004
1.
This personhood of critical want and shuddering need. These transparent things I do. How staggering the contents of my small gaze, how violent these distances of green: what I, a poet, might want to call a field; what I, a lover, might want us to trample, showing our teeth.
When I say love I am not speaking of illusions or extremes. It’s only this: how I want to be seen seeing, to be known by my desire to know.
How many selves go unrecognized through the Other? How do I solidify the latticework of intangible sight, communicate to you a pattern when all that exists are objects and feelings, bodies and air? Is there a balm on the world today or are we speaking in the reacquired tongues of panacea? Have we always been marked for the heaving, or is this defined as the healing itself?
I lied before. I’m not a lover, just a bringer of fugitive light. And I am not a poet either; I’m just showing you the worlds we would have lived in, if only the words had come.
2.
I enclose you in my writing. It’s the way you occur to me. You, subject. You, August. You, bleeding. You, wait. There is ripeness in the world’s back pocket which resembles our hands.
3.
There may seem to be a theme but don’t worry I’m only dreaming. Love is both tenor and vehicle to me now.
Why are there tears in my eyes? Because I am reading the wishes of those who want to be made clean. Because problems and solutions are two sides of the same key and only one opens a door.
I mean I’m getting obvious; there’s nothing else to do!
Are you still following? Do I make sense? Am I playing this like a game or an instrument? I am the understudy playing the fool. Stop flailing and watch me.
4.
It’s just that you get so embarrassed sometimes you know it’s really unproductive you keep barking up all the wrong trees you keep missing all your deadlines you are estranged from the soul of your art you are desperate to prove yourself (but also be true) (and remain full of love) and your life feels flimsy but it always has (though now you should be used to the responsibility of reinforcing) and you get so touchless it’s hard to believe you’re not untouchable and yes you want to mean impenetrable (perfect) but really you mean vacant (flawed, horrified) but not always because fulfillment is abundant I mean surprising as dancing color and you’re learning to smile and you’re learning to look and you’re grading yourself on a curve and who cares why you’re here just live like you meant to and maybe happiness is less like filling in the pits of despair and more like forgetting where they are I mean it’s a freefall just being alive I mean I’m alive and I’m free so who cares if I’m falling I only feel awful til I don’t after all and I only exist when I stop saying “you” and I’m lonely for this green world and I’m nowhere but in it
5.
This fatal, unfeasible feeling. These fallible fears and these fists and this fervor. The way I want to be the epitome of anything.
I want to dive into your ocean of presence; some aquatic caress— first your suffocated, then your submerged.
What was it that Anne Carson said about the derangement of feeling anything; what was it that Richard Siken said about the enormity of desire?
What is it that I mean by invoking such ways of explaining this, again and again? Like Langston’s poem that ends where it began, with what went missing.
Would the simpler terms be more pitiful, showing my hand in hopes of the holding, shamed and futile if denied?
6.
Enough for now. I’m breaking the fourth wall. I’m playing it up. My life in prose. There is a simple choice for proceeding through one’s own afterlife: dismantle (or destroy or depart from) the established narrative of self or continue mapping its details, more deliberately this time, for a purpose. I am trying to compromise in a case where doing so makes no sense. These looping tendencies of mine. This nauseous repetition. The desires I’ve had and have and go on forever.
August 3 2023