Palimpsest

It wasn't just that day.  The totality of expression.  There is truth at the heart of every misapprehension.  If I laid it down, I would still be a coward.  So I built a fortress, I made it up.  It is hidden even from me.  As it goes from hand to hand.  Your sickly frame against his interest.  Memory is just the encoding of fantasy.  So much to unlearn.  The primacy of emotion, how it activates wrong intention.  Your interest against a historical dissatisfaction.  I was warned; I had time. 

It was so new that none of us saw it coming.  Selective memory and articulation.  Your gaze drifts off where I try to tell you who I am.  A fiction, a secret transferred.  There are stones in your stomach, blood on your lips.  How contingent everything is on thought.  Here we are.

Storm clouds on the horizon.  A string.
"You put it in."
Removed from context

any other thing.
Your hands on my face and the vacuous show you put on.
There is no heat where once there was heat.  Your good humor a weapon.
I imagine you with your hand in his hand,
                     a liar,
                     a friend.

There where I first saw you is fraught with tension.

The waves, the waves.

It was a sense over time.  Something amiss.  Your words surrounded me and my own voice receded.  An irruption.  Something spoken.  I was supposed to be something other than this.  I will whisper in your ear, be a fly on the wall.  Amid all the delirium, truth.

He fortified his lies with the comfort of rationality.  Even in the face of it, he still wanders around, looking for someone to notice him.  There will be other times, other decisions to be made.  If I showed you the way, would you believe me?  It is labyrinthine, sprawling.  It belies the secret that I placed in front of you.  Statistically improbable.  I think I would like to stop.  Your fist and so many things against a wall of apathy.

He speaks with a forked tongue.  Would his hand in yours mean anything at all?  It's a matter of invention, all of thought brought to bear.  The situation, a cold day in winter.  The insanity of belief.  Another world is possible and I am watching, always, for its sure conception.  I rely too heavily on displacement, metonymy.  Just let go.

The sound of a rushing creek after the rain.
He will not budge.  To live in a fantasy is to be open to the possibility of neurosis.
And it all falls to pieces, all of it.  If I knew of a way to fix it, would he let me?
What is the significance of such rapture in solitude, the weight of a heart in your hands?

I thought of it, then thought better of it.  Your hand traces where he has been.  For a thing to be true, it is necessary for it to exist.  There is always another option. 

Signing

Placed in context, any other thing.  You can look all you want, you won't find it.  The force of character (limited to as to be succinct, poignant).

"You have confused the true and the real."

The look in your eyes, as though there is another person behind them, staring out.  The light is too harsh.  It was duplicitous, spoken in past tense, a thing so menial now charged with meaning.

I watched as the words were written, recognized them as my own past and began dismantling everything.  It was by no means systematic.  From point to point, it all goes many miles in seconds.  How many apologies must he suffer through before I wake up from this terrible dream?  It's a matter, finally, of putting things to rest.

I have resigned myself to the simplicity of statements.
But if I let go of it, where will I find my center?
All of it, back and forth, kept on record.
Deliberate time.

Ask yourself why it took this shape--the answer contains multitudes, none of which remain standing.

I can still search the archives for the only clues I need as to why I'm here.  History is a set of repetitions and I know that I've been here before.  Pin it down and dissect it.  There is no such thing as a perfect circle. 

History

Reflective as the process, toward a leaf or this cigarette ash in my mouth.  As a number on a circle, black and green, the sugar masks the floor.  To say he.  One, two, three, four.  A marble egg.  His confusion becomes somnambular, domestic.  Anger a clear line running across the sky.  Low to the ground.  yes, it's blood.  Fathomed in a palm, a set of car keys, a set of golf clubs.  She said she was was she was not capable.  She is say to carpable or whatevering.
                                                                                             Seven again, legs itching in tall
                                                                                             grass, where every morning, do
                                                                                             the routine, clean off your glasses.

Susceptible to dinner or sweets.  Honestly, it's where his money goes.  Alternating within self-imposed boundaries.  Why does he always think the ambulance is coming for him?  With mock intonation because it's justified.  Spit out the window.  White circles in brown bags.  He hardly visits anymore.  No one has a single memory.  At eighty three, one expects reams of data.  One becomes a geologic formation, striated.

Untitled

He opened the gate--
   somehow full of himself,
   even as all breath
   even as it is these days.
A distance to go still,
   fallen leaves.

Untitled

In the early morning, a rupture.
Erases the city, makes it whole.
Where I woke, bedsheets covered in blood,
           wrapped in a deep and disconcerting fog.
                                                Limited in, left
to roam, calloused hands.  Complete
a thought, these things that happen
     where you live.
                            The torn
cellophane a key indication,
how language charged with meaning can
change.
Found out, form more.
         Another directive.

Location

Phrasal symphonies, written and rewritten.

Left with the mere suspicion of an impact on things

through their subsequent loss.

It is a calculus of human activity.

Your blood sings with the richness of thought,

                                                    of what it is to be thinking.

All of it rendered semantically inert.

Terrified of linearity, of the slow progression,

you hide behind him, let him speak this falsehood.

Put it where it ought to be.

I decided it was a useless endeavor, considered it finished.

All the while, a handful of nettles burrowed their way into my clothing.

You see, I was trying to solve this puzzle—

even my dreams foretold this sequence of events!

