Mortified snow

It is strange when simplicity steals you back. When impatience and improbability becomes fixed by a fate never signed up for, long spring snows that have broken our strides. Stranger even when I feel imbued with loves, a life not mine--want to stand knee deep in spiraled southern rivers, want to take my coffee black. As said by Pablo Neruda--'I watch my words from a long way off. They are more yours than mine.'

When forced to compromise certainties; comfort; cradles we thought would rock our worlds, then small compromise suddenly hangs no weight on our shoulders, our hearts at all. Then compromise becomes the norm, waiting not awash in gripping panics, but instead in the grips of suns or sudden, city stars. Those stars apart partake in our mourning for eventuality, not an organized but organic calm.

I know this pain, inside of, unmended by my own body, it can be no brail to read that other deeper, more damaging pain. At once I know I can not only survive but live within my aching bones; but still not him, without my blood. Not when fear so hard fought against feigned passing, yet dropped me in a jungle so full with foreign sounds. Even in this moment, with the possibility of postponement, with the possibility of missing out on the small joys I have struggled to keep closer to my chest--even in this moment I see only one failure in my life; and that is my failure to fight hard enough for, to keep my keeper safe.

Life does not reflect what we accomplish but what we accommodate, not how we kick to avoid drowning but how we bend around all circumstance; how we return even when--always when-- we know no way to tread softly home to a fallen, mortified snow.

Putting on Airs

The streets of this city are tough, if tired: churned by childlike appearance, the apprehension of biting storms. I will drop these gentle winds if to be caught in the fanged airs of unearthly escapes; I will drop these gentle winds and run.

Where else do you find the minotaur, windswept and inhuman—miniature if androgynous gentiles of youth—but between the airs, and the eyes, united in the burning brow of memory, mistaken magic, or mighty mistakes? I can look up, out and above these pigeon-grey of skies. Yet what has kept me wild is not insincere, nor cynicism, but bruised belongings; the same belonging that nips in longing and layers beneath my skin. The belonging that brings me back to an artful, uphill climb raw of reason, powdery grass that grew more potent promises to let die.

Why, then, am I gasping, grasping for a breath beneath the yards of fabric that fall, fly around me, feign billowy softness I once believed all cities, pigeons, incensed doves possessed? I remain agile and exhausted in these silken jaws or dreams, in the smart swell of my jaundiced past.

When the blood, or breathe, stops streaming, so too the tears, so too the storms. What I wait within is neither ice nor warm, needed nor disposable, not mine but all that I can grasp back from the past, can give again.

Wardrobes

The venom is in the closet, where I tuck my head in the day, praying for a door to Narnia. What is noxious is the emptiness, the broad belly in which I can no longer close myself. And when I close the door, the simple white, a reflection of me and me alone. I believe it is there in the wardrobe, no land of lions but one of less fickle fairies that can dutifully dust alive.

When I sit and sweat below the earth's surface, drink wine in the revelry that I should embrace, I stand outside of myself; I shoulder the warmth of the evening, I whisper in the face of the girl I know best. It is not that I believe--there is a very obvious sentiment in the name of Never never land; it is just that while there is very much beauty in possibility, there is ecstasy only in what cannot be, breed, breathe. Impossibility is artful, an aged fountain we drown searching for.

So too can I drown my days when I watch the wardrobe, push up against the cement of walls that I hope will fall beneath my fingers, melting Dali clocks weeping on my hands. So too can I hope that whatever is in the wardobe, or in the skies, does not live only within me--that dollhouse version is too small to embrace. And that is all I am looking for in a sea of clothes, striped silk and always argyle. I am looking for his mane, peppered beard; the man more than the spirit that I have been promised will remain.

Tides

It is harder to wake from memory than dreams. Some mornings sweated with a mourning for not another try but tide; the most blushing of happiness still biting with bided time. Perhaps where we find forgiveness, we release the most; we forget what it is to abstain--haphazardly whole for few moments before we restore our reprieve. It is golden, gripped by sunshine and shadows I can laugh back at, sear in the sun. But still tempted, still fat with hand-in-hand hollows; with the breathe of coffee; with strung, spandex above my ankles, with the the bellow of Stand Up America, a moon-shaped mirror of my adolescent self.

