you think..

Do you think from the grey, cobalt ash of your eyes when alight with a judgement you never squander and never know if yours, do you think: a bridge lain or a forest debunked of beauty? Did you know that I stood one day fourteen years ago near a bay after having drunk Bacchus' fill, wretched in marriage and loving it all the same, that a bit of colour spat into the clouds for no longer than a blink held, except that mine eyes did retain it; and that it made me stolid and strong in a second when to the waters I'd have thrown myself; and that seeing it I knew to walk at least one more step, one more is all, and that it was and is the colour of your face in the morning when you putter to the washroom incredibly believing yourself no more than a tired faun exposed to a life not quite your own?

People reenter the complex. They annoy. A cigarette hangs from my lips. The single sentence between mother to daughter as they leave their car enter our downstairs, sags my spirit for as long as it takes the insect scratching at my shoulders to remind me of my priorities, attention-wise. I think of you, know you're arriving soon, wonder how I'll speak to you when you've disavowed me for the night, in your mind, conceiving only of a drunkard who'll be the person you love again in the morning, mourning that loss uninspired by my will. Defiant of the implications, the mollifying platitudes of who and when and what, I'll wonder, perhaps self-indulgently, how you can wonder when and how and what when you know who I am.

Weird creature, the clue is this, the key, simple: [the post was concluded, Love]

Remember that

Remember the swirling grey smoke aloft yet slashing thin running limbs, a lapse of symmetry defying our notions of truth and lines, a rhombus equating nicely to how he hurt her; she, him; a small clutch of shifting kids sliding with whoops and making sense of it.

Remember when my father's name was Jose Aguiar Sousa, Titan of the Azores, indefatigable pacifier of woes, a verbal giant, physical, robust levee against the peevish fears of men his size or more, better dressed, or worse. Remember when he calmed Colonels shitting their pants and crying for their mommies while he learned the language of a lizard's worth on the market versus what it might cost him to fuck the Colonels' wives. Remember he was materialistic, but never call him petty: he roared for the lot of them, and no one ever lost a woman they wouldn't have gladly sacrificed for his spiritual buff. Remember, pewling backstabber, that he took off where you had left. Not a soul departed on his watch in Angola. And all he did was know how to smile, cut teeth, soft jagged hurt and salve, when all anyone else could do was frown. Remember that that's all it took and that it took everything.

Remember the little chattering child in the attic of his house, wondering at the bats and headless horseman prowling; and far worse; he knew the inclinations of storytellers already. Remember how he grew and took on the sky, a personal challenge, a villain or friend, equally put on the pedestal he'd laid when she sauntered past as if it were nothing to walk in pink past leaves falling, he knew, for her (Remember that he knew they were falling for her while acorns fell on them both in separate spots but uniting them; remember that he took that night an oath that called for the head of a cat whose throat he blurred from blood tickled rather than cut).

Remember the Sargeant's blood running through a new channel, less stoic now, more versatile, hearing the gentle thump of her heart pinned to bristle boards alit with images culled by minds he'd protect her from if she'd only listened--remember that he tried to have her listen. Remember the consequences of  the nervous energy of a hurt heart wedding the master of ceremonies. Remember how the child followed the little girl throughout the day, shielding her from a stray wind if he could, or a ball let loose. He hid her in his heart; remember that.

At least a million drops have hit the saturated greens near this place; remember that, and that the one I grew to protect protects me now.

Remember that.

Bestiality, in other words

had me check your blog. Aghast you'd omitted me from the short-list of past paramours influencing your hyper-nuanced being, I then thought, "Omitting me is more of a statement than if she had not."

Yesterday I traveled with likely the most thoroughly decent person I've known--of the non-psychopathic genus "hotsweetsapien-- to a small glade post-modernistically ensconced in a casino hotel, smack dab in the middle of a town populated by no more than 4000 discombobulated souls, none of them lost to German sneezing fits. The pond/glade held crappie fish, nondescript turtles and a dozen of the alligators famed here, stitched into clothes, slapped as stickers onto the backs of cars, bottles of especially piquant cajun sauce, and so forth. At first I assured my very close companion that we'd been defrauded: we were looking at statues. N'est pas, Joseph, c'est vrai. Two minutes of staring at a specimen lounged on a faux-stone betrayed nothing of its living status until I finally discerned it breathing, a long soft intake of air almost imperceptibly swelling its stupid, vestigal body. I felt like piercing it, felt momentarily enraged at the staring eyes reflecting almost perfectly my own illimitable appetite for anything clear, clean, cold, uncompromising. Then my companion got me fumbling towards the entrance to "the Atrium," possibly the most misnamed bar on earth since it's composed of ice and has nothing to do with the sun except the absence of it.The Atrium, though, was not our destination. 

I once called you a jellyfish. Truer to the bone, you're a reptile, scaly and opportunistic. Is there a more pointlessly nuanced creature than the alligator? It moves only to lure and pounce, never exerting a truly artful calorie of energy towards creation for its own sake, which is to say, God's. Unwilling to bumble, it never chances upon the revelations Chance provides, becoming instead a marvel of tired evolution soon fit for the digital scrolls of extinguished species. You can't calculate without needing to dash it all to the wind because the wind came, and call yourself an artist. A salient lesson unlearned.  

This blog began with a post to you, Jessika, but will not end the same way. My own bumbling assent to visiting 

Lifelong thanks

Thank you for being the smile in my heart and for lifting its corner when no one else or thing can. 

Thank you for making my eyes well with touched tears when I thought they never again could; for the plenitude of spirit it imparts, thank you. 

When the rush of death blinds me; when pessimism and despair plunges my spirit under dark waters and I am drowning; when tossed on those currents where no purchase could be had, thank you for the godly gifts of thoughtfulness you throw into the vortex, those buoys, those gestures dispatched with telltale words and actions bespeaking profound care. 

Thank you for your gentle gaze, for your unflagging conscientiousness towards me and all things; for your uncomplicated, perfect decency. 

Thank you for making this morning, the gossamer thread fluttering from our balcony rail, in turns translucent and visible in the refracting sun, by your essence and the strength it has given me, an occasion for the greatest hope, the unerring awe for life, the answer to why. 

Thank you for being the surest redemption of the best I ever had in me and ever hoped this world was. 

Thank you for guiding me back to the life I was given.

Thank you, Brandi Dawn Ports. 

Jogging on the spot

I''m held hostage by nicotine and the need to segregate this primary addiction with a secondary one, the Balcony, where plumes of hundreds of chemicals can saturate my lungs with impunity. A game of mental tag has me oscillating between resentment at having to step out and an appreciation of the outdoor air the balcony provides. As with most compromises, I try to convince myself that this isn't an act of obsequity on my behalf but a participatory exercise in sound reasoning: smoking outside reduces indoor pollution; the clothes subsequently smell better; the offbeat, involuntary communion with nature--or at least with sod grass--adds serenity to my spirit. All good reasons. Then one reason adds to another and produces an irony.

The complaint by a neighbour of smoke seeping through the walls is the reason for this imposition. Chalk it up to the fear of carcinogens. But the sun bears its increasingly unfiltered, ultraviolet peeps full onto the balcony, scalding my skin. I find the word "melanoma" crabbing my mind while out here more and more often, and it sends a superstitious, sickening wave through me. My one dangerous habit has now lead to a second: sitting out in the sun for long periods of time.