You were an indefinite distraction.

These familiar tropes, bursting with recognition.

And so it opened, as a sudden field, once I understood

its utter lack of utility.

There are many things worth thinking of.

Many times it confounds me, but something must be done.

In dreaming, what once was outside now comes in, makes a fool of me.

The mind collects what it needs, focuses on what feeds it.

I stood there asking questions to an empty room.

You sat patiently awaiting the end of this masquerade.

Put it back where you found it.

Whisperers

Blossoming as it did from a deep affectation, this stillness at my side.  It took shape as a formulaic lie, spread over all these months.  Of this I am sure, in the heart of rapture, in the taming of neurosis, I move about, fidgeting, listless.  You spoke in hyperbole, recounting the thousand travails of your life.  I listened, attentive to the gaps in detail, noticed the warnings all around me.  All the times of whispers, as though the bookshelves sheltered sound.  Don't tell me; I am not ready to hear it.  My name is spoken, I turn my head toward the source and find it smiling at me, asking its riddles, wrapping its speech in this heavy cloth.  I opened the gate for all that transpired.  You sat by me, perplexed and perplexing, peeling an orange, offering me the sweet juice.  It's the fantasy of stability I was after, taking possession of your time to allow for the possibility.  The trade off--one for another within minutes, as though articulating a secret.

I found out through whatever means I could, standing outside in the rain.  I wanted to say it out loud but instead I wrote it out, the characters smudged from the water, a chorus of indecipherable signs.  Your eyes flit about the page.  You begin to withdraw from sight until I find you again, call out your name.

A  thing so simple it demands no presence and yet this frightened silence, a gaze across the room to where his shape once stood.  A smell in the air like lavender, like a dry heat, the metallic tones of blood.  Something else brought me here; I no longer wish to be set free.  I waited and waited, pacing through all these empty pages, pushing around in the dark for some assurance of an exit.  My feet suddenly taking root in the thought of you.

How your voice finds me out, unravels me. 

Four Eyes

The parallel lines overhead.

And all around, this parade of uncaring. Every day, I enact the same rituals, think the same thoughts. It is worrying, tiresome, dreaming of the ways I've betrayed myself. I'll eat some toast, ruminate on the fiery path before me. Having seen the shape of things to come renders one at least a little blind.  

They were aware of what to look for and kept it under lock and key. The nature of mind is habituation. Keep your head down, it will help you see the fissures in the narrative. It was sabotage. If I knew why I do it, I would stop doing it.

You sat there next to me, like Janus, speaking through both faces. When I look into your eyes, I can see another person behind them, skin to skin. The intensity of it, a blister, a heat in my face about which you constantly ask me. I should tell you all of it, spend countless hours explaining the subtlest detail.

 I know the truth of you, friend. The crux of it is I want you to have nowhere to run.
The object of the game is to keep it hidden until I fall to pieces. There are so many things I understand.

Red Wire

A simple material, left in my care and transferred from one point to another. It was so banal, the thought of it, but, in moving it, sent sparks running wild through the network. Collected whispers and closed doors. The way he looked at me, the way of silence as I come near. You asked me exactly what I thought you would, phrased it perfectly so I wouldn't notice the undercurrents. Kept from me as I longed to have it grown. Smiles on their faces, painted, a breath of air between us. So sure the path was set.

Fire! Air. The way of wind as I unfold this. It was a puzzle I could not figure, even as my life depended on it. Your claws sank deep into my flesh.

He was doing something I should not have seen, pulled you aside to ask the burning question. This is an elaborate fantasy. Everything I am converges on this point. If any of it is true, I can never look anyone in the eye.

 I have been here before. I know this place so well. It haunts me, how familiar it is. I want to wash away the impurities, come clean. How my voice trembled, how my hands shook. It will be such a spectacle.

 I foresaw this and let it happen. If I showed the least concern, I would still be in another's back pocket. You were prepared, sharpening your tools to be at the ready.

Something is about to happen. Sometimes you don't fully reflect on the consequences. I imagine a sweet embrace, a cautious exchange—saw green, fell to pieces. I am worn through. Maybe it's all for nothing.

 Then again, I have watched you watch him. Always with an ear to the ground.

Walking

A field of noise. I listen at the wall, awaiting deliverance, looking around for a sign of egress. How am I found again? The direction of wind, the sound of your footsteps intruding, leafing through my words. We are both trespassers and I cannot decide whose offense is more egregious. It was obsessive, my predilection. It was warranted. There is no question of intent. Then again, maybe it was all panic. The voice I heard, ethereal, a phantasm. A flurry of feeling, hands working quickly to map out the terrain. I looked up at the night sky as the heat from the burning paper swelled at my feet.

One said I love you.
One said How could you.

It is like a coin one flips to decide. As the rain closes in, I cannot fathom this scenario. All the times of dishonesty, the sun now setting in several hundred pixels.

A movement, closed.
A thousand questions standing in readiness at the back of my throat.

There were many dreams along the way, all pointing, all begging.
A stab in the dark that catches, turns the knife askew in my hand.

I know you know. You left a trail of breadcrumbs to the door, drew shut the blinds and watched.
Mere minutes after my departure, every time.
He stands waiting in the wings, ear pressed close to hear your signal.