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.