Empty as Eve, my God, why
do I wake feeling just barely
born from this body? Watch
my words carefully, they tend either
towards the somewhat arbitrary, like
Van Helsing lacking a stake and in bed,
limp as a pony tail, just counting his
losses one by one in that empty space
behind his woman or towards the
romantic: what happened to
this bright land, and the cry of a child
from the same crib in which I first rose?
http://www.imeem.com/pavfca/music/T68HcUBl/the-cure-boys-dont-cry/
It starts with the rush and roar of a love song, but it reads like a lament. Robert Smith sings desperately, but he’s so in love with this melody, with the awareness of this yearning as is his first realization of the fullness of life, that somehow the delivery sounds triumphant. It’s a break up song for new couples and if that doesn’t make sense, then you aren’t listening closely enough.
The emotions are hard but the urgency used to deliver it is so simple. You find yourself in a stadium kissing this girl to this song and you aren’t surprised when you laugh out of sheer giddy wonder. It’s been a long time since you laughed like that. Robert Smith looks more than half-dead but his eyes light up when he sings. Her eyes glow and flash from the lights of the stage. Neither of you are watching the band anymore.
When you reach for a bottle of water you see your fingers and you know that you could play this song too, but instead you just find her hand and hold fast. You know that you’ve only got this summer and that it won’t be enough. Still, there will be moments that will offer you more than you can understand within their own duration, that will take decades to grasp fully, and that’s better than anything else you can hope for when you’re twenty years old and still foolish enough to believe in love.
I am infected, sick
at heart, but it’s
just a virus, no
more than a cold
knife, in a cold
drawer, hungry
for the touch of
warm meat.
Even the molecular
is fictional.
Even the grass can’t exist
without us.
My heart too,
has no being
when neither you
nor I can witness it.
A dead cat,
in a box, and as
its only companion,
a radioactive isotope.
Don’t open anything.
Leave me that, at least:
hope
that a cat may still be purring.
I know this faith
was always difficult, but it only
turned impossible once witnessed.
Your terror is not my terror.
There are too many— no,
not enough days in between us.
We papered the distance
in maps, but found
only geographies of
subjectivity.
When you left,
the whole mess stopped
making sense.
We could take all of the young
strangers by the hand, but
where would that leave us?
Where would that leave me?
I will remember both
how these creatures,
solitary, but only mostly,
were wicked
and how they were not.
From the street to
the elevator, just
waiting for my bed
he was drunk
and I was still
drinking when we met
his vulnerability
together in my room.
God
how lonely
these
men must feel.
Don’t trust too
much or too often,
he said, his priest’s
collar like a hole
in his neck, But
when trust
finds you shut
the hell up and take
it in your fists, hold
it by the neck as
a hungry dog would
a rabbit kicking between
its quivering jaws and
bite back hard, if
at all necessary.
There are holes,
___there are holes
___in this body that
are not worth
mentioning, but
some that are-
___but it’s those, those
that are so
unmentionable
and as such they must
___remain
______unmentioned.
The morning started too bright and
too naked, struggling to pretend
that in these winter years the twenty-
somethings should sleep without
hushed promises or recognition
of how earnest, lean and yearning
we once were before realizing
our own youth.
I’m just trying to say something true:
you never used to think that sleep
was this inevitable, that we were so
powerless in the face of our bodies
as when you hit the bed stumbling, fated
and I had my words but they all wilted
beneath the dry heat of this unavoidable
miscommunication in flesh.
I read the handbook for whores
twice and knew you were just a hyena
in petticoats, but the pages, I guess,
were missing that mentioned that you
would still curl your toes towards
me in your sleep and that it’s
impossible to sequester our heartbreaks
on these bright, naked mornings.