And I guess I'm forced to accept that I needn't smoke and another needn't suffer for my own addiction; reason sides with complainant. And I guess I have to further concede that a doubling of carcinogenic risk is my fault. And I would, with a big, shit-eating grin on my face, if my awareness that the two gas-guzzlers driven by the complainants, their use of electrical devices, purchases of untold petrochemical products (from vitamins to handbags), and the multitude of linkages to coal-driven industry consequent to their participation in present society didn't mean that they severely, daily, with not a thought in their empty, troglodytic, blustering, minimized brains, contribute to the fact that sitting out on my balcony in the sun exposes me to a heightened risk of developing melanoma; for they have helped thin the ozone layer, replacing it with carcinogenic air. It's one of those ironies that's rich and maddening. Watching someone wag a self-righteous, condemnatory finger at another over some perceived transgression of morality always struck me as a filthy act, petty to the point of nauseating, redoubtable, a marker of why this species might not deserve to be around.

And saying that I note another irony: my own judgement rears its sermonizing head, finds an indignant roar swell and rise into a towering rage savagely desiring, needing, to raze their bones to dust, the complainants, the landlords, the media selecting which bit of information is capital-friend to prescribe, which not. Then I begin thinking of the colluding handlers of the media, see the web of mutually-generating influence, and know all of the impotent hate of the devil, all of Prometheus' woe, a blind and blissful eagerness to decapitate the head of an organism that unfortunately resembles the hydra in regenerative acumen.

But no Boethius, I, unless everyone is; and I refuse a recourse to calmer planes of thought. The tranquilizing affect of philosophical distancing and speculation, meant to perpetually defray a course of action, has no truck with me in my truer moments. It--and this worries me--might like these words be an attempt to convince myself that this isn't an act of obsequity on my behalf but a participatory exercise in sound reasoning.

   

Deployment

A retinue of pompous moneylenders coalesce around rule-honourers, citizens, average joes and janes dutifully enduring the maddening maze of directing blips of lights, painted lines, squawks from televisions, looming grimaces of controlling consternation by the multifarious Uniformed, to reach spiritual spaces the dimensions of a tictac where more briskly ushered pretenses to consensual authority say when to eat and by which manner food shall be obtained. The moneylenders call them "jobs". They hire people to call them jobs (the job of telling people they have jobs or should and what they are). These jobs are bound by a web of contractual gobbledygook bound, in turn, to mystify; that is the point. Lobotomized by moneylenders, con-artists--they give themselves other names, ones usually requiring the breadth of a medium-sized mid-western library to pronounce; and that, too, is the point--warrens of domiciles, quaint and to the purpose of feedlotting the lot of us save those whose names demands the endless decimation of forests to pronounce, are erected in woe, with sweat, dreams bloodied and false to the blood dripping from them; and then in the small crescendos and declensions of life the lives of the swelling biomass of our species pulses forth, moneylenders riding the sludge of their decaying bodies like surfers on high.

Then something happens. Beginning from as simple a spark as a campfire brings, never guttering, accelerating, though in defiance of a moneylenders' natural law, never consuming, the bright and forever cordoned guff of one child renders forfeit the flabby deceit with the tiniest cry ejected voluntarily from its chest, a single act of causeless, non-contextualized sound shattering too many miles of historical edifices to the disjointed fragments they meant to deny themselves to be. The cry, the allborn wail of insistent justice, bears the unique meaning of the babe's own name, never squandered, economized ubiquitously only to itself, bereft of bequeathing and ending where it began. The mysterious sound echoes eternally, forming the reality of a world begun again. The moneylenders, trying to sequester, nurture and restore their dissolving bones, cry "no, eleutheria or fate cannot coincide!" Soft notes not unlike the gods nodding imperceptibly at dandelions or galaxies swirling, make piquant with meaning, by sound, the sound of the babe's, how to resolve with or without death, either state the same as the other, the confounding dissatisfaction of waking up while remaining asleep; that is, having a job.

Sunken libretto

Infernal Louisianan sun simmering my skin, I dropped two sacks of refuse into the industrial green bin receptacle, one of two tucked into corners of our building complex. Sentinels of sanitation, the waft of their stink barely touches your nose as you walk away. But enough to dispel any illusions.

Heading towards the mailbox in anticipation of finding therein a meagre symbol of coin designed to stave off physical insecurity another day for me and mine, a tiny lizard scrambled past my feet with that skittish, undulatory motion that reminds you of a frog's hop and snake's slither simultaneously. The gecko--I suppose--made towards the gate to the pool, pausing every few paces, stockstill, to assess whether my foot sought its spine. The sun was a molten ball concealed sufficiently by cumulus fluff to let me unblinkingly spot a hawk sweeping high to my left. The hawk circled;  the gecko held that ancient fearful pose.

Was the creature aware that its real threat lay high? Did that fleet whip of mottled green grow taut with adrenaline at the right danger? Lumbering, I could never catch it; inedible to me for all impractical purposes, it could have leap between my teeth without harm coming to it; yet standing there electrified by the feeling of deja vu over a scene that had been played endless times in every squirming cove of life; as certain of my own  heightened awareness at the timeless little episode was I that the small beast knew nothing of its position within the web of life; no telltale cue rendered its fear of me inert; the hawk could have snatched and swallowed it without its twitching a vertebrae.

Music, a murmur of strings, crazily struck the air from a nearby apartment for a half-beat, never concluded. My muscles slackened. I walked to the mailbox.

And I wondered: would the same myopia end me, too? Would I know, finally, that I had cannibalized myself?

GFYM

A pilled morning air daftly suffuses the bones of the wood constructing the balcony supporting me. Generous molecules give their frenzied energy in expressive love for those that are mine, ladled on and in this being. They support me no less than I them, this slab of errant urge, as frenzied, without hope of knowing a state ungenerous.

There is a line reserved for mystics and death for writers that you never want to cross if the latter's your deal.

Eggs infiltrate plate, ape responds by knifing it and ingesting. Ingesting, ape gurgles, belches, moves forward a few steps, a few steps more, a yard becomes a mile, energy has accrued and been dispersed.


And I'm fairly sure this is what we're supposed to call life in the biological sense, and in the sense to which capital has reduced it. A mere nay-yay-saying bit of sallying 'round the pole we imagine feeds us. The pole is "physical security"; its price, the feral opposite, blood-thirsting eyes in the middle of the night, by streaming dream or the hateful shard of paper claiming another bit of you.

Denouement.

Resumption.

This afternoon

An iniquitous Gordian Knot, self-indulgent and strangulating, is the desire to unburden my metaphysical suffering when the nature of that hurt hurts you, casting a shadow in your life that darkens mine again and in turn. The "desire" isn't the culprit, really: the psychological mechanisms of retreat, defense, biological imperatives, a clutch of factors puzzling themselves into coherence, a yearning for completion or truth or another name to valorize and justify this urgency in me--these are all co-conspirators in drawing out words from my mouth that silence the good mood between us. 

Whatever "it" is, "it" is not our material circumstances, nor anything pitted about my love for you, nothing wrong or false or unhappy. "It" is the morbid nature in me, and the inability to gain pacification through anything but myself. 

There's nothing tarnished in this course of us. I mean you no pain and seek none. I'd ask you to forgive me for airing my feelings this afternoon, which while not transgressing all principles did violate the emphatically Catholic one I believe: don't hurt anyone.  

Traum

Woe the fellow who thinking that he has it all understood concerning the person lying beside him, when snug in his belief that he's privy to all of the inner workings of that being, slumbers with the utmost peace; for that man will find himself awakening one day, whether he sleeps or not, to the sudden awareness that within this trusted sanctuary for his thoughts, the place he thought to lay his unearthly and earthly goods aside safely so that he could repose, are chambers unknown to him, passages where she alone treads and which map she keeps secret from all but herself. 

