silence

truth lies here.
don't fill this space.
don't fill this silence.
with words.
with thoughts.
with doubts.

don't fill this space
with silence.
turn intentions
I'm losing my words...
lost my words...
misplaced them?

where my heart is

i prayed

what else could i do?

what else was left?

when a man enters you

and i don't know what to do

because god created me to be entered

but it is not your entrance

and we smoke

and talk of love

and hierarchy

and homes

and our love is there,

in that cafe

in that bed

unconsummated

and is it a consolation

that we do not consummate

yet still love

is it enough?

is it the pain I adore?

or is it truly your smell?

now with my cloak

not nearly passionate enough

i cover up once again

only to know that these covers will be torn away

and i will let them

your opening of my heart

is as good

and your stabbing of it.

his room.

One is never alone in Fable's room. That is to say the permanent occupant is that ephemeral companion, the sun. How he loves her. I've seen him dancing in her, holding hands, pressing his cheek out to be caressed by this mother. His enjoyment is to be reflected upon, not giving much back except the silent smile to himself, which are the terms that suit them. He needs only to be there. Like the tree, the cloud, the building so that she may reflect from them. That is there relationship, and that is what suits them.

As soon as I enter this room I feel her pushing me. I have to fight to sit down under her weight. I have to part my path and dig out my space from her intense stare, but she's constantly felt upon my side like a wall that I'm trying to keep from crushing me. It's not always like this, but in this minute she is.

In this minute I see Fable, but just his outline. This is what happens when you play tug of war with the sun, she blinds you to grasp her object which she can never ever really grasp anyway. Instead she creates a fury in your eyes, explosions on your skin in her frustration to grasp, to have her fingerprint felt. But in these instances she is quickly evaded, out of her element.

What's funny about reunions is that you don't fully see the person that you're reunited with for a good five minutes. Caught up in the bursting lava in your chest, the flickering lights in your brain, it is the sense of touch and smell that actualize your friend or lover. So, I'd have to say I didn't see Fable at first, I smelled him, and felt him. It was the only communication that dulled the lava and lights, the only senses capable of answering their desires, making him more real that seeing or hearing him could ever.

The initial hug has certain advantages. One of the first being the permission to linger. Followed by the reflection of both sadness and relief in the fact that you've been reunited which highlights the empty seat you've saved for them. It's also an introduction. If you're lucky you've had the good bye hug that makes your welcoming hug rich with the promise of new stories and the next level of getting on with things.

Soon we are back in our old routine, his room doubling as our tree house when we are together and decidedly the age of five involuntarily. Only when the sun is with us, though. Like a mother ever present we wouldn't dare try the stuff we do when she leaves the room. Because her exits and entrances are solaborious we both have time to accept the leaving of the bed as well as the anxiety of waiting to enter it.

In the wake of our hug we sit facing the computer vibrating with all sorts of desires and not knowing which to do first. Who should begin the catching up? Should we just remain silent and enjoy our moment, or speak toeach other through prose and music? Never having to pick one, we pick like cherries from each bin and spend the rest of the morning into the after noon in the honey ourexistence . There are short bursts of laughter or tackling-bear hugs that escape one or the other of us in our joy to be sharing the same space again, but soon we settle.

If I told you right now what I thought of that moment I'd use the word perfect. I might even have used the french word, PARFAIT, being less demanding than it'sEnglish sister and implying the flaws that make PERFECT flawless. Being temporary as these moments are, it faded into the late after noon and evening when we found our hunger calling us again. the harsh ways that our bodies remind of ourexistence is as beautiful as it is annoying.

The rooms, houses, of others has always settled me much deeper than the rooms and houses of my own. The place of myself hold my materials, history, and names. As if they were sponges ever saturated and no amount of squeezing could release the liquids. Sleep comes to me faster and heavier, but only when the sun is with us.

As she being to descend the tightness of my chest both grips me and undulates to release it's contents. This happens under the awareness of Fable who is more adept at handling the functions of his own chest. His patients of this process of mine comfort me and allow me to relax into it. I tell him I love him and he smiles and hugs me. I know tomorrow will bring more of this.

sans finger

The idea, it seemed to him, was quite natural; to build a shack for the summer. Find solitude from the house even if by only 100 paces. The house that he came back to again and again, where he had been born, and where the life of before him still went on after him with the same silent mystery. It was his idea not do much of anything for Reason or Rhyme. These two women had led him astray, he thought. This Rhyme and this Reason, like sirens calling to him. He had listened, fell into their gaze and forgot the chaos. It was through the path of these two that he had be brought back chaos without forewarning. This is what he needed to parse out. So he thought to build the shack and build the shack he did.