Of course, the menace had slept well,
with cock limp and reassured of the
poverty of the flesh, that you hold no
truth and are just a sign of the
madwoman in the attic, not the angel
in the housekeep, and that Eve was
just a monster, Adam just young
enough to be foolish, in love, and ripe red
for where your missing pages went:
James Dean is not dead, tomorrow
I will teach you how to drive again,
disbasement in the sphere of love.
Hallucination One:
I choke on violets growing thick upon my lips, my eyelids, in trails down my chest, across my thighs. Everywhere you kissed, seeds were planted. They grow there still.
Hallucination Two:
A gardener, brown and crooked from years of labor, lies still on his back among these, his orchids, without being able to truly claim them as his own. He closes his eyes, buries his fingers in the dark soil, and presses a pinch against his pink tongue.
Hallucination Three:
Your father is dead. Lying in a red coffin too small for him, he is dressed like a pilot. An unfiltered Lucky Strike burns on his lips. I bring the cigarette to my own mouth, then exhale the smoke hard into the air.
Hallucination Four:
Stars drip from the sky, leaving streaks against the dark. They shine like the mucus of snails on dry sidewalks. I taste one. It is sweet. I think of the afternoon I first went down on you.
Hallucination Five:
We are children lost in the forest. Your hair grows as quickly as we walk, turning into black water behind us. You look at me and begin pacing circles around where I stand. There is nowhere to run.
Hallucination Six:
I watch purple octopi in an aquarium. Two of them circle something small and brown on the floor of the tank. They stare at one another, then become a single writhing mass of tentacles and blood. I look more closely at the tank floor. Your ring finger lies there, pointing at me.
Hallucination Seven:
A television is on in a room too dark to even reveal the location of walls. I can’t tell what’s playing. There is a small red light near what I imagine to be the ceiling, what I imagine to be a corner. After my eyes adjust, I see that it is a camera. I realize that I am living on stolen time.
Hallucination Eight:
A bald man in plaid boxers and terrycloth slippers hands me a black box with a tiny hole in one side. He says, this is how you photograph love. I open the box to find a peach pit and mirrors. The pit is cold and hard. The mirrors are pliable, hot to the touch. They cling to my hands like latex gloves.
Hallucination Nine:
My dead grandfather is young again, on his knees, kissing the hand of a woman that is not my grandmother. He is sweating. The woman slides her skirt up heavy thighs and motions for me to come. I kiss the backs of her knees.
Hallucination Ten:
Earthquakes wrack the home we share. My legs give out beneath me and I fall to the floor. Only your paintings remain still on the walls. You touch my thighs among the rubble and tell me that my skin is transparent. I am too pale to love truly.
Hallucination Eleven:
A white whisp of a woman, with a noble jawline and high arches on her feet, takes my hand. We walk across the Golden Gate Bridge. When she speaks, she says, this is how you photograph loss. She presses her palms to each of my cheeks and kisses my mouth soft. When we separate, I see how beautiful she could once have been.
Hallucination Twelve:
My mother wears loose robes. She tells me that true love has no reasons. I look into her eyes and see only the ocean.
Hallucination Thirteen:
It is summer. I am driving with the windows down. It takes only a moment to see that I’ve done this before, that this is the day we went to the beach, that this is the day you stepped out of another’s home in pigtails and I first realized that you were beautiful. I feel heavy, but I turn right, then left, then right again, towards you anyways.
Hallucination Fourteen:
I bound down a steep mountain path in great leaps. The air is thick. When I take my next step, I never hit the ground. You are far below, waving goodbye.
Hallucination Fifteen:
I wake in sweat with the word “elope” on my lips. Already I’ve forgotten the dream. Only later do I notice that I’ve gouged topography into the bedposts.
Hallucination Sixteen:
Lying on the banks of the dry creekbed where I lost my virginity, I watch the nearby hills. I hear a sound. On the foundations of a bridge, someone is spraypainting, THE UNFOLDING DRAMA OF REDEMPTION. I notice a thin trickle of water making its way across the creek’s parched stones. I dip two fingers and let them dry in the sun.
-Garrett