And then pearls before swine revisited. Then a brief nod of acknowledgment to a status secondary to box, image, paint, the rank commonality of the sleek bourgeois. 

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty": the first law of thermodynamics

The coordination of economic policy honed to a simple ordinance prohibiting smoking within our apartment coerced me minutes ago onto the baking balcony where I considered the vast orgy of absorption, release and re-absorption, that smorgasborg of unending appetite engendered by photosynthesis, which we genuflecting hole-mushers have as the piquant sum of our earthly delight. On a baldly energetic level, to live is to consume and return; and it tickles us. We eat and rut and die and are regurgitated after bacteria and fungi redistribute our molecules into the soil for solar-eaters to feed and thence become feed. Obliterating a few dozen abstract categorizations leaves us with the winking reality that cannibalism proves the irreducible material principle of existence against which linguistic niceties have no gainsay if truth be told, burped, highlighted in the sky by the northern lights or L.A smog, etc.  The fork that lifts a glob of carcass to our mouths and the one stacking sacks of carcass onto trucks for distribution are with a little imagination the same; let that imagination extend to a principle: differentiation can only be in form, never essence. Form becomes the physical articulation of essence. When kissing my lover's nape, rapt with the soft heat, this transference of ardor, the desire to bite sometimes overwhelms me, sensibly so; I wish to consume her, assimilate her molecules. A supercilious creature whose impatience would meld art and essence, in the roundabout cells burrowing and surfacing her, I would have everything in one tripping glut. But devouring the form disperses the essence elsewhere and then all forms, failing to be speak her, would grow grey and one-dimensional. I would preserve her form above all others for the love of a satisfied sigh protracted in perfect, punctuated beats until I'm, quite against my will, made anew.  

Lemmings

(I choose my own points of departure)

And we might seek to agree that the need for forgiveness is itself a quality of social lemmings, corralled into a way of thinking and living where something is wrong or right by virtue or vice of whomever spoke loudest, longest, most eloquently.

Let me corral you into my way of thinking, something other's made you resist though I know in the inscrutable meanderings of your heart you would awaken wondering, stressed by revelations that were not described, only felt, if the cycles of the moon aptly paid homage to your bearing in this world; if you do them. You wondered all the time and felt helplessly swept by a river towards a basin called paradise; and you wanted to go ashore and find your own, or another. And you found that that, too, was a lie. 

Let me corral you: I took the economics to heart, played with numbers and time where they intersected and compelled feigned feeling when suppressing the real kind; I took to heart the economy of the heart as that paradoxical entity where the thing as a vehicle of expression inverts itself; I took as a sign that you stepped outside of us both, said "maybe" where on your lips there had always been a "no," whenever to the best of your numbers juggling, with the faith you put into them, the small house seemed threatened. . 

If the price comes with a tag, I can concede to it. Far more costly to defy than accept. And still I wonder, as the truth purifies me, whether the lie was ever mine or another's. 

Let me corral you into listening to a voice your own, mine: even when you thought it a lie, none could have said what you did in that way and not mean it. 

The Lollipop Tree

Trundling, half dying of thirst and my wearied Being half slaked by its promise of release, a bosky presence answered my croaking voice remembering a memory of love aloud. The days continued; I hugged the tree; I supped from its dew. I thought then that if I left its shade, the invisible and scavenging past would have me again, defenseless. But God had given me a choice that was no choice: I had to go. And the tree followed. The tree uprooted and followed. I walked in awe of this miracle of locomotion until I saw that I  had become rooted as it once was.

And I realized that it had been waiting for me to help it walk; its dew our tears ours again.

Absentia

A somber night, neither despite nor because of the clenching swamp as aptly describing this air as it does any marshy earth.

Just is. 

A night of missing things. Some familiar squawk from above. The brawn of a red memory, all bold and leaden, dense. 

A night fading into itself, plush and deferring to a sole stream of life that began, I swear, in circles and never. 

All to say, or mean, I miss you.

Amused Fate

Roused into consciousness by the end-score of the movie I'd been watching before falling asleep, I left our bed to stumble into the washroom, then the kitchen to replenish the fluid just left behind. Snuggling back under the sheets, she suddenly spoke to me in a clear voice nonetheless senseless to me. I turned with an apology on my lips at having awakened her but before a phoneme escaped she continued speaking, eyes closed; and I realized she was having a conversation with someone in her sleep. Judging by B's calm tone and the prosaic nature of this (for me) one-sided talk, I thought her dreaming of some exchange with a colleague or acquaintance she must have had in so many words dozens of times before.

Then she suddenly peeled into laughter, that gut-deep gorgeous laugh defining mirth. I looked on, rapt. She'd pause, then laugh; pause, laugh. I could feel a smile splitting my own face. Between her amusement she said "he's going around in circles." Then she awoke abruptly into semi-consciousness, asked if I was real, said something about a zamboni; and when I kissed her supine lips, assuring her I was, she burrowed her face into the crook of my arm, promptly falling asleep again.

During the night, while we lay in bed after a madly gratifying bout of sinuous sex, idly chatting, I tried to communicate something less an assertion than an ad hoc negotiation of feelings about my passion and how to embroider it within our relationship (another passion, our passion). The essence of my message was tenuously cautionary: I want to devote my energies into this one thing; and I need her to understand that any ensuing silences or seeming indifference has nothing to do with altered devotion to us or feelings for her and everything with the obsessive singularity of thought inevitable if I'm to pursue what she has sincerely and with a love larger than I thought possible to have as mine follow my proverbial dream-need. With unwavering consistency her own response was the same: she knows, her love will not falter, nothing will be misconstrued.

Yet throughout these last few weeks, the urge to set my verbal mortar has been held in repose in deferrence to needs I assumed of this relationship; but it is my fear, not our needs, hampering me. Suspended in a state of peace and well-being with her, one eluding me since birth, an either-or position has been undergirding (and undermining) my mind: I'm either happy with her while skirting the perimeter of my past; or I plunge into it, craft it, relive misery, and let the ramifications to my behaviour pare us back into singlehood. Mere biographical experience has told me I cannot have both. Scratch that: the novelty of the situation has left me unarmed; there is no biographical experience from which to draw, no lessons, no time I can recall of peace. My hesitancy bases, then, on a pattern of life and its attendant strategies inapplicable to this one.
The closest a liberating calm and I have ever come happened when I knew Ruth, twenty-seven years, and then only in isolated pockets, those spits of time allotted between recess or in happenstance encounters around the neighbourhood; or, later, smuggled hours in the Dell Park after dusk when its sole weeping willow tree's downy tendrils muffled our lust from even the stars and keening ears of passersby. Transcendentally bubbly Ruth...

Comparisons of lovers almost never flatter by virtue of a comparison being made in the first place. One always wants to feel uniquely appreciated; this is understood, and is also the stuff of low drama set high by storytellers abiding by a script I didn't write or relate remotely to reality. Call it biological or psychological, the mind takes no situation sans referencing, even if inadequately. So while B is uniquely B, her laughter during that most honest period of time, sleep, triggered a memory of Ruth, whom I loved originally, dearly, and never again in the same way with another until now.

The same way and different:  The same way in how Ruth's soul bound with happy faith and the grace that faith bestows regardless of circumstance; different in a way that is partly owed to maturity and a greater measure of autonomy than one as a child can have; and partly from that of Brandi, the whole of her, that somehow exactly binds at every node of life to the whole of me.