The grass, at their highest parts, tickled his knees. His black work boots soaked up sun in competition with his shoulders, who were losing that battle. Had it been a week since he'd washed his hair, or even referenced a shiny surface? The mid-day sun produced salted water that he drew from his forehead with his forearm. He had forgotten the heat and the sun and it seemed he would forget them if they did not insist on making themselves known. With a hammer jumping in his right hand the bundle of corrugated sheet metal occupied the left as he walked out to the field.

Arriving in the middle of the field he found the house behind, the crops beyond, woods to the right and to the left the interstate far enough away to make cars look like beads being passed through an invisible thread.

The structure was simple yet contrived. He couldn't think of symmetry, couldn't see the object so much as a whole but more as a collection of beauty and function. He chose pieces for their rusted edges and watermarked etchings. Some had been twisted beneath the wheels of a tractor - those he pierced into the surrounding earth, their only purpose to serve as focal points for the coming weeks. Still, he wasn't finished. The room without a roof remained an enigma, and so he threw down the pieces to sift through and divide and began his task to enclose his edifice.

He needed to bring that hammer down again and again, to nail metal to wood. It was an action with purpose that allowed his body to articulate the fire inside his brain. Creating sound that did not come from his body but bellowed out of his grief and frustration and like a boomerang came back around again to him. These sharp bursts numbed his ears providing the validating pain that it had not been his hearing that had been a problem but that there had been less and less words that entered them. Her words had become fewer and fewer until there was no way for her to say what she did, and instead she had walked out. There were also no words to request of her, he knew, because her language had become garbled and disconnected. No longer could he hold the rhythm of her gestures in his sight and translate their meanings. She had become an stranger again, which is what bothered him the most. To recall her was almost to have deja vous, feeling he had been there before but this was actually the first time. His anger flared up and he struck the tin roof again with the hammer.

At first it didn't look real. It was when he blinked that he felt the reassurance of pain. His lack of reaction surprised him, so he searched for the next thing he ought to do. It made sense, then, for his next move to be to step down from the ladder and walk back to the house. The sky was clear and there was a tender wind that encircled him. The silence was as intense as the heat which made his breathing annoying. Because there was nothing to hear, he could now hear it all. the grass crunching, the rubbing of his jeans, and his heart.

Some three hours later another sharp tone numbed his ears. At first he grabbed through his sound index in hurried frustration to place it. As he opened his eyes he was able to make the connection. He could see it was her mouth that was producing the sound, but it was her eyes that expressed the horror. He expressed question in his brow. Then that tickle on his chest, and it was as if his mother had screamed pain back into his body. He dared not move his hand but he made noises - guttural claps and barks mixed with long moans and breathy gasps to retain some sort of strength by exercising the pain.

The first words of the day came then from his father, "you're gonna lose that finger, son."

Tears cleared paths in the dirt on his face. Swan's face passed before him, but it was someone else's wisdom that he heard. The loss of the finger was not a loss, but an awakening. It was a sacrifice by blood, one which he could not make by heart or head alone. It was an end and as endings go, also a beginning.

His father was right. They amputated the left index finger two hours after arriving at the hospital. It was the three hours that damaged the nerves and gave time for the sun to boil the sausage that remained of his finger. Even then the bone had been crushed. Irreparable.

Gospel didn't mind the loss, in fact he was relieved to not have been given the choice or the following obligation lie for the rest of his life. He knew he couldn't tell people that he'd take the loss as a tangible to the intangible loss that had occurred months earlier. He was content to have proof; evidence.

It was three weeks before he returned to finish the shack, even against his mother's plea. She knew just as well as he did that he didn't have a choice. He needed to finish it and sit in it. And so that it what he did.

orangutan

have you seen my sister?
have you been my sister?
she said, "I don't know"
but she held her breath.

and i knew

I took it in through the ear.
she said, "you've had your fair share."

but her fingers crossed
and my banks bleed.
and I said " come in,"
not seeing her already
pas the threshold.

in my camp
while i turned
in my earth
while I listened
in my straight
while I gleaned

she grew deep tips
sharp ends sank down.

while i prepared the meat
while i sang the song

she fucked up the sediment
bust through the limestone.
to take my crown

I clapped my religious hands
she whispered, "glory, glory"
hands full of terracotta
and i sank into her

just as the mist became her
face wet as I reached for ground
there was none.