Category: PROSE

imagine I feel

A story is a story is a narrative is a story is an experience is

A lifetime.

“I don’t know.”

That’s what he said

, when I asked in a low, hushed, tone,

“How do you feel right now?”

The lovely pitch and tremolo of that voice.

As delicate as sinew finely strung and harshly wrought.

Utter “freedom,”;

requiring me to keep one foot in the wage economy of the mundane.

Like how your guru turned out to have a cigarette and woman habit.

Something must keep a mystæ mind from leaving here and now.

What better than an active hand in one’s own mortality?

⊙

Morbidity versus gestational rates.

Malthusian growth.

I heard your response before you said it.

⊙

And the forgotten

essence of Hesse’s

Glass Bead Game slips through as an ethos that the spiritual ideal, once obtained, is to then be put back into

the service of life and the living.

⊙

Doting and clinging like

a jaguar killing a caiman.

Death rolling.

Binding in the collective noun enumerating

A rare of knots.

Throwing seed and sowing semen.

Tilling the earth, post slash and burn agriculture.

Fallow lands left to lie and respawning

New growth.

Imagine I feel exactly as I appear.

The old plea of pleases

Arms.

Pull me close in arms.

Mystical shaking from astral exploration. Tend my physical body while I fly.

Because, the reading of an old text alights my spirit almost too easily.

A mystical proclivity circumscribed in existential insecurity,

Because how and who am I?

You tell me what you see.

But, press me close to you, so I don’t runaway at what you say.

Held dear until freed.

Then, left as a tree shaking out dead leaves,

recalling, in newly resounding silence,

the originally begged pleas of ‘please’.

Automatic Diatribe (II)

Here.

Heel.

We are running in circles.

Cyclical spires of turrets leading to screaming minarets.

All is as it has been before.

And, I hear your silent complaint that I never wear my hair naturally curly anymore.

Give me a reason.

Who summoned whom from the pneumatic ether and how many times?

Who and Whom are a real, diabolical pair.

Alain de Botton hissing out a status of anxiety.

Dialogueing with the ecological shaman of

David Abram casting natural spells of the sensuous.

Put your faith in me.

I will make you watch me return it and put it back into yourself while I ask you to consider the chartreuse evening.

Prowling the catacombs of the catatonic.

Buffering neophytic initiants while irritants and retinal scratches

itch;

because sometimes I say silly things when I’m embarrassed.

Hand sigils and face touching.

The difference between indoctrinated and initiated? I call to Æ like a game show host.

The difference between you getting it and blowing it versus you getting it and not blowing it: he grins, blowing it for both of us.

And what if what I call discipline is just self-indulgence?

You bitch.

Don’t fret. I love you madly, too.

It is true. I don’t know you, yet Æ thinks I do.

You’re interesting: he says.

I reply: you listen or hear better than most.

Ammend-able.

Amen-able.

Ami-able.

Ambivalent.

What’s the difference between the interval and the rest.

Your silence.

Duress and stress?

They were meant to know of how I see your eyes, dear.

Depleted and explicative.

is followed by

A truck drives by us, at well over the speed limit. Zebras in its trailer. It made you remember that limerick.

The only one, you. Know.

I say, “I don’t call ghosts ‘sir’.”

Precisely proud.

Let it roll while I make strange sigils with my fingers:

The pyramidic containment of an ‘A’, for you;

The flipped up middle finger over my left shoulder, back facing you;

The inversion with a middle finger flipped down;

Hang ten;

Metal horns.

(Another haul of the mother lode laid at the

grounded, pegged point of the Caduceus Staff.)

Shiva and Shakti as agronomists¿

And, my fingers move as if by some outsider’s volition.

The movement is an apple cart over-turning,

upsetting some.

Why wouldn’t we want to bring it all down?

Dictionary divination of a dervish

And, ca is followed by

cabal is followed by

cabala is followed by

cabalero is followed by

cabaline is followed by

cabanis is followed by

Cabaret.

shortlisted

What if they all hate you? Æ challenges.

How can they hate me? They don’t even know me.

Thinking you hate anything outside your skin is a misperception.

You hate yourself for hurting.

Just like I do. Just like them

So, when I think “go to hell” what I mean to say is:

I’m sorry you ever had to ever hurt.

Because I know that feeling.