And all is begun anew. Fate, it seems, foreshadows. All good books do.

Penumbra

 Discs of evenly-spaced ceiling lights line this floor from one end of the hallway to the other, making me feel like I'm on a run-way every time I come home, directed to our door, that port saved from homogeneity only by the rectangular tin plaque with a number differentiating it from our neighbours'. A faint twinge of mathematical superstition has me wondering if any non-cabalistic series of numbers from 302 to 333 can prophesize my fate if only I had the key, the sceptre, the secret, that magic thing, do they take Mastercard or  Visa.

Padding down the hallway this afternoon, trying to muffle the elephantine thud of my step, I heard a voice in the near-distance, cresting as I passed 325. The voice within--gruff, baritone, pidgeon-englished--roared at another; a couple was in the midst of a battle royale. My comprehension doubly confounded by ebonics and southern drawl, I couldn't decipher the subtleties of their conversation; money seemed its heart, though. The man was indignant and the woman's retorts were loaded with a galaxy of scorn and contempt. There was nothing for me to understand than that this was a trial not readily remedied. The contours of this fight had been well-established, cemented after years of finger-wagging at each other over their relative poverty.

World over, the same economically-based squabbles form the larger part of discussion between mates long whipped by the ignominities of pay-cheque survival. Year after decade after century. The opulence of the first blushing promise when two people in a collision of loins and of hope get wed or cohabit or conjoin had for this couple grown a dull sheen of grey, maybe black and white. Fashioned circumstance beyond their purview had crippled the bright energy of their love with shadow. Who spent what and why and how could you became the delicate, ever-fluxing barometer by which each measured the other's and his or her own worth. Love, hate, passion, nobility or its want, a sniff of rarified air, a preening moment of self-adoration, pettiness, a churlish snarl elicited on principle at some perceived outrage of valor--all reduced to nickels.

Cool air sealed my skin when I keyed into our place. Outside, heat had rendered steel bumpers, oil slicks and glass nacreous in a bitter way. Rainbows of reflected black-marble road-kill eyes moldering with humidity were optically enthralling, bait lulling me into momentary collusion with the killing heat; but self-preservation severed the spell. The apartment, cramped and crabbing, offered nothing visually enticing but I could at least draw a breath without gurgling the air.

Throwing my key onto the bed, echoes of my neighbours' mutual hostility returned, an itch that endured, implying my mind hadn't absorbed their discontent as another dismissible blurb of sensory information unfit for long-term memory storage. Parallel associations between me and the women with whom I've been began cropping up and it made me uncomfortable how similar the problems of couples are, regardless of stripe, location, or anything when pure, rutting economics entered the fray. The old dissonance between transcendent affection and physical need, the dichotomy between an abstraction vying for preeminence against the bluntness of blood, I reconciled again in familiar tones: there is no dichotomy; the two are aspects of a singular thrust made from the original pitch by God or gaseous cosmic clouds of ethanol or something beyond our ken (as if both aren't).

And then a deeper disquiet began pulsating volubly within, whispering of the possibility that everything we're doing will sag, a protracted whimpering into inertia, into a redundancy that dements; that there is no way we're going to be able to staunch the tide, dash mitigation and compromise with the thing that is upon us, this thing that is not fear or death though kin to both...this thing...this thing that has as always been Plato's cave-dwellers fed solely by silhouettes whose makers remain obscured to them when all they had to do was turn around to understand the difference between transience and permanence; nebulous blobs and discrete entities; illusion and truth. Maybe they were wiser still and knew you’d learn as much about anything investigating shadows as their casters. Maybe when bedding down and hearing howls flung from groping hunger, they thought that that plaintive urge vocalized, and its answer in the form of flesh, meant the same thing.

Friday night has arrived. She returned home a little earlier than usual and we passed our time in laughter, tenderness, our usual exchanges of frank expression, though we know that however transparent we wish to be with each other, interpretations and gentle negotiations of meaning sought in cozened silences or abrupt suggestions are our mortal guide at least for a while. She sleeps behind me and I utter her name under my breath, murmur it into her ear inaudibly, tell her she is me, my own soul, the beloved and proud part of it. I feel her there on the bed, look forward to ending this post the sooner to again touch the skin worth more to me than mine. She rests in her mind now. I hope she finds me there, smiling at her. I get under the cover. Nibble her ear, fed.

Touching Brandi

Thank you for your unflagging support in all I do, all that labours for me to be whom I want. 

Thank you for letting me feast on your food and the sight of your swinging pony tail while you sing and bustle with that prim, impossibly sweet smile while making it.

Thank you for the small noises of morning grumble that you make when your face is slack and gently pouting, angelic, Shiele's own dream. Thank you for privileging me with your recumbent body, when asleep all tucked and tuckered, in the nude, like a fresh babe; awake, generous and sensual and yielding in that dance at which you excel, thrusting me into a wanted torpor, a heady depletion that is our point.  

Thank you for touching me every waking moment, beneath the laughter or a minute's silence near a lake, by the waves you seem to summon, beneath everything, this feeling of love from you radiating towards me in overlapping, concentric circles, embracing me at every turn and thought. 

Thank you for getting me, for making my every cell laugh, and laughing with me where we both most live, where neither culture nor genes can touch us, where the plenitude of divinity, of care and of effortless compassion, always does. 

You are the happiest days of me. The soundest, the surest. 

You are mine and mine is all the glory. 

Where would we be

On Germans: good taste, generally honest, shitty counters of subtlety.

On the French: the food's not good enough to justify the attitude, but very close.

On Louisianans: a plenitude untapped the world over. No hardier from any clime could you know than my loving hotpinksweatweewoman bearing a heat that melts eggs and words with the same indifference; there is no plea: it's fucking hot (she and it).

"Artifice" used to be a positive word, once styled the act of creativity, in flight or staid. Now it means  "lying," "falsehood," or "pretension," and I ask where the two twain in good conscience? When did art cease being understood as representational? Where is my lie, your truth and visa and versa and where does it matter and how and when, plebe? Is it not enough--and this is rhetorical--to say that when she smiles, all glides and you're glad to be alive in a heated car in the morning, thanking God for that one smile, praying for another knowing she's pissed off, preening for one more kiss before the day simmers and melts away in your eyes, held captive by her own blue beams piercing straight into your wee bare-knuckled heart, not a thing between you and brutality but the heft of her brows, the twitch of her lips, and utter chaos for fellow man.

Where, gentleman, would we be without our women?

To a card, my Pablo

Your slumbering breath against my forehead ushers in new thought, new vigor, love rejuvenated, held two steps for fear of slipping before giving all to All and plunging, a fall as Luciferian and assured as the tranquilizing calm of a turtle you can't catch for the pond it loves, loving it back in soft thrumming ripples barely perceptible except to a few, to my Love, with her poor eyesight, always seeing the most beautiful and gentle thing, no matter where it goes and how; always that, entirely her own domain untouched by the vicissitudes, a harsh word or hand by the world as we'll all get, a backhand perhaps when we least anticipate one, thinking we'd done well, thinking I've been good or well or some label we give ourselves after feeding to feed again. We'll know our sign, mark it, and she'll be there approvingly pointing out wind chimes, turtles, spots to clean, and all things purifying. We'll know our name in the ruminating stories of others. We'll know us when we know that little swimming turtle (all kids do; we lose it, I'm tempted to say "over time", but not that. Never that: time holds no sway to a soul).

"I want to tell you about the girl and why she looks so fine....I need to tell her she's the only one I really love"

Now Brandi put it to me far more eloquently through Neruda, who made me weep, whose power came entirely from her; for never could those words have meaning had I not known the universal through her. He touched me before; he levelled me when she quoted him.

