I observe him when he does not know I æm there.
Who he is when know~one is seemingly æround.
An ænimal in his natural state.
Sacrosanct
His eyes go soft and unfocused.
His voice rises in pitch, ælmost imperceptibly.
Beauty without æwareness.
A repeated, unconcious nod recurring.
Like præying.
Stalking like æ big cat,
Æ Espy with mine brown eyes.
Strange, dynamic current/s; accusations of dereliction of duties.
So, they transcend from surge to suppression.
Chai spice fragrance in one room; lavender and shæ in the other.
.comingle.
Dragon breath vapours pour forth from the room where a steaming bath is drawn.
And, food is around the wall; but, every bite is like you chewing ice next to me.
But, they don’t die; and, now, they have to live with it.
Just like the sporting, courting gentleman he was, she was informed of his intentions by writing. Epistles held in chester drawers reserved for intimates.
“”
She watched his exposed pocketwatch glitch, continually clicking on 1:13.
“Your timepiece has a hiccup,” she says.
“No. That hitch in its get along preserves a piece of time specifically.”
“Oh Specific Standard Time?” she teases.
He rolls his eyes.
That frozen timezone where this intensity of scent memory seduces all into succumbing. Cologne in an elevator. Columbarium. The sweet soap the waitress who touches your shoulder wears. The aroma of my shampoo lingering on your throw pillows.
“You shed, you know?” he says.
“I have known for a while.”
“I found one of your hairs a month after you left.”
“So? Where, what was done with it, and what did you care?”
He simply makes eye contact again and stares.
Returning home, with untapped tenterhooks and tarp in her pack, she bivouacked on the sidewalk of the High Street. Too tired to care about pitching shelter after being so carelessly untiring.
“”
She slid her skirt up to her thighs; and, she let the sun shine directly on her bare legs for the first time since the new year.
Her eyes closed; and, she imagined.
Heating legs of firm, chilled butter which begin melting into decomposition earthwards, below her.
Eventual food for earthworms.
She feels strands of her hair’s tresses pulling away and apart from her, flying from her crown like a dandelion’s spores into the languishing four corners of the world.
The grand finale of winter winds, amidst sun shine, finally blowing her asunder.
A cry heard.
Weather letting her dissolve into everything and await rebirth in the nearing spring.
She will poke her head back out like new-growth into the Great, Wide World, when the seasons shift themselves about her.
Until then, she silently hopes to abide in a makeshift, subterranean respite entombed in nitrogen rich dirt. Dwelling in darkness.
~
She comes to prefer when night comes at five and not ten o’clock.
The sun proves certain, missing absences exist within her which she already, too-well feels; so, she will enjoy the sun’s final days of not so brightly shining.
Yet, the Star teases her with its cameo appearance today, tickling her extremeties along with her forehead, cheeks, and, ears.
Its heat working in defiance of the howling chill blasting off the Sound.
~
“You remember me,” states the Sun, caressing. “You remember how I draw your perspiration. Draw forth those colors dormant inside of you.”
“Perhaps, I prefer the transparency that winter gifts my flesh more.”
“Kunst prosa, you love feeling me excite your melanocytes. The experience of pigment changing hue. The closest you’ll come to the plant’s ecstasy of photosynthesis,” the Star hypnotizes.
Hypnerotomachia renders me suddenly languid.
~
“I sense ice in your veins.”
“No shit. And, when your blood is frozen, winter cannot make you any colder.”
“Let me thaw you.”
“You will never thaw me; you will only make me sweat.”
“I will make you high.”
“But, then you will leave me dry.”
“Drink more water, should that be your concern.”
“Not until you make me,” she teases.
~
She takes off running down the lapping Sound’s shore.
Full exertion increasing her potential dehydration.
Appearing joyous, but truly seeking to the shelter of shadows
Sensing her terror in the face of his brilliance, the Sun says, “I shall not hide today. I am faster. You will never out run my effulgence.”
“I know. But, I want you to make you prove it all over again.”
“Then, it shall help if you keep your skirt hiked up, please.”
“Let it languish,” she hears the silence say.
A breeze blows like a whisper, across her windowsill.
A universal exhalation of the collective unconscious.
Feeling it tickle her cheeks like jet-current streams, she inhales the salty, trade-winds through her mouth; and, holds it like combusted tobacco leaf smoke.
Letting it, leak out, eventually,
as unseæble vapor through her nostrils;
because, it feels more filthy than expelling it through the mouth.
