Equal Love

There is no doubt that the undersoftness of the skin is a shudder, the jaunt shoulderblades of something more. Molded to the drought of our time, the set-sailing fall beneath what waves we have know most intimately, ridden high in the sky with a might impervious to the love we should have swallowed whole.

No sorrow stands in the way today, or clouds the fiery pink of dawn's skies: rather we are marked by a racket unreachable by roar or rain, a calling back to a wish we cast upon a stone, serenaded amongst pyramids boxed inside our singing city; histories we have stolen and made ours.

Who will joust with our minarets of youth? How to recall what we have lost not with countless steps, but with countering that which is left to memory, slippery if miniature in mourning, too sweet to swallow whole. As love.

As life, as the ridiculed Moby Dick with filthy, fiery eyes, arched in the earth's bowels, fraught with too much to feed upon and far too much suffering to tuck away inside.

If this is loss, we suppose, there is no room to lose more; our apartment is full of recollection, dreary, rage-inducing rubble. Grief here gapes open-mouthed and, as toddlers, everything we touch is new. This newness is itself different; it knows no novelty, but rather the proof of dirtied hands and dirtier hearts. A desperation for re-entertaining the pristine, still being rigorous with so much gone. With the wind, the fire, with the water that always washes back; either sparks or soothes our wounds.

It is an ebb and flow, this and us and our broken hearts. It is no softening, no escaping, but rather reveling in the rare moments too full with life to ignore or kick back with long legs or fall asleep to in the jumbled exhaustion that embraces and releases, patternless and not one bit paternal in its warmth.

Sometimes, these days, we even throw back our heads and belly laugh; or kiss fiercely the young child that raises his eyebrows in reference to you. Sometimes, all is burnt with breath, inside, in starts, in the same wild wind that could not bring you back.

Perhaps it is because I was not there beside you that my mind is full with only fishes and frantic hideaways. Perhaps I am happier to know you now--or it is somehow right to remember you--curled to the side of a broken rowboat, shifting above bored crocodiles, drawing in the morning sun and suckers with a single line. We lie on that line too, today, are drawn to you and the puddles you pretended were eyes; relive your youth in photographs and love letters that we, kittens of your small litter, lick livdly and desperately, a lifeline to devour and then demand again.

You remain only in our clutter; in our cluttered heads; in the world of your photographic prose.

And I find, that I have misnamed this as empathy. As it is not empathy but instead that endemic to being part of you. That somehow, no matter what struggles made against this tide, no matter the fraying of this line, you are near. The patches of your yellow plaid tidy in my pockets. Imagined lockets I would hold above my left breast.

Still, there is nothing serene. I cannot balance this or bargain with anybody's god. In the gardens at my sister's, pulling back the earth at daybreak, in the wild waters north, you are brought to me too far too touch or turn to, between myself and some enemy of resting place. Time only breeds as it does with all species and all specimens that do not fall, it only breeds the need in the greenery you built, in the family you fought for and in the children you loved out loud and grew, somehow, strong enough.

Overturned

It is best to face the lull of betrayals with open eyes or with the silence that sneers at years of revelry. I can laugh, or land head first in familiar muffin tops, the green grass of lakes or pickled pistachios, gorging on the presence of the past. But the neighborhood is empty now, echoes in a night where I am told by tired neighbors of their child-dogs, recommended the reading of pharmaceutical failures and the most potent pillaging of all, not our, times. Fruit stands now stoic undercover, once broken to the ground and built upon by giant, jealous cranes.

I still see the penguin suits where we sweated out first nights at home. These paper planes flied high, a thousand storks that could not save our name. It is in these motions that I might have been, a few years back, making light or making love, shadowed in the moonless night that heaved, breathy and barren; the night that, starless, or at least so patient as to swell around its drums, allowed a manicured melancholy: a stage not set but sorted in its sins.

It reminds me of dancing or dwelling, idling on sides streets, sticky stoops where secrets were undressed, decorum come undone, desire dappled in by teenage minds and mouths alike.

It seems, now, more a sight than a setting. It reminds me too much of what I've lost; and yet the salt of sweat and slivered stardom, of precious, gummy gems of life, beckon me to the streets. Where now, sunny and cher are revived by the chess set, small canopies replace familiar green, my favorite fried filler makes an appearance in neon light, the scent is stolen by something sweeter: a home not overrun, but overturned by time.

Rooftops

Could be the place where I am best portrayed, not placated in the summery night that ignored the fired skies, that pulsed harder than stone walks or forests at my toes. It could be the small piece of peace, precious in a city centered around strung wonders; how Christmas would laugh at the milky moonshine sunk around my feet. How memory replays and replaces mourning without a bated breath to bend back time.

It isn't sorrow under this blinking sky, shot by planes and island spires. This is what I missed. This heart of mine, this site of so much more to be said. If only love determined us, if only desire and not dank circumstance. And yet, in what was once severe oblivion, that pungent past is present and pulling at my insides, once maimed, once nicely numbed. So with it, chance. Or possibility. Roads kicked aside, run to dust, ravaged in the most remarkable of homecomings.

And still, however versed, however close to me I pull this night, I am unprepared for the weight of afterthought; I am unable to entertain more goodbyes.

Sour shapes

Penelope seems pertinent, with yet another nickname murmured in a silence I know I have grown. These shades of tales, sat upright on painted windowsills, are marked by fingerprints and the pallid, pressed beginnings that, breathless, defeated, are still fat with frantic love. Sometimes, absorbed with this smaller past, of evenings or lasting flights above spitfire waters and bombs we blew, I forget the larger past. The stacks of peaches lining my block; the heat of sleeping bodies on stone park mantels; the street murmurs and even might, broken or bloody, a blight far beyond my own.

There are small mentionings, a shock of auburn curls, a corner cafe with puffed chocolate pastries where I was re-given promise, already slighted, already shattered, but murmured with mechanised meaning, a metallic tongue. Nostalgia for this and then is now muted, but peaceful, so small compared to the nostalgia on my walls, my floorboards, in the musky closets of my home. At times, I hope for a haunting--of the house, of the city, of myself inside and the shock of reminders, the small sparks of air that part my lips to call your name, bend me backwards; into all sorts of sour shapes and selves I thought long gone.