And here's my response to Neruda, grand Latin I've surpassed a thousand times in as many emails forgotten: the nibble in her nimble mouth gnaws through me, draws my hunger while satiating it, never abating. Her button nose, the pert reminder of better times, when idyll and the ideal were wed, has no way around that impish mouth, that minutiae of pout leaving droves in mad houses and driving more to do more. Why, when speaking, Pablo, did you forget the curvature that pearls coin and oyster with equal disposition, with a fast and grinding ferocity like your whores never met in clime or in time? How did you not know but do, dearest Paulo, that when the sweltering palaver of passerby matches in meaning the heat outside; that when we stumble and gawk for a pretty sight no sooner had than left, we'd no sooner had than left her, all palsied and debunked of illusion, hearing her voice for just one second and knowing in it the everlasting truth we'd spend the rest of our lives trying to justify?

If, gentle Neruda, you need to know the meaning of love, knowing I could never articulate it to you with a surer hand as yours has had, I would say this and only in the last gasping death of hushed tones where all we mean to say is said:

"Oh, my baby"

Leagues rise, they fall; none of it matters prior to smelling the scent of you, that hot heat between those legs, assured by eyes if you saw them twinkle just for you, knowing it was for that alone that they did, not for material or spiritual gain, but as selfless reflex, a hurt hunting love nothing touched or could, you'd fall and proclaim a faith you thought gone, never was, reestablishing itself in the warmth of her arms you know as home the moment they encircle you, the moment you stare at a bland white wall and wonder why while it comes home to you in the softness of her lilt, begging you to beg for a little bit, until begging remains a bad memory. You would know that she had never left; that she'd been there from when as surprised as sleeping serpents perturbed she came to know. As subtle a touch as a wink can impart in the softest glow of mellow light at the beginning of the longest day you've ever had, she came to know.

Tell me, Neruda, again, of this woman that I know I am bent on destroying as she creates me. Tell me how  much we love our women when that is our furtive aim. Tell me that her back will ever bend to a will as feeble as ours. Tell me that we are not delusional beings. Ten to one, chum, we're fucked.

And thus all is well. Calm settles. Dragonflies find shoulders. For now, Pablo, dear wee child sitting hurt in the barn, we are well.

Bananas after dusk

The night does not use me nor I it. Ours is a mutual pact of suspension from the rigours of lesser life, of one held in strolls through bright, plastic Walmart spaces in the thrall of the surreal nature of that world; or in a forced moment of stillness while learning the subtle art of withdrawing from honeysuckle its nectar. The mellowed decline of light, between day and night fully-formed in bruised shadow, is the eternal place of peace. I would dwell there always but must wait, bide my time, whittle away daylight and the night until I can have those precious minutes wherein all of me seems to only then live by any definition of the meaning I care to have. As I repose, restless and tossing in the bed shared by my lover, I know my restlessness is a mourning for that time just passed and the anticipation of its arrival after what will seem an interminable wait though only twelve hours might on the clock pass, obliviating with its relentless, at times comforting queue, the fabric of me.

My fate is assured. I spoke with her of the unease I feel. She cited my lack of literary accomplishment as defined through the approbation of others as the source of this malaise; and I could not argue that this trite vanity lay at the root of my urgency and my trouble. Never gratified, always listing away from the people with whom I aim to communicate and upon whose judgement I must humiliate myself and await, I find no communal spirit with my fellow-creatures. Everyone has a role, I assume, or used to. Now we seem, or I do, to have as a role a simple outsider status, one lauded, promoted, written of and shot in flickering imagery. The promotion I suspect having some hegemonic nature, a hint of Marxian confusion tossed with ample Gramscian remarks about control; about seducing our own oppression, there always posited an "us" and a "them." The whole of it fatigues, these dichotomies; but not less than alternatives of an oriental nature presented as the height of wisdom. People turn to Daoism, to mountains, to poets, to zennish blurbs, to theories of unity or dispersal, to incorporealism in one form or another; and we mellow into yellowed skin, crinkled features, only to find ourselves with a vast depression to have returned to the same confusions of old. The cyclical monotony of doubt recast and reasserted when spoken with new words supersedes mere ennui. We ask ourselves if there is something ours, ours alone, ours impervious to the machinations of theory or of mutual need, of reciprocity or deception or control. We ask ourselves in the smalls of the night the answer given only in that time of which I spoke-- twilight, the heft of day behind and the oblivion of night ahead. During then, alone, can we be alone, our thoughts subdued by some job undertaken, that of living, and the respite of sleep which in wiser thought offers none. Our construction of time compels us, stick and carrot, prod and yearning.

A blackening banana peel lays limp-limbed over an ashtray and the alarm clock on the nightstand, mute testimony to rapid decay. The physicality of it offends my sense of order momentarily, the kind of order that denies transience of a finalizing sort; this is the grand delusion of the world, our true and only mental disorder: to believe that in denying the simplest truth we overcome it; to be believe in an order that can armour us against inevitability; to thrust our faith, maligned now, in movement as immortality. The reasoning, a commercial outcome and enterprise from the start, we think sound: if we're moving we're clearly alive; if we buy things that proves we're moving and are clearly alive; if we are alive we cannot be dead; if we keep getting things by moving for them and have them in their daft motion appear to move us, we must be immortal as long as we do not falter in step, not for a second, not to breathe or to think. Most of us wilt like honeysuckle for want of water in the landscape of that delusion, the paradoxical place where, saturated with moisture, the very substance engendering life, we nonetheless cannot slake our thirst and die from it.

Only in the haunts and hollows of memory does the gleam of the elemental sometimes peek over the cusp of the insane march, of enforced linearity we deem life or, more appallingly, "having" one. A moment snatched when a girl's hair from far ago met with unspeakable grace a magical nook along her neck, the eternal resting place of that particular lock, that cluster of strands that bound like the strongest rope, rope pulling or anchoring ships, the roots patterning beneath the oldest forests--that moment, or one like it, or one that maybe never existed except through the ironic insidious quality or images ever-reformulated, stories told over and again whose authors imagine themselves saying a new thing, maybe that and nothing else. The question that must plague me until I am found in the grave of my skin, the one courting me from the outset, can only be whether it matters. And I know no sadder thought than having to ask it.

She rests beneath, behind, around me. Her consciousness enjoins mine. She dreams for us both now, while I hear the hum of air-conditioning, feel my wakefulness. I hope she dreams of having peace. I hope she dreams of a moment that was real for at least one of us, kept and secured against treasonous misapprehension.

Momentarily this computer will do its hourly shut down, a glitch in the operating system that I can't rectify nor care to since it seems a fitting reminder to put away the machine or my thoughts according to a timer. The flaw seems no flaw in some poetic sense. Thence to enfold myself in the blanket next to her and hope along with her in some dream we might share.

You told me to be brave today. I will try. Because there is at least one who listens and one is all another needed to redeem the effort, ourselves, dusk, a moment, the life and death of anything.

To the jonesing Jones':

Don't you ever slow down? What are you racing towards but your own death? There is no hurry: it will come. It is only an illusion that we can move faster than our destiny has already proclaimed. Only animals have an unrelenting sense of urgency; souls, instead, dawdle.

