It's not you,
it's just my longing I've been talking to.

You are peaceable and still
while I clutch my guts, and imagine myself
to be gravely injured.

I'm just hungry, hungry for a long time.

There's a little something there, in the light
between your quiet and my groaning thoughts

but how small it is, how insignificant,
compared to all my frustration, my stale desire,
an ocean, complete with sunken
cities, ancient,
strange creatures,
vast emptiness,
crevices of boiling stone...

why don’t I pound away at this sadness.
I’ve got nothing else to do but sleep.
somewhere in between the crumbling stones
won’t I find it,
something worth having.
a face that sees,
a mouth that gives
a body that knows.
eyes that turn the lights on.

not another
stumbling shambling
upright stick figure
of a smart man, right
now and usually,
words saying,
face being,
mouth speaking,
body leaning,
eyes to see
where to go.

it didn’t seem to hurt before he came here,
a scarecrow waiting for his clothes
and I put them on him—clothes I’d saved
all that time.
Dress up clothes
for ideal roles.
Clothes don’t make the man.
Buttons don’t make the heart.
A mask doesn’t make a face.
And he doesn’t know the play he’s in,
a play about sadness
to pound away at it
only when everyone else is asleep
like an aspiring escapee
so nobody else knows
how much I’d give
to not be here
to be in the flat plains past these feelings
running in the sun
nothing on and nothing around
and nobody
just completely free
and forgotten
and forgetting.

each strand of desire
woven in the air loom
into a gauzy nest
hidden in the air

there to tell you
how powerful
is each element unseen

each future, each word
each possibility, each touch

and all those desires
hints of which were conceived
long ago, tendrils opening
with powerful wills, stretching outward
along time

do these twine into your air space
or just see you from far away,
harmoniously twirling
in the wind

step, step on the path
back to simplicity, nothingness
you have nothing to give that is yours
take a simple set of actions
that foster clarity and simplicity
and accept the confounding chaos
with a simple heart,
a simple presence,
simple acceptance.

wind in the trees sounds like a door opening
in the garden, someone is touching plates over and over
dry plates with hands that are only a tiny bit sweaty,
so each time they rub and have to give up their grip
and someone else has a tambourine between the tall buildings
and is shaking it, and shaking it fast
they said that I can see through to death
and I said I know, you told me that just yesterday
then they said you are an actress
here are your papers
the play opens tomorrow night
and the plate and the tambourine went quiet
but the door is still opening

I have an incoherent proposal for you.
It is incoherent because I lack both the courage and clarity.

Anyway, as you know this world is riddled with
brailles and imaginary synaesthesic hints over all that seems
to be what it is.

Yes, all that *******.

So here I stand before you.

Punctured and drawn, pulpy and inelegant.
Wry, silly and dire. Cultivated and ridiculous.

It’s.

Scratch that.

In the mind

you have said emotions

we are

not lines.

nope.

Sky wire.

Erm

If

None of what I say is true.

Look past me and see what’s real.

And that.

I’m hoping you want that,

to touch the electric, liquid-ish paths

and vector strings.

If.

I’m a non-bundle of emotions
lately—not sleep though—

and it’s not you.

Just desperate for

not someone.

Just desperate to
get past selfhood
with somebody else
to keep it interesting

and it makes as much sense as anything

so I don’t want to talk ******* but
would you, as a complicated instrument,
like to get outside ourselves
and not play
but be wildly serious?

Sitting still, this is how I am. Just a little bit drunk on fear.
Sitting on the plank. Legs dangling. Ship heaves up and down,
I swing up and down, holding on, trying to trick myself into the sense
that this is a kind of stability. I say to myself, “I’m on the plank,
off the ship, looking down.” But where I really am is over a very
wet abyss—a universe unbreathably foreign, full of seemingly familiar
monsters. Just dangling. Nothing to keep me out but the grip of my thighs and
my relatively small hands. And the ocean whispers deceptively, “This is where
you belong.” And there is that always suicidal pull, “Yes—embrace me.
Press around me and show me every dark, silent strangeness.”

The ocean is the more real. It holds all those thoughts for which I ache,
holds all that I am missing in /my /self most ancient. And
in there /you turn around and /see me for real.

No. That’s not it. It’s something else entirely.

Something deep down there.