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. 

The slight light from the slats blind the grit lining them both

I love them both. I love this world. Its hatred falls deaf to me: it was always right. You cannot lick the snot off your lover's nose, see her rub it in that motion you adore, and think there's anything we can't fix where it hurts us. 

Tears as large as celestial globes, she justifies. If I ever hear that snuffling hurt sound again, my Darling, I'm afraid I'll take it as a sign to relinquish all cynicism and love the fuck out of you. 

Resipiscence Lost

Coetzee's always a timely way to get to somewhere forgiving of every human indiscretion, rendering from the fat of lust its rightful glorification, a sardonic contempt held for anything that admits anything not meant just for us, just us, and all the time no matter how a bullet chips the bone in our elbow, the wrist bruised from words too often pounded without purpose. Our rally declares itself in regret recanted: it was all in the happy morning light for the best reasons and there is never a reason to mourn.

I saw her beating the Coetzee out of me, in her casual reflections, vitiating me in her idyll, with as careless a word as "okay," the belief held in pantheistic truths, where a sad slash of light reveals an Aleph acting as prism to all. All she had to do was remind me that I travelled, once

From Saskatoon to Kent, hence to Capetown, repeated thrice, dates remembered in a book tossed in the suitcase that brought me to both. With a sighing "okay," I'm reminded that

Landing back to a land once rebuked as all hick, preempted from a scrutiny that could be called it since the bias had set, reminding me

That forever lasts just that for me whenever staring at myself in the smalls and looking for the thing that makes me me without shame; that nothing that she ever did, any "she", moon or whoring bottle, ever did take a thing away from me that I didn't give back, dour pill, swallowed together, taking us where we thought we could never belong but always had.

All wrong: the one wilting scene thirsting for a bit of futurism, a daub of water to quench the disdain for a present that refuses to die in progressive images of geraniums....geraniums...strange flora....blossoming...proved a truth dust envies, and

That 

Right, that the little boy teasing a bug with the pad of his forefinger, trying to align the insensate creature's movement to his own, seeing where they differ and why; and as soon a dog whipped, a man murdered, a world poisoned, as stop trying to learn that

Spitting in the sun's as profitable as a billion hard cash bulging pocket and balls, each momentous in the mind, and there--forever lasts just that--disproving a truth dust envies. 

Telling her that when the geraniums flounder, petalled seals bashed by shore and man; and the whole of the raucous world utters a groan from incipient lust; and there was a reason never to have one though all of you was told to tell you there was, 

I counted you. I counted and, life paraboling, I counted again. 

prrrrrrr

Door cast open, a red gash as wounded as the womb, I inherit her, ask that the blush of good midnight air takes us where I wouldn't, pray for her. A rattling of bone, a shambling sack, moving from instinct to bed, there, right there, I see her.

And when I do, do I marvel.

Made

Here is a lie you made me in your love reject, a thought once felt: I chronicle the chaos of the ill-reasoned images from sleep in uneasy elliptical motions, a true orbit defying geometric simplicities. Unsure of the meaning snared in mild spasms of shock while sleeping, fatigue supplants vibrancy as the normal state; pragmatic dicta usurps passion. Beauty becomes something to weep for but never over: the nexus where condition and being vanishes arises. Only the collation of experience is left; to be is to catalog. When then the chaos? the agency once implied?

Unity defies chaos and in our hearts, yours and any who have heard you, and whatever your guise times long gone but still to come, we always knew it. Unity is truth; disunity, the easier thing to understand precisely and paradoxically because it conforms to staid, rigid shapes, never accounting for the passionate creation and recreation, and transmutation of life. Because we feel we cease to understand in the sense that can matter when either or both are at stake; and that is always. Unity has been one of your great gifts to me.

I love you more than I can ever express, Brandi. You are the finest thing in this finite world. You define the parameters of my existence; and I am grateful.