Watering flowers

The palsied flips of word thrown onto the screen grow from the need for expression, to gratify an urge whose wellspring is the clarion call for honesty, not truth; the two differ. No just cause greets me, no sense of nobility, lament streaks me now, remembering what I had written one night months ago

"The flowers in the vase, whose names I do not know, sent to me by her when the promise of an effacing love, a feeling that might whitewash the woe of the past, of imagined failures, stolidly sits their brittle selves, one or two tiny green leaves fallen only as a gesture to decay rather than full conciliation to it. As obdurate as the illusions hungering in us to bind truth to lie, to make amelioration the truth itself, retains the structure of these flowers whose names I do not know"


A faraway touch, planted years and miles ago, lacquered by love and wide purple skies, gleams, a flicker. My eyes strain to pinpoint its locale in me. Nothing. An afterthought existing only as such, never apprehended, elusive. The meaning of these stray aftershocks from the quakes of old--trenchant, scarring rumbles--I've long since forgotten, if ever they were known. With disabuse or flogging they become dessicated. Tormenting. Seasons cease, hope ceases, memories are dust revived in stray gusts of wind when a stranger opens a window, door, mouth.

A rustling from behind, a street away, I can almost hear her walking the corridors briskly, mind abuzz. My head remains still, rebar all of my spine, fastened on this screen. Washroom pipes groan (somewhere), water splashes into basin (elsewhere), teeth are dutifully scrubbed (this morning).

Twenty-five minutes from now: her fresh lips press against my neck. I peer behind me, up over my shoulder, into her almost uneasy eyes as she wonders if in her gesture of care, her token to love and glance at her dreams of resurrecting love, she impertinently disrupts me. She does and never could; I've no way to articulate the point. Instead, as ignorant as always, I here pause to save these groping and cozened words; rise, return the confused motions of care sparked in our earliest times, before we were, kept with softness, water, flesh, leeward smiles.

Forgive me, Father, the flesh is weak

No retributive posture cancels out the consequence of the act. Christian ethics claims the opposite; that a heart willing to renounce the deeds it had perpetrated, whether physicalized action or by thought alone, will have transmuted through this intent some culpability into something finally expiable. Much in denying this possibility is made of the fact that it proves a psychological want met with metaphysical approval; that is, we want to believe that all we have done--those things which we would eschew, those we regret, those that have had regrettable consequences--can be effaced through an appeal of intent; through sheer desire to have it not have been so; and that because this is a feature of our psyches; and because our psyches exist in a sense to safeguard our physical selves, our psyches then proceed to provide us with an explanation, a means "out" by which those things that startle us, those behaviours we regret, lose their power to hinder the physical self. We can continue, these naysayers say, because we believe something external to us has granted us forgiveness, has wiped out those acts and their consequences. It is purely an article of faith, I suppose, as to whether this is so or not. The typical atheistic professional might see faith as a sort of mental disorder (certainly the psychiatrists and psychologists who are responsible for the creation of the DSMV would at least in heart concur, though they dare not voice it lest the mob de-legitimize the entire Clergy of Mind by disbanding it). My own belief is the flesh falters where the mind can surge ahead; and that whether divine or mental, the difference is finally negligible; that is to say, I'm capable of believing both at different times. In the foxhole I would as any other immediately cling to the former. This does not make it untrue.

music

The mood settles first, then the melody; melody does not precede mood. The mood's the apprehensive state of elusive landing, a sense of embeddedness in time but not in place, an illusion as melodious as the smoke bounding from my lungs and smashing into dispersing wisps against the console of this computer. The melody's of interest where the nature of the mood bewilders: how to string this thing? what note where? Melody determines all of drama with the occasional tethering, ponderous reference a la Shakespearean mode or Beckett's pointless circling to cite the pointlessness determining the mood. I haven't hit the right tempo yet but with B I'm finding my stride; and in striding, the most terrifying and exquisite sense of acceleration, volition, movement, even if it proves paraboling after the litter of our mind-children.

nave

...there are hollows where she still haunts, a lingerer, ever, and grants me in those spaces little peace; but these are reserves that have been created, much like the government here creates physical ones for the Native Americans, to sequester and manage, not to keep alight, not to inflame, not as some future prospect now laid dormant to when in better shape revive and rejoice over. Ours was a tumultuous beginning fraught with anxieties and remained so until the very last hour or second, whenever exactly that was (for who can know such a thing if we're to judge "the end" by a mutual cessation of emotional attachment; or at least a severance sufficient to preclude the possibility that there will be a future reunification?)

Why am I mentally, and unbidden, revisiting old painful haunts and experiencing--unlike only a short time ago--not the benumbed sense of a remembered past but a searing indictment on existence, a papryus of testimony to the agony humans can cause to one another, can inspire?

Further speculation would prove fruitless. The best approach is a tactic; the best tactic is to wilfully ignore these flitting monstrosities of memory and focus on the present. If the past drives itself into the forefront of consciousness against my will, against my better interests, then ignore it, white knuckle the process down to a nothingness. Of course the question always remains in the back of my mind, nurtured by exposure to psychoanalytical beliefs about the subconscious and its power to convey our greatest needs or perhaps even truths: do the memories come, freshly painted in new bright blazing colours, as the random cruelty of an afflicted mind, or do they come bearing gifts, warnings, a plea to something else, somewhere else. I can't know that but can this: whenever I've given over to a more superstitious interpretation of my memories/past/thoughts; whenever I sought to let them guide me rather than take a rationale approach, they have almost unfailingly lead me to unhappiness of one kind or another.

So, take stock: you've not accomplished a fraction of what you want to; and your every relationship has been a failure, including your marriage. Take stock, warn thyself. The past proves useful to me only in this way: as a warning not to act impulsively, to think with the same calculation that the very wren now haunting you always did, except at her most vulnerable moments, and those seem to me in hindsight to have been exceedingly rare.

And then, with a mocking bow and soft salute, I deny the advice just rendered. My allegiance is with the blighting horror and indifference and exuberance of the past: it was mine, the only coin given to recompense breath. To my employer, then, as always, serviam.

E.R.M: eternally recurring mountain

The expanse of her soul serves me as ground, as a field with a mountain in the distance to head towards. I stand atop her and walk sure-footedly; or is it perhaps that she walks as I do though the infinite reaches of her deceive me into believing that it is I who walk, like a man who thinks the earth still as he saunters past a tree? The Recoverable Land, she offers and takes nothing but your life at the end of it, when you've expired from utilization of her gifts; this is her only and undeniable request: to succor from the bones which she has fed until the bones grew saturated with usage; until they had grown ignominious in their repetition, had lost all lustre. Then, gently, as you retire to her, she enfolds you, bids you nod, coos in your ear, and has you sink your dispersal into her, scatter self--the dreams inviolate and intact--into her.

No outrage can be had from this tacit pact. The ungrateful or willfully ignorant mewl, balk, protest when the end of their ability to want, which doesn't rely on chronology; which occurs moment to moment and one she has until the person's own nature no longer supports the proposition of continuance, occurs. Ever-earthly and caring, she nods a little, spikes with rage on occasion, never falters in her role.