“Slowly,” she thinks.
“I’m just fixing to have a real good time,” says the Southern (Parçi)gal.
She recalls more quotes to express the feeling than she can count.
But, she says none.
“Slowly”, she says from a mezzanine of her own.
“Let me show and you can tell. Tell me what you see when you look at me.”
“That way?” he confirms.
” Yeah, when you look at me that way.”
He rolled over, having fallen fully asleep.
My cape slipping away.
I roll over and drape myself across his back.
The refrigerator starts humming.
I tap out a rhythm with my right foot’s big toe.
The tap comes easily so I’m not dreaming.
Hyper lucidity,
yet, the bed remains empty.
~
She smiles. She shakes her head.
She admits. She misses him.
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’.
It is a moonlit night in the forest. I am running.
I wear a black lace dress, giving only a pretext of covering my body.
Breasts bouncing freely, pointed appendages of low lying bushes ripping the delicate fabric grasping my thighs, allowing my legs to stretch farther apart in their stride.
I hear the sea gull behind me. One moment its call is a mocking laugh, the next it is hysterical crying.
Laughter and tears.
But, the gull is actually the moth. And, this realization makes my runner’s stride spark into a frantic sprint.
Because, the moth is actually the last man I fell for.
“Turn and face me. See my eyes again,” the moth/seagull cries.
“No. You will wreck me again,” I holler.
I want to feel you chase me: I howl, telepathically.
Peals of laughter erupt from his beaked mouth.
“You are chasing me, heyoka!” he bellows.
And, I send my perception into the starling flying overhead, my shadow spirit.
And, I see,
from on high, looking down on myself and him below.
I see how we run in circles. It becomes impossible to tell who is chasing whom.
And I realize: We’ve been doing this for multiple lifetimes.
A tree limb snatches the collar of my shredded lace nightie and I trip from its unexpected pull.
The gown tears away and I am laid bare and naked.
The forest melts away and now the moth and I are in a horse’s lunging pen.
We are tethered. One moment he lunges me in tight circles, tapping my ass with a long whip. The next moment, I lunge him.
We work each other out.
Jimmy (tha motherfucking) King appears, peaking over the fence of the pen.
He is furious and hurt. I’ve not seen this lover in over a decade.
He accuses, “This is what you are doing? This is preferrable to life with me?”
“I never wanted to bear your children. You wanted twins. To dress up identically and take to an Easter Sunday church service. You broke me when you told me that desire. I was twenty two. I would have taken that dream from you if I stayed,” I pant out.
The lunging pen melts away and I find myself at the little bistro where I work.
Seated at table six. The four top table at the very back of the dining room.
Moth, Jimmy, Sam, and I sit there.
I see Kim. sitting alone at table 7.
I’ve not seen you here: I say to her mind telepathically.
I’m here to play mediator: she says to my mind.
She smiles and I feel safe and held dear in her mind.
Moth’s mouth hangs open in a grotesque grin. Tongue hanging out of his lips. I lean in and suck his tongue into my mouth like I’m giving head.
Jimmy shudders in disgust.
Sam looks completely disengaged and tells me, “I hated you for years. I hated you before I asked you to marry me.”
“You abused my loyalty and I am glad you came clean and we never made it official,” I tell him.
“But, I’m rich now, thanks to you,” he challenges.
“I loved you when you had nothing. I could not care less about your liquidity.”
“Tell moth the truth,” suggests Kim.
“I showed you the story I was telling myself. You showed me how to deconstruct it, edit and revise it. I shall never forget you. And, it hurts, so I howl. Thank you.” I whisper.
“I did nothing but enjoy you,” he responds.
Moth suddenly cries out in pain.
“My ankle! My leather brogues!”
I look under the table.
A sweet, little one of a man is curled up on my feet like a dog. He wears vinyl short pants and a cotton sports bra with a lovely crisscross over his back. (The bra I lost on day two of visiting moth.)
I discover I am holding a leash connected to his collared neck.
“Don’t worry about him. He is mine,” I say.
Jimmy, moth, and Sam look stunned and scared.
The man at my feet growls.
I toss chicken bones under the table to occupy him.
“Careful, pet, they may catch in your throat,” I coo lovingly.
Kim’s laughter is so loud it awakens me.
I sit up suddenly and feel the pit of my stomach ache.
I am thirsty and the water tastes like ecstasy.
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.