Because the whimsy arc of time’s arrow, once arched, can be cruel.

When I think “you are exasperating”, what I mean to say is:

Thank you.

Because, patience requires testing to find its grace.

Because, I know what it is to find out someone thinks you’re exasperating.

When I am stupefied in surprise or fury, or admiration, at you, what I mean to say is:

I care for you.

Clearly.

Because, I have an opinion at all.

That turned sappy fast: is all with which Æ can counter.

Well, you posed a ludicrous question.

pious profanity

The wrought iron chair scrapes patio stone, as I tuck into the table.

A thigh grazes mine, too innocuously.

Pressing its luck against me.

I look over to see averted eyes busily studying the hangnail of a left thumb.

“Rip it off or let it be,” I say.

Those eyes find mine.

I let my hair down. Disinterest feigned.

“Do you want to know what I’m thinking?” he asks me.

“No. If you wanted to tell me, you already would have. Besides, I already know.”

“What am I thinking?”

“You are thinking: I want her to ask me what I’m thinking.”

“Wishful and reductionist thinking.”

“So?”

I seize the arms of my chair and rake my chair closer.

Outer thighs mashing in an intentional collision.

“Put your ear to my mouth. I want to whisper exactly what I am thinking,” I say.

An ear presents itself to my open lips; and hears,

out of my sweet mouth, sailor strings of profanity pouring piously.

embedded trinity of coos.

⊙

The boy had tried to stone the crows, but they just caught the rocks with beaks.

“I shall train them to stone the child/wren back,” she thought.

“It would be instructive.”

But, then she remembered she had simply cribbed a line from someone and made a fantasy from it.

Anyways, the kids were in school right now.

Her crows were perched overhead, waiting for peanuts.

⊙⊙

Oh, so you need prompting now?: Æ asks me.

And, promptly: I deadpan.

Someone is playing for Team Sensitive today: Æ smiles.

I grin: Fecking captain. And, the fact that you love me like this pisses me off.

Æ counters: You’re more entertaining than when in your mystæ provocateur state.

Dickhead: I think, stinging from the blow.

Every time with you: Æ thinks, reading my mind, laughing.

You know, I refilled the coffee on Mr. Book of Answers‘ table today. He said, ‘Thank you for your sensitivity.’ I was charmed.

⊙⊙⊙

Hold my hands so they become held(,) dear.

Silversmiths of alchemists gatekeeping access to backrooms of bazaars thick with smoke.

A misty haze formed by fast talk and subtle exchanges.

Quicksilver traded for the mercurial.

Where those who do not wear thier darkness on thier sleeves abscond to let thier absence of light shine.

A speak easy of sly shadow souls and sacred fools that is only found by not looking.

Defy the beast, release.

perhaps

⊙ What are we doing tonight?

~ I don’t know. Laundry?

⊙ Dress up while doing it?

~ What, like it’s Sunday School?

⊙ Not exactly.

~ Who’s dressing up? Me? We?

⊙ …

~ Sigh. That’s what I assumed. Do I have to redo my makeup in this hypothetical?

⊙ No. You should wash off what is painted on now.

~ Wildling berserker is a favorite get-up of mine.

⊙ Because there is no get-up required.

~ Perhaps.

⊙ The look does become you.

~ It overcomes me. But, what shall we do about your get-up?

A4 conversion

The trick is to assume anything could happen.

The task is to make it seem as such.

Suspended by imagination, standing there, snarling,

beast-eyed and in a state.

Clears throat.

Twirls circles with one ankle.

Watching the mountains pitch darkness using shadows from a sinking sun

There a’stood at the Dungeness Spit where it never rains.

Next to the only lighthouse for miles.

The keeper never answers the knocks at his locked door.

And his light comes on later and later,

as the days enlengthen the periodicity of thier effulgence,

Like winter was a thief come to return what was taken.

And the noise of the Sound vibrates at 432 Hz.

A4 conversions and changes in the ferryman’s rates.

Ha-hai-hyena

A bird singing.

“See and know,” I tell you on this lunar new year’s first day.

Obscurely erudite but available for the attentive.

The pulsing of the interior of thighs, trembling like

pleura of laughing hy-hy-hyenas’ howling lungs.

In ampersand out.

Coalesce; converge.

Release,

Stillness of coda.