She has in all respects the attributes of the perfect human being. I would not for the life of me consider not living with her, being her mate, loving her until the very end when love can no longer be had and there is only for naught to continue. I will not cease loving her because she is the generosity of a butterfly's wings set in skewered motion by God and held in awed observance by the child. I could not imagine an ingratitude so great as to ever turn to this marvel of a woman and say to her, "no, the fault was yours." I may as well shake my fists impotently like some melodramatic character to the skies and curses the gods. I would not desist in loving this creature regardless of the vicissitudes of life, regardless of where this existence takes me, regardless of all; for blame's blameless; there is no one upon which to cast aspersions; there are no oppressed and oppressors; there is only this and that and the need for the other (the other as a figure of illusion, to gratify the this or that). The severest act, the only crime if crime is judged to be an act merely of severity (and what else could it be?) is to in luciferian manner deny one's creator. Not because there's an intrinsic baffling evil aspect to it; nor is it as mundane as Arendt's banality; no, it's because to deny one's creator is to deny oneself; and to deny oneself is merely to give back unto the earth more quickly than some others might. And so the self-denier dies young, meets the maggots on their terms and also squirming, uneasy with this unfolding of self to another before it is done. The denier of self is perhaps the most self- sacrificial being of all; for he uses little of himself before returning it to earth. But, then, he always unctuously refuses a gift; and illogically; there must have been  reason for it in the first place.

All there is is equilibrium, regardless of the manner by which it is reached. Crimes are only matters of perception and of degree; of delicate considerations; of nuance; never of essence. There is no crime; there is no waste; there is no disparity; there is nothing but all. There is no one standing aglow at the end of the corridor, the promenade, the last avenue and final sigh, than her. She's an infinity, the self-actuating infinity, the infinity that sees itself in the mirror. She is solidified in this act of self assessment, the scrutinizing stare aching to be lateral, striving to circumvent. In her circumvention, she creates, and she finds herself.

As readily as she would receive you she would your compliments, with the same grace that she receives and does everything else; for there is not a thing about her that is not measured by some free state of harmony, grasped with an intuition that bewilders more excitable souls, such as myself. The placating visage she expresses, turns, towards all things, all situations, occluding nothing, tells of her immutability; of her nature as Nature; of the fact that as a mountain rose and will fall and rise again, so will she in a glacially-paced motion you can never observe emulate.

Elusive Sanctuary

In the lee of a strong memory I thought sanctuary could be had. If there were an experience conclusive in denying other incidents the power to assuage or to torment me, then all of the incidents preceding the Big Incident would be after all an elaborate and purposeful series of events all logically linked to bring me home; I've not found the one. Many seek a messiah fashioned from tangible cloth, though the Messiah himself might have trounced that tangibility in favour of something more ethereal; but I'm interested in the thing within not born of me alone; not a fleck of DNA transmuted through various interactions with the environment; and not a pigeonholing menagerie of images designed to capture my energy; but an intimacy born in the colluding moment of all, where I and another felt through our insecurities and embraced them together; spelled out our dreams with backward letters intact and sacrosanct, almost venerable; touched each other in the weird wending fabric of space-time to find in the endless question we ask ourselves an answer not of finality but persuasave conciliation, a way-station stable enough to support us into the next phase of existence (whether as a splattered molecular morsel for the earth or as spirit--bound or unbound--in a dimension people speak of and insinuate themselves into). I don't seek the Argo; the Bounty would better serve: a vessel with no return once paradise has been promised, the paradise lost on earth. Would that I were referring to the Garden, Le Jardin, bougainvillea and tulip and lush, munching berry bushes and dairy squirted from variable teat. No. I want a memory that precludes the ability for another to hold sway: that is all; that is enough; that is more than what many can have and I am sure what most people would seek if they knew they sought peace. One of the astounding things about her and those like her in this respect is how they can shuffle off the past like it were a tic, something to be correct, obdurate mustard stains; or else something to be bow-tied and placed gently in a music box that can periodically be opened for solace, a touch of the old to ground the new or make it bearable. Ah, maybe the latter's the thing I want after all: armour, invincibility. Yet how frail, if that is the sole want. How frightened, quailing before the novel worse than a child since children never really do...the loitering appeal of youth, not blinkered and sauntering forward with a jutted chin.

I worry for the boy.
----

Early impressions of Shreveport, Louisiana

I anticipated little, always wary of preconceptions culled from media summing up people and places in politically-energized stereotypes. After the bustle of Atlanta's mostly glamorous-appearing airport denizens, I found my way to the gate departing for Shreveport. The twenty or so people I joined in waiting for the boarding call appeared, as a collective, slumped; that's the word that comes to mind. They seemed somber, uncertain and sagging as if from the weight of too many miserable incidences and indecorous moments; too many fatiguing arguments. Weariness and wariness twinned in their gestures, a genuflecting belaboured chortle, a half-smile while faint alarm pitted their eyes, a shift in chair uneasy, at perpetual truce with something mysterious. Their physical impression and their clothing amplified or accentuated the exhaustion with existence etched in those life-shot eyes, the slightly stunned, shell-shocked looks on their faces. 

Yet when they spoke to one another, they were unfailingly polite, civil, as if having known each other since children, seen each other daily. The flight staffer who boarded me wished me a good flight and addressed me, remarkably, by my surname (her smile was warmth; her well-wishing genuine). And on the plane, hearing the people beside and around me, I heard the same friendly ease and courtesy when bantering. I wondered if my initial impressions of these people awaiting a flight, people for whom Shreveport must have been home, were misguided; if I mistook humility, whether religiously-inspired or culturally (where the two differ) for emotional timidity, an overall impression of psychological defeat bearing its visible evidence in the physical. I thought them embarrassed of themselves and each other; but their unfailing familiarity with each other and confident civility suggested something altogether different: pride, pride in their humility, if the paradox is allowed. 

Emerging from the small plane that had freighted us the hour and forty-five minutes from Atlanta to Shreveport, I scurried through a wending path of corridors before my vision gravitated towards a sign with the word "baggage" along with an arrow pointing towards some escalators. The baggage pick-up area happens in Shreveport's airport to disgorge from its bowels luggage directly in the entrance area of the airport. As I descended the stairs following the escalator, down to the main floor, hunting for my bag, I searched for her amidst a modest cluster of milling travellers, welcoming family and lovers; and didn't see her before feeling her lace her arms around my midsection just as I approached the luggage puker. I turned around, her encircling arms never separating, saw the face, live, in its fresh glory, in a way technology could never in impression and emotional impact replicate. Naturally, we kissed. Not the dizzying kiss you experience when it's the first one, long awaited; but the kiss of a one long-loved returning home. A kiss of relief and of deep affection. Exhausted by lack of sleep and the journey itself, I half-collapsed into her, almost limping in her arms as we made our way outside for cigarette before retrieving my suitcase. My fatigue had vitiated my brain, my senses. Hot light, her presence, a concentrated effort to appear and walk normally--these were all I knew as I felt for the first time in many years Louisiana's air unobstructed by walls. Before my ziggy ashed into pure butt, she'd left to fetch the car while I returned for my bag, which I spotted, isolated by several meters from its kin before and aft; swung it off the conveyor; reentered the world of soggy hot whiteness, and waited for a couple of minutes until she pulled up on the other side of the street. Luggage in trunk, off we went. 

Talking about the bristling dynamic between us, now no longer the danger of drying concrete but its solidified purpose, hardened by months of suffering and laughing together over the waves, is not the purpose of this post, though separating her from this soil, its culture, night air that gave sense to words like "sultry," can be achieved only as an abstraction, some empirical-minded segmenting of a whole on the strength of some guiding principle or word or string of them. Mine was, remains for tonight, "impressions of Shreveport"; though I know teasing apart her from the city can exist only as a kind of mental experiment; but I'll give it a go. 

