Blue stage lights on skin
The curve of a jaw
Eyes glittering in the dark,
Raw and human.
Something swells with the silence
A truth never spoken
Like a ****** of music only half heard,
Barely remembered but achingly lovely.
Some marriage of sweetness and savagery
Courses beneath the shadows of this place,
An intimate wound
It scrapes at the hollow parts of hearts and lungs
Demanding
Purchase,
Demanding breath-
Famished in its brevity.
It is made here and it dies here,
Witnessed, at least, if not inhabited.
Every other face- white as bone and as hard-
Stares, blank,
And they do not understand
But sometimes,
They feel.
Fairy lights
The trees glow and fade
Shadows stretch long, reaching for feet that scuttle back
Afraid to let light soak them
Because here it has substance.
Others bathe in it
Nourished
Faces bared to the blue and the red
Upturned as to rain after a long and bitter drought.
They know it as water
Hold it as water- it slides away from them,
A thought half formed, a memory half loved
A step toward
God
That falls into a stumble.
I am always afraid that nobody treasures this place.
Always sad, somehow, to suspect that many don’t.
They say the magic will fade with time.
They do not know magic.
Hands, gentle,
The hands of a stranger
But known, known as water
As light.
Contained within one fragile touch, the idea that hands are not weapons
The cautious testing of fingers against flesh
Innocent, a connection between beings
Who were born of blood and will turn to dust within seconds
And who only just now have become aware
That their palms are miracles.
Safety- a contract,
A careful consent
To reveal,
To be vulnerable for a moment-
If the moment is scripted and choreographed,
The bow and curtsy of a dance both partners know,
The permission a mask gives
To tell the truth.
It is eyes which cut deep, not hands
Wounds that last for years
Resurfacing as prayer.
Silent in the mirror of another's eyes,
A vision of what we could be
If we shed our disguises as Ordinary People and rose to our forgotten grace,
If we let others in not as lovers or as owners but as fragments of the soul we all share.
That loneliness- the grief of contact- crescendos in the corners of this place.
It is loud
Louder than music,
Louder than shouts and screams.
It grows by the moment, reaching its fingers along the walls behind footsteps, digging its heels into the fragile fabric of whispers, wrapping its ghostly arms around shoulders and tracing collarbones with cold tenderness.
It is the grief of closeness, and the grief of isolation.
It breathes here, unsmothered by the roar of subway cars, the murmur of smalltalk, or the burn of a liquor that tastes like forgetting.
This is the feeling of remembering, of being, of a truth long lost but not quite gone-
Something far away enough to be painful
But close enough to be
Unsettling.
That is why people laugh here
Why they grab what is not theirs
Why they run.
That is why they shut the door and don’t return, content to float above the surface,
Desperate to,
Terrified that if they sink even an inch
They will fall forever into themselves
And, groping for an edge
Find none.
(Terrified to realize
In becoming endless
That they always have been.)
They turn away, and call it nonsense,
Begging to remain small inside.
Not me.
I could sew my heart into the shadows of this place and not be close enough to the world it holds.
Instead I press my palms against the walls, hoping to take some of it with me each day when I leave.
They say the magic will fade with time.
They do not know magic.