“Have you ever met a bashful punk?” he asks me.
I tap the skin covering his sternum with my index finger.
“Do you alternate between two complimentary psychological archetypes to reconcile them?” I ask, alluding to his question without directly answering it.
He traces the double u spelled by the curves of the underside of my breasts.
“We are all dealing with the transient eternity of the arrow of time,” he speculates.
{space only has meaning for matter}
“Let me show you that you are the congruence of the meaningfulness of the universe?” I request.
“How?”
I begin undoing his buttons.
Concretising methodology.
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.
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
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.
“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.
Rip me from the spotlight.
The show is ended.
The backstage scene now begins.
My knees and legs unable to support my dizzy delirium.
Help steady my body.
The depths below begin churning as strange sediments begin to arise.
Let me.
I want to mine this precious mineral vein,
to see what visions will come.
Hold me(,) dear in my spelunking.
I feel weightless.
Perhaps, if you wrap yourself around me, we may float together.
{in the subterranean ether}
I fly off this edged state easily into deep space.
Tether and balance me.
I always seem to land safely
because I can exercise control.
Let me exorcise a lack of control and cushion me when I fall.
I will coo into your ear and call forth trembling, hopeful, goosebumps from your salacious, salted flesh.
The snow came overnight and stripped all the colors from your sight.
Even the televisions lost technicolor.
It was all like it was before.
And everyone else rediscovered outside
while we explored inside,
below, then above, the old quilt.
Hands rubbing flesh like flicking sparks from flint.
Thawing out tongues pressed against icy appendages.
Hot breath pronouncing as smoke, in short
vaporized bursts.
Dragon breath lighting dormant pearls contained in shallow
hooded caverns.
Petals under the bottom retaing their flush.
I could remove some of your dreadful readiness; but, to do so would be to denigrate the events within your human condition: Æ says to no-one, in particular.
Speeding along another dissolution of ego through hard knocks followed by unseen but well-heard giggles in the darkness.
Æ said you wanted kindly unkindness: I whisper to no-one, in particular.
Spurning me forward, as I spurn you.
You drew the five of swords, sweet sap of sorrel.
Æ said to tell you that death is a mercy you do not deserve.
How dare you?!
I dared to accept this personally æons ago, dear. Thusly is how I dare.
Tears spring from his eyes.
I begin seeing bleeding horizons, bloody in the sinuous, poet trauma symptomatic of a new birth.
It feels like a backyard, handmade, waterslide, whereupon you sweetly play, dripping;
And given you remain unconcerned about getting grass burns on knees from all the slipping and sliding,
you may have a real devil of a divine time.
You may be rewound, house proud, town mouse.
Let your prise punish you;
you mashed my berserker button.
Teutonic fury arising between my lower limbs.
Never try to take a medal from Muttley the Magnificent.
S/he has many sharp teeth.
As opening gambits go:
《There’s a man who has been out sailing》
is up there with
《Call me Ishmael》
And her heart is full and hollow like a cactus tree.
Sweet skittish, humming one.
I will stalk the perimeter of your peripheral until I
no longer surprise you unduly
, my sweet sap of sorrel.
And, yes, your ephemeral
devil may care if you serve eviction notice.
So, come,
see your sly gal, would-be ephebe.
My dæmon will coax your demon into relishing those new, fiendish exploits that arise from your newfound piety.
Sit at my feet as I rise to my knees and part a slitted skirt.
Æ am Blodeuedd conjured by Math and Gwendolyn.
Come, and as I arise from a cauldron’s vaporic outpouring,
I shall gift you a name, abandoned one,
with a new pair of cobbled brogues,
to boot.
Put your face between these two palms of mine, so I can let
Æ show you transient waves of temporality transpiring in
etheric extensions of
trough and crest.
trough and crest.
I am going to wrangle your talent and be your hosting site.
Ping me anytime.
Forget yourself and you will have nothing to fear.
It wilt be what it is.
You do not have to assume the future, wild thing.
The ability to move most quickly will only make others expect more from you.
So, when you realise this, beast, come and visit me in ewer own time,
because energy has only a here and a now, in this,
our art of dreaming.
I procured twelve stones and one pebble,
from the tidal pool,
while the water was low and you slept,
under high moon.
Rock hounding the Sound on
A cloudless night.
Bouldering about, unseen, in all black.
You could see all the usually obscured mountains.
I could see what you were presently dreaming.
WrittenCasey 