(From the moment we arrived home until this afternoon, during her shift, the melt-your-bones, grinding, agonizingly pleasurable sex has not abated, though, whatever my mind could or could not absorb. As I said to her earlier after we both buried ourselves into each other, mashed and smeared into we exchanged on a molecular level, I think we have a viable sex life. I groan and explode and all from a pitch reached after alternating currents of tease and submission, tease and submission, a mutual hunger ritualized in a million ways by us but always, across species and time, the same fundamental dance, the same forms of power interplay. Our transmutation of it, or reversals, or attempts to transcend it, can pervert but never declaim its original energy)

The first few days I was an extremophile, locked in an atmosphere of extreme fatigue or of extreme inebriation, most accurately, a combination of both. Each day from Sunday to this one, Tuesday, has been a process of regaining those senses that process. My receptors have opened, the antennae probe the ground in little pats. The humidity one notices immediately. Louisianans, still part of our species, remark to themselves how remarkable it is. Like people from Saskatoon preen with pride at the extreme cold there, as if sharing in its power by withstanding it, Louisianans take no small pleasure, not in that evil coupling of punishing heat and a humidity to make of the air more water than anything and those living here closer to amphibians than humans--not that: the pleasure lies in believing that few would endure it. Tales of shoes filling with water; sayings endemic to this place ("You can  never wear big enough shorts"; i.e, they'll never be billowy enough to evade getting drenched), are at every denizen's ready. My response to this has been one largely of approval. In the absence of sweltering death-heat, during the night when a Gulf breeze respires like the atmosphere's breathing, the humidity soaks through the flora, stews it, flowers boiled for their essence, and produces a palpable taste, one primordial and deeply affecting. Languor overcomes, though not the dry sub-Saharan kind: you're hydrated, you're in a sauna, you're mind unravels those synaptic threads bunched up by repetition of the commercial sort. Images of big-breasted women slinging hamburgers with a wink; lovers meeting over Brand X and by Brand X's influence alone finding their happy evers--these depart, sort of obliterate softly, disperse. With relief I find in their wake not an exhausted affiliation to nothingness, the more than empty empty air when a flock of birds flee without remnant inspiration left; in the dismantling of learned disdain or diffidence, the energy required to create it never lost, now modulated, there reformed, put planets back in me; the eddies of ethanol clouds from within and without; the pulsars and black matter; the thing you always wondered about that made in its own image its image, hinted again, anew, the adrenaline thrill of possibility, one yet wed with fate, the destiny that things can be rather than will. "Azalea," unknown to me by sight, became something to learn; everything did. This, I thought, is what is meant by starting over. 

Of the city itself in its infrastructural and commercial sense, there's nothing to recommend or detract from it in relation to other North American cities its size: tar and signs; a profusion of fast-food and ice-cream shops; boutique areas and Walmart warrens; overpasses, interstate stretches, a bridge linking Shreveport to Bossier; a downtown core chiseled from rectangular, low-slung buildings of oft-cream facades and bland curlicues of sculpture. The element salient from other places floats up and down or stays stilled at the river as boats converted into casinos. Riverboats, I guess. A loop of road chords the city with two main thoroughfares piercing it, parallel to each other. Within twenty minutes, she tells me, one can be from any one point of the city to another, an estimate I imagine fair. The real gem resides in the somehow unobtrusive trees softening spaces between structures. Not overcrowding; not bullying; merely passive well-wishers to the lazy gait of people walking their bicycles or sauntering across a street, the heat they're feeling visible in long-suffering brows busheled in the middle, whatever the colour of the person in a city equally divided in population by facetious distinctions like "black" and "white". The boardwalk in Bossier offers a pleasing pedestrian retreat from the tatters of metal or their more refined versions (cars) creating a heat island in a city in no need of help when it comes to sufficient warmth, according to both the barometer and the way people interact with one another. The boardwalk stretches along the Red River, a cubed outgrowth of geometric, shop-lined alleys from a span of it perhaps a mile long. We entered only one shop while there, a frozen yogurt fix-it-yourself dig that, were I ten, would have been my second home. 

Tattoo shops must do brisk trade here. Body art is immensely popular even with people whose skin colour differs as little from the sepia ink of the tattoo as my left hand to my right. The young, mostly. The older people tend to have considerable physical heft, beige and white clothing, tuck in their shirts, squint a great deal, and walk with an air of authority. Trotting through a Walmart, surreal for the inexplicable post-apocalyptic impression it left, is a lesson in tattoo art, a living museum of those pliers of dye on flesh, each a statement of sorts, codes of this culture. Gather a few of these heavily ink-entombed folk together and their colours seem to blend, limbs ceasing to be discrete parts of a single person, bodies blending into one shuffling mass of blue hues whose awkward gait defies human anatomy and its usual motor function. Almost to my surprise, the beleaguering midday heat that nearly liquifies me doesn't cause those tats to streak like Tammy Faye's mascara in her heyday.

The library where I spend much of my day while she works nestles in a treed lot adjacent to her workplace. Four columns of computers, eight units deep, centre its floorspace, flanked by seven or eights rows of book, dvd and video shelves on either side. Ending the library, are large windows in five section, each providing a pleasing view of the ever-present, almost emblematic shrubs, bushes and trees that in this short time here have marked in me indelibly Shreveport's natural character, parallel to the character of its people. I always occupy the same four-seated tasteful wooden table abutting one of the windows. Of the library, not much more is to be said—everything is about everything all the time; one opts for selectivity in lieu of inchoate existence—save that, from my casual perusal, the material stocked represents an admixture of the standard small-scale canonized western tomes and a regional emphases (in this case, all things Louisianan: Christian, historical along the Mason-Dixon Line line, etiquette, haiku about Elvis).

A brief word of poverty-indicators: there are an inordinate amount of payday loan shops; and gasoline cannot be pumped without payment of first. 

Freshly arrived, the people's "character" beyond universal features eludes me still; I'm uncomfortable in putting mortar to the bricks yet; but this is a first impression: 

As resigned and phlegmatic to their place as the knots in a tree or the roots upon which its existence suckles, the people never appear dour, but it's an illusion of sorts. A sardonic, languishing smile, far more Mona Lisa's than her own, inform their expression, their attitudes, inspiring in me a calm, fatal in the most pedantically technical sense. At the risk of presumptuousness, I feel, or they make me feel, no barrier between their innermost selves and my own, often, even in the midst of a curt rebuff at some inquiry; and they seem to want nothing out of you, to seek no gain or advantage. Interacting with them resembles the relationship you have with an ex-spouse: the marriage is over and has expunged the worst or best or your instincts, those hungriest for some salvific security; and what remains, what made the marriage the reason for itself, is to have in this ritual of purification a lifelong friend whose direst needs effortlessly prove your own; whose happiness gladdens you without an overcasting self-interest.

Trilling birdsong suspends the declining flux of light, pinning with pitch the earth, renders it an orbitless sphere, poised in equality for a moment with the sun. Timelessness intervenes, expands, secretes infinity. The break from motion and from change freights me to the epiphanic understanding of Louisiana's inimitable charm: here, all is elemental, nothing with insensate haste moves to a Nowhere when Everywhere is always. Immutability pervades every blade of grass or stranger's smile, and is this land's aura. And it is hers, too, this favoured child of eternity. In her, I see the stamp of her soil; and as it, she is loyal to Forever and speaks with the only subsequent authority that ever mattered: endurance. She is why I am here, why I breathe still. 

The single most impacting impression I have of Shreveport, the one that summarizes with a laxness of imagination I admit, and a truth even more fiercely asserted; the reason my fondness for this city surpasses any determining experience in it, slept with me last night, and will tonight and all the tonights the two of us could have in this life. She defines the place she lives and, loving me, has come to define mine, inseparable from her own. 

Thank you, Brandi, for the limitless gift of your smile and shared life. 

Sempre, Serviam.