Breakfast
Once past the only time a flicker on the clean-eaten dish, I think I hear you pass the fence that looked like a fishrib canoe. I remember thinking sometimes my stomach rumbles and I think it's my cellphone vibrating like I'm swallowed in the present by the very objects that cut a clear line through the past, make the past past, our past, and the present unthinkable any other way. Like I'm swallowed by them, even if I feel them quiver inside me. Because the inside me is the sign of what's outside, you remember.
Now and then reach for one another through a mucus membrane, doing the old pushpull.
Sometimes I remember it like the smart-bomb videos back in the nineties - a target imagined through a technological dream appears, approaches faster than knowing can see, becomes an inevitability shaped like a hole remembered only after a violence that swallows the screen in a sizzle of destroyed light.
How I remember our We's first moment.
And somehow that meeting is also the place I've left so many other's stranded. The boy, sitting in the Row-5 Cough Bar being instructed to finish his story by his father, standing over him as his hand refuses to write anymore ... How sometimes silence is the only remaining defiance, no matter what the age ... And Young Madder and 12, both of them converging on one another at the Four Stories, that dilapidated cedar-shingled tottering hotel by the water, twenty-four rooms, each named for an hour of the day ... And V____, him too on his way to meet the young, too-young girl being sold him by her mother, her paying him to have her, so she can hear something break that she slept through the first time, as if that would change the break and mend ... And Wen, reminiscing on his early years, his jail time, his buried radio, his first year of a first marriage, his hearing Eve die on the floor below, hacking up her pulped heart and dying with the lighter and charred tube in her hands, spooning the toilet's base: And thinking, as he listened: Good, go. And shocked by the vividness of the thought: Die. And watching his decision not to go down to help. Feeling the femoral artery of solar inevitability roar through him dark without sound. A pleasant sensation, like melting into sand.
It's at that meeting place, when the screen sizzles white and dies, where we met first, that they all await their outcomes.
Twenty-four years is nothing, you know. It takes longer for you to leave in the morning, so I can find my peace, and miss you.
Now and then reach for one another through a mucus membrane, doing the old pushpull.
Sometimes I remember it like the smart-bomb videos back in the nineties - a target imagined through a technological dream appears, approaches faster than knowing can see, becomes an inevitability shaped like a hole remembered only after a violence that swallows the screen in a sizzle of destroyed light.
How I remember our We's first moment.
And somehow that meeting is also the place I've left so many other's stranded. The boy, sitting in the Row-5 Cough Bar being instructed to finish his story by his father, standing over him as his hand refuses to write anymore ... How sometimes silence is the only remaining defiance, no matter what the age ... And Young Madder and 12, both of them converging on one another at the Four Stories, that dilapidated cedar-shingled tottering hotel by the water, twenty-four rooms, each named for an hour of the day ... And V____, him too on his way to meet the young, too-young girl being sold him by her mother, her paying him to have her, so she can hear something break that she slept through the first time, as if that would change the break and mend ... And Wen, reminiscing on his early years, his jail time, his buried radio, his first year of a first marriage, his hearing Eve die on the floor below, hacking up her pulped heart and dying with the lighter and charred tube in her hands, spooning the toilet's base: And thinking, as he listened: Good, go. And shocked by the vividness of the thought: Die. And watching his decision not to go down to help. Feeling the femoral artery of solar inevitability roar through him dark without sound. A pleasant sensation, like melting into sand.
It's at that meeting place, when the screen sizzles white and dies, where we met first, that they all await their outcomes.
Twenty-four years is nothing, you know. It takes longer for you to leave in the morning, so I can find my peace, and miss you.
posted by J. Neptune at 11:38 AM
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