You Turn

This is my place in the world now. Where your face is not. This is my place now.
I’ve elbow room in your absence, I can move and spar, I can swing my arms so they feel wind, I can see across this space you’ve hollowed, a valley between what was and what is not.
Hock up my voice and let it splatter.

Loosely, variously bright and woven thick, a walkin meatlocker is the night. As if on skates variously frozen and fleet I make it past what passes for time.

Around your absence I am doubled, helixed, always up before it’s light.
I breathe in the memory of your face.
Wrapped in its missing, I’ve made land.

Visa V

I want you to tell me when it will rain.
Maybe you could break something.
You know, when it’s quiet like that. That’s when I think they could actually do it.
I’d make a move when they were looking straight at me, since they’re so used to everyone waiting ’til their backs are turned. And then it would take them a second longer to react, and then the gate would open that extra inch, and I’d see the face a second longer, and they’d never be able to cut that out of my brain. Or if they did, since they could, they’d never be able at least to cut it out of my bones. ’cause I’d fertilize the ground they kill me in with it. Or the smoke they make me would spread it into space.
You make the same mistake they do. Matter. It’s not matter.
But I am, and I need get to what’s not through it.
Then you are them, and you’ve got no conflict.
That is the conflict.

I’d want to put me in the ground too.

But instead, bring on the songs, so I can stand and watch the many faces songs, so I can watch and hear the singing they make, here from the outside, where I thrive.
I feel my bones.
It wasn’t I who created this thing I’m in, what you call my face, what you call my ass. It wasn’t I, and so it’s not me, but belongs to whatever created it.
I know you love to look at it, but remember it is not me.
I’m the result of your looking, which is the result of what you see, which is made by another looking entirely, which is absolutely different than me.
And you, seeing your own looking – I want you to drop that, continually, drop that and drop that and drop that, until there’s nothing left of what you are seeing except what you are not seeing: and then you’ll start to glimpse what I know as ‘me’, glimpse without light or space, without rod or cone, glimpse in a heartbeat buried in blood – the violence inside peace of really knowing. An other.
I can already see it in your eyes, how you are tracing my contours to the topography of your insides. The portrait will be monstrous and shortloved. I’m telling you to wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. And wait some more. Before you think you see ‘me’.
Which does not mean I do not want you to gaze on me. I want I want I want. I want your gaze upon me. That is the rain upon me, feeding me. Without that gaze – your gaze – I die. But I want your gaze to never meet itself, and never to know. Only gaze.

3 Months Pass