Some mornings, I wake to an alienating fog sulking in my room like a ghost of yesterday, or the day before. It tastes like something metal: copper, or tin, something like memory that's gone acrid and sharp, and it swims across my skin like a languid fish.
I woke one night to a half-misty room, and found fog pouring between my lips, and I realized that I was simply a cold person in a cold room, exhaling ghosts, because I was empty of anything else.
sometimes I feel less like a human being, less like a woman and more like a murmur or creak of a floorboard, more like the way that dusk crawls out from under the bed and weaves its fingers across the sky, a gentle hush, inconsequential, and unsure if it's sad.
I'm not good with the words, with having a voice, but I heard I make you say hallelujah with a tone so bright that it's like morning or looking into the sun,
and I wish that I had the eloquence or the breath to tell you the prayers I would say for you but I am stuck here, kneeling with my hands clasped staring into the sun, silent and steadily whispering hallelujah hallelujah
Last edited by Button on Fri Apr 05, 2013 12:50 am, edited 1 time in total.
It used to be in the laundromat, white sheets spread out like angels as we folded and placed them in our baskets, sitting on the dryer and hanging my feet over, wriggling my toes like they were in sand:
the dryer bumped like a heartbeat,
and later on I could feel it resonating, like all the warmth had spread up through my fingers and stomach, into my chest and could be carried by my basket-like body,
and I think that hope feels like dangling your legs, maybe off of a cliffside or a bridge, when days are really dark, because there is that resonating warmth of being small and fragile, there is a heartbeat somewhere in the traffic of a bridge,
I could find you in a breath fossilized in a restaurant window, or the fog of a window car, in the parts of the bed where you gripped the frame and mattress and
sometimes I find myself there too, but more often not.
it started like this: like old people talking about how the earth spins on little feet, falling in love less with the idea of love and more with the idea of self and other and respect and their old hands meant something at the beginning:
hardwork and dedication and withering bones that shrunk and shrunk til they were thin and rubbery like mushrooms, creaking happily like rocking chairs that spin out lullabies like silk.
they meant something because the edges of their eyes crinkled up into smiles that was like dawn cracking and spilling out light over the horizon, and sometimes when they listened hard enough, their children could feel the light wash over them like a gentle flood, telling them that maybe trust and love and patience were worth it.
it started like this, like a father kissing his son's forehead and telling him that the world would beat him down like a fighting dog, that he would come out screaming and wailing and scarred, that he would love him all the while; it ended in tears--
the bottleneck spindly fingers of dawn spreading its fingers into you like a medicine. you meant something when you closed your eyes and listened to the earth turn, when you learned to love and realized all the years you thought you'd wasted meant something, meant everything, it was dawn, spilling over your eyes, so that you might experience day
it's 3:36 am and I have been crying since 1 and I don't know why but I am choking on myself like a poison.
I have been waiting to hurt myself because my skin and yours are different and I don't know if I could take your expression at my pain with any less gravity than I could bear this numb, dull, stillness
and I have been waiting and it is 3:38am and I'm wondering how long you expect me to choke, how long you think I can hold my breath.
There is no love lost here; these are the mechanics, the parts of you like a machine that could eat up years of my life -- these are the tissues and blood, the bones that shift like columns under a marble building, but you are gone, barely breathing, speaking, and you do not know me