Parçigal disabuses Æ

~ When I see you tremble, it makes me shake. I will devour you with eyes.

⊙ Let me shower first?

~ No. I want to taste your day.

⊙ I’d describe it as a long, hard one. Consider yourself warned.

~ Don’t flatter yourself. As far as I can taste, you never even broke a sweat.

⊙ Such a little, smart ass.

~ A’yup, with a tarty mouth.

⊙ I like it when you front like you’re hard.

~ Well, that’s the thing about having lady parts, swollen and pert is as hard as it gets.

⊙ It does it for me.

~ Yeah, well, do it to yourself tonight. I wanna watch.

⊙ You seem tired.

~ A’yup. And, a bit uninspired.

⊙ Lazy.

~ You sure have been. Get to work, please.

so she howls.

A young girl used to eagerly await the mailman’s delivery, fighting with her younger sister about who gets to check the mailbox. It was a different time.

But, now, the mail comes all the time and you cannot hold the words like you could when they came on paper. Pealing of bells sound now to herald any incoming communique.

No one checks their box, these boxes check us.

And, chess becomes a frivolity of a checkers game.

She remembered sailboat life. Never being dry.

She remembered life landside where everyone seeks to be wetted in swimming pools, baths, and showers.

She recollects stories her grandmother told her of boxcar hobos making x’s with tree branches woven through the chain link fences of certain homes. And, of kissing soldiers working POW camps, through a chain link fence of a compound in rural Louisiana.

She recalls other things and her cheeks bloom scarlet.

Things recent and things well-aged; things imagined; things that may yet come.

In her solar plexus, a bloom of a blackhole’s burn consumes her inside to out.

Pert rosebuds puckering.

A presentation of a revelation. Where space may take back anything which it enables.

And, suddenly, she is no longer Narcissus, but Goldmund.

The Lover enlivened through Death.

And, sometimes it hurts, so she howls.

scratching itching papyrus

And, they came onto the lady saying, “Won’t you tell us of your darkness, pleas/e?!”

And, she grinned, ” What darkness? I can show your eyes No-Thing wherever there is no light. What could I glimpse of my darkness, anyhow? I simply embrace it.”

I’m a real kunst of a Kirkegaardian Kant.

They only came in the hopes of eating anguished eyes, anyhow.

What daunts you, motivates me.

What stalls you, puts the spurrs to my flanks.

What spurns you, ewe, encourages me whilst scaring ewes.

So, how could it not be hard for us to meet, one to the other, in the middle?

Where the splinter impales skin from leaden pencils frantically scratching

itching papyrus.

Rubber meeting ridden road,

Bug to windshield; the hood of a jacket grasped against hailing precipitation, frozen.

All in & either or.

And, of course, people who posture by peeking over paperback bios of punk rockers, yet cannot hum a single song, piss me off.

(found scrawlings on canary yellow)

I felt your shape and your breathing,

heartbeat sneaking in.

Breathe in the scent of my sternum, right there in the valley between.

I smell for you.

All written in canary yellow.

Masks melted onto faces.

Fuzzy beasts.

“Bespoke never beholden. You look good on me.”

“Then put me on, I want to be worn by you.”

Crickets singing

Parçigal wants attention from Æ

~The lunar new year approaches. We could celebrate at the temple.

⊙No, let’s celebrate under the night sky, just us.

~Lay down in my bed, please. Warm the sheets.

⊙The boy in ridiculously baggy pants, with straps hanging, at the grocery store, had BDSM tattooed on his fingers, but he couldn’t define the difference between a sadist and a masochist.

~Why do you care?

⊙Because, he looked like he was full of shit and needed to know it.

~We all are, dear. Most of us feed our guts everyday.

⊙Well, he should develop a kombucha habit.

~You should read a book.

⊙Listen to me read aloud?

~Why do you ask when you could just read aloud? You are hard to ignore.

⊙Because, it pleases me when you say it back to me. Also, consent is important.

~Dear lord, please read aloud. If you’re gonna yammer at me either way, then other people’s words become you better than your own, right now.

⊙Very good. Pluck a book, any book. I’ve got it nice and warm under the sheets, here.

(a)muse

Halt(er) me again, using the rapture of your words and gaze, to keep me still.

Thank you.

The words become illegible in the book’s bound spine.