I do not even try to quell the wisps of time that extend their branches, their spearing, spoken quills into this present that is only mine. Instead, I fully embrace the foreign, human fact, that time is not linear--or rather, not unilinear. It is a space and spade of many lines, woven in wool across our eyes, bound or blinded on our wrists, velveteen, soft, sweated silk, metal shards and shapes that pierce us, that remain.

Even when we try to fish them out, to clear or clean, divulge the present or any presence that unsettles our calm, of any glance back into that glinting night of blackened sealife and the bluest forgiveness of my father's eyes. The scent of the floors, where my body could not breathe out my beating heart; blood and boredom; the pools of sunsets that once flooded my eyes.

To smile, in reference to this past, is to know not that I am unchanged; but rather, that my core is so recognizable, still so soft, perhaps shelled--at times--in a generous cynacism, but uncloaked from the red, from the blood, from the hood, still waiting; waiting with an edge, with an expectation that did not, in fact, drown in those biting tides.

Kalaidescope

I want to isolate in these rare artistic moments, fraught with feeling, a foreign vanishing, grown of wishes and my own great expectations. As summer creeps open, vigilant and viceral, the world outside seems to mirror my insides: icy, blooming and blushing, groomed only by the gods.

For all of the mistakes, misuses, abuses, moments broken by wishes at our feet--spilled like bloody wines on cotton whites--for all of these real broken hearts lie sly certainties, birds with bated breath, slightly soured by the whole fishes gutted before their graves.

My world, my inside world remains soft and plush, as pathetically protective as a spotted tortoise shell, familiar as the slate grey pigeon that carried my initial love--overbred and full of promise, unique as the red-sand desert, filled with rodents somehow deserving of sun's nurturing eye.

Sometimes, many times, I want other things to matter most. I want to revel in the wash of hot water, be pleased by the rare if perfect sky. To sigh at the inhale of bakeries and weep in moonless nights. The small, not of my back, but of my own knowns, is that every rain of laughter is colored if not brewed by love; every tear shed is empowered by love. Why it has become both my house and my martyr, sacrificed by some sick strength of my heart. I am certainly discerned now from my lover--no longer are my cheeks wet with someone else's tears, my rage our offspring (virulent, violent and somehow still wonderful). Yet when I close my eyes I reinvent memory, or reignite its slight flames--a playback of familiar films, kailadescope versions of life that dance on my pupils, soft lenses baked to the core. Sometimes they are spinning, set to pounce, and other times as dumb as deer, greeting demise; or a child on the brink of opening the world, without the bulging chocolate of bunnies to tickle the armpits of the real, raw, sticky alive.

Sometimes I can stare back at myself with an open yawning of callused hands, milky bath water, sandpaper stubble and the disappearance of dunes.

Dunes of course are the high build up of sand, washed up barriers performed naturally and crushed only by children with vengeful tools. They are the real glass walls, set aside any ocean--the perching ground for parasitic birds, opaque, ovaler, wedded to water. They are barricades, barriers not only to the waves but also the lax lull of storms, the thickest silence of us all. To write about love, to live next to love in this sense is a velvety dawn, smoothed of a smothering landscape, disengagement, grown-up stomping out and down: not short of sand castles and buried feet. It is a devouring of the dunes, spilling forth, damaging of all the dams built between. And in this gnawing of the gates, not golden but skeletal and washed out by times in the sun, secret gardens bloom bent and born again--a gilded age of innocence, never wiped away but whispered through our crackled lips.

Love of words

Of course old men in pubs throw snow at girls who dare the streets. It is obvious and yet I am still oblivious to this very British life, lifted up above a past as short as my own, my nation, my city of god. They could be angels, these frozen fairies broken at my feet, or strings of cotton awaiting warranted spring. It is here I would expect them to write, a rare if real creativity cordoned off by ice queens and quick outpourings of skies, not love that lasts. But yet I think of poets that belong to my city and my own song. I think of stories not of pebbled pretense, not of Portuguese winds or those winding roads in which I saw desire, but of the very south of home, of the wildest buildings grown pale by the sea.