The ink bleeds when you turn the page with a wet, bath-drawn, hand.

Knobbly knees peaking over the surface tension.

Your bemusement, unawares, amuses me.

A muse.

use.

restless menagerie

“I have nothing to lose and everything to gain,” she says.

“Except being in the suspended gravity of a win/win position. If you let the pendulum swing you could lose that position of having nothing to lose but everything to gain,” he says.

Oh, shut up and kiss me hard, you would-be Lewis Carroll, s/he says.

<The sound of glasses clinking, followed by giggling>

(The privileged hear yet remain silent)

[The de-privileged chomp at bits and struggle, ecstatic-ally, against their chains, restraints, and clamps]

Tsk, tsk, the menagerie is restless.

Æ shows Parçigal some leeway.

~There it is! That trigger you press to release my pressure valve.

⊙You were quite tight.

~Then do it again. I could be looser.

⊙But, would you be worthwhile were you any looser.

~You mean I was worthwhile when strung up and fretted?

⊙(Silence).

~Oh dear god, are you ever the dirty dog!

⊙Rrrrufff.

~Shut up. You know ruffing is one of the few things I’m better than you at doing.

⊙And , I’d take even that away from you if I could.

~(My eyes go hard) I know.

Parsiçal giggles to Æ

“You have told me nothing that Æ do not already know,” Æ tells me, sternly.

I grin, with closed lips, then

I say, “Oh howl. Is that what we were doing? Let me have another go at it.”

I do panto like I am a junkyard bitch barking and straining her neck against an invisible chain tethered to an imaginary spike.

I smile broadly, with both decks of teeth bared.

I suddenly spit out, “I once lit a candle that burned for two days straight despite there being not enough wax left.”

“Ostensibly,” he shrugs.

I cock my head sideways like a curious animal.

“Be quiet. When you try so hard, you always get in your own way,” Æ mutters.

“Oh howl. I thought that was the point of what we were doing. To let me stumble against the obstacle of myself,” I giggle snort, a bit bratty.

“Are you as confident as you seem,” Æ asks, seriously.

I howl in laughter.

“I did not know I appeared confident, Æ. I’m confident that life will render me unconfident often. If I am properly challenging myself.”

“How do you think you appear?” Æ asks me.

I reply, “Great question. I’m confident that I have no idea how I seem. Because, I am inside me, and cannot ever perceive myself. But, I’m the one that gets to experience myself as I am, regardless of how I appear. It used to be ‘I think therefore I am.”

“But, now?” Æ obliges me.

“Now, it’s, I’m seen therefore I am. It’s a real narcissistic shift.”

“So, then, what do you know?” Æ asks.

“All I know is that everytime I ‘think,’ I do not know.”

“And, when you don’t think?”

“I know I am.”

“How are you then?”

“I’m super, thanks for asking,” I giggle snort.

Æ rolls both eyes.

I smirk.

“Hey! I just made up this joke for you, Æ! Do you know it?”

“Tell me.”

“What’s the difference between feral, spitting of saliva and enunciated speaking?”

“…..”

“An audience!”

Æ smiles coyly. “Æ do like it when you spit your seemingly inane nonsense into the hole between my lips.”

My eyes go hard.

Tolle lege

I am a girl with far away eyes.

Take me outside myself, please.

It is as simple as picking up a book and allowing yourself to be read.

Red.

Tolle lege for me.

I see the anterior triangle of your neck.

Where that perfect, delicate but masculine midline meets the inferior border of your mandible and is set

against the border of sternocleidomastoid.

I learn the names of the parts of you, so that, once intimated, I may rebirth your pieces through gifting them new sobriquets.

I see your head cock one way then another.

Like a curious canine.

The radius of your eyes narrows then widens.

The diameter of your pupils expands and contracts.

The circumference of your perception swells in purple and ebbs limply.

I read your reactions and they become my bedtime færy tale.

I perceive you through closed captions.

You swallow. Hard.

The suprahyoid muscle raising your hyoid bone

The infrahyoid depressing and restraining it.

Smile. Your glands are reacting to whatever words you are perceiving and I doubt you even notice it.

My attention diffuses. My energy overflows.

My fingers fidget.

I play with the cordon looped, seven times, around my wrist.

Worn for this explicit reason. Something with which I may fret.

I practice tying knots while watching the best show not available on any screen.