Perhaps writers are simply snared by words, themselves; they love rhetoric more than the real, soft, feathery beings that can keep them warm. They are cold perhaps, snowed in by wounded, wound up minds that never stop, the trails of tick-tocking, internal clocks that shudder even in the full mooned nights. Perhaps these snows, or these failures to warm the ice are real stakes that bend in hearts; they are the stakes they hold, such flippant hands in life, all aces or nothing, at its very, beaten best. All wings tucked into the crevices of breasts.

Vampires then, I find in writers, as I find in dreams. They have sucked in the life from others' lives, from lived experiences claimed in desperate prose. All stories told are real, not white lies but black realities. real as that fleeting cotton that will melt in moments at my toes, real as that ornate aching of every, any broken heart inside the darkness of these english pubs.

Words, as snow that does not belong on this forgotten island, as deep and damaged as the pebbles that grew our greatest poets--drowned inside of themeslves by active, enemy skies. Set to lurk, set to flight, their phantom fangs never abandoned, for no saunter, no skin can live up to a love of words.

What dreams

A patient of my father writes 'Any man who knows enough about figure drawing, germanium vs. silicon transistors, photography, "taking the air," farm-life, nightlife, Mexico, Lucky Strikes, cellphones, and making me feel half normal deserves to live forever.' I wake up in the middle of the night from a dream in which I am not asking my father not to die, but am asking him for a warning, something slower that will seep in over time. I feel guilty for this dream, where I want his death to develop like tea, a timed occurence, one with warning but still blackness at the end; death has become inevitable and instead of attempting to step up, to stand against it, I try to postpone it, to let love live a little longer.

Somewhere in my mind is a dance. Or rather, a song, 'Stay, just a little bit longer.' And for some reason, in these lyrics, I see my very best friend, I see car rides struck with the tears of the skies, rains to which we belted old melodies; I see a wedding where we danced in circles with a dark-haired, older man. I see walks down Riverside drive, measurements of the new distances between us. No longer do I feel afraid of age, of developing, losing, changing over time. I am, however, terrified of sudden loss-of the wrenching numbness, the outgrowth into pain, the raging anger of my very own storms. I am most afraid of the weeping at the end--the portly nature of a pain that will not subside, so raw that it invades the nights, so real that it shatters smiles into frowns.

This is often how too it is with men, though there is no comparison to what I feel for my father. I am not writing here of the present, but in a note to a friend I emphasized the eventuality of hurt from separation, as she has recently split with her lover. Pain may be postponed, but it will show its face, whether by peaking from underneath hot covers at night, or by just full force, a skeleton from an unlocked closet, or a living being frustrated by the mundane passing of time. I am good at ignoring such pain--or rather, letting it in little by little, droplets that can not make me drown.

With my father, however, it is a wash, a shower, a bath of pain. Some days, it is deeper, I cannot move beyond 86th street and the roads it has built in my mind. I feel ill recalling the emptying of his office, or I enter his closet realizing how sentless it has become, or I empty my bags to find what I saved (a piece of a shirt, a small photograph) to be lost.

Although for the first time, I do not hold onto things so fully. Meaning, I have given up believing in such magical ways. Whether I hoard his argyle or not, he is gone. Whether I surround myself with questions of creation, he is gone

Deserving is certainly not enough to entertain reality; to assuage the airlessness that ate him up. Dancing is certainly not enough to alleviate inside aches, but still memories act like melted snow on my my lips, spun sugar that counteracts this sour--not the shuddering sour of citrus delight-but that which rests within the bittering part of the tongue.

I am thankful for the dreams where I hear his voice, even in the hours we so less treasure. I am thankful for the moments when I wake up warm from a love, just a little bit longer, all mine.