lua d'inverno

i shouldn't be seeing you everywhere i go. you're gone.

except that i am.

and so i keep getting sidetracked.

nothing new, but something old. pre-january, or january thereabouts. found in the armrest of my eighteen year old Buick.

::..::

The television plays a special on the Tiger Lillies, footage from PS122 in New York. And I watch, and laugh the the gruesome deaths of children in morals. I don't watch the audience footage. I try not to think about where the concert ticket is, scrawled with the James Joyce drummer's unreadable autograph. I pray they won't show them play 'Send in the Clowns'.

The views of the city are hard enough. I can feel me feet pounding out the miles over concrete, over pavement. Expert navigation between moving traffic and a million isolated worlds. The bizarre warmth of apathy. Sweaty palms and eating too much meat. The stench and heat of the subway I'd give anything yo experience every day.

Here I search for distraction, find it late at night in pointless talk, burnt out insomniacs willing to let the conversation wander where it will. Never anywhere dangerous, never anywhere unsound. Never anywhere vulnerable. Bare, twisted humour. A hive mind. I could talk to one or two, really talk, but I don't. Maybe. Maybe.

Inside it looks abandoned, a forgotten hospital, files scattered like leaf ash, dark and aged amongst the skeleton crib infestation. Galleyways and gutted halls that no longer pump blood, just direct a careening wind with nowhere else to go. Dirty moonlight where the sun can never reach.

Dave Matthews says: 'The space between the tears we cry are the moments that keep us coming back from more.'

But those spaces hang tired and quiet, forgotten coats on forgotten racks. shoulders dusty, bottoms frayed. There are no moments. There is no redemption. There is nothing but an image of Revelation in the most literal sense.

I dreamt of something the other night, but have no memory of it. The world passes through me like film, dust riddled frames that fly by too quick to see alone. I try to care, but it's not as easy as it used to be. And it never used to be easy. It never is when you feel too much. When you're too sensitive.

I'm called lucky for ever finding love. Luckier for finding my soul mate. Lucky even to have lost? I ask. Apparently. So I am lucky to be broken and shattered, incapable of ever feeling enough for another person for the rest of my life. That inability on its own, even without the bone-crushing depression, the knife-twisting agony I feel as literal pain in my gut and the way my heart tried to beat itself out of my chest, has me hoping I don't even see this next birthday.

It's meaningless to ask me if I've got a plan for suicide. I know a hundred ways to kill myself, and I don't think I've ever planned a thing in my life.

a passage from 'A Lover's Discourse':

"I am engulfed. I succumb ..."
s'abîmer / to be engulfed
Outburst of annihilation which affects the amorous subject in despair or fulfilment.

1. Either woe or well being, sometimes I have a craving to be engulfed. This morning (in the country), the weather is mild, overcast. I am suffering (from some incident). The notion of suicide occurs to me, pure of any resentment (not blackmailing anyone); an insipid notion; it alters nothing ("breaks" nothing), matches the colour (the silence, the desolation) of this morning.

Another day, in the rain, we're waiting for the boat at the lake; from happiness, this time, the same outburst of annihilation sweeps through me. This is how it happens sometimes, misery or joy engulfs me, without any particular tumult ensuing; nor any pathos: I am dissolved, not dismembered; I fall, I flow, I melt. Such thoughts--grazed, touched, tested (the way you test the water with your foot)--can recur. Nothing solemn about them. This is exactly what gentleness is.

-Barthes, translated by Richard Howard

Love as an object of interest.

//

I found old poetry yesterday. A few things that might, I think, be as close to being okay as I'll ever consider any of my own work. But I have not written any since then. Not since. Nothing but purple prose and stories about the people I wish we were. Or might have been. Or maybe sometimes are, somewhere else.

I fall in love with broken characters because I understand them. The rest make no sense to me, or are boring. And boredom is the entrance to a maze with no centre. No exits. just glass and mirrors and old super eight movies of our lives skipping frame by frame along the floors and ceilings.

Last week I watched When the Wind Blows with a friend. And Grave of the Fireflies. Both are as bad an idea for the soul as they are a good idea. I've seen them both four or five times. Will see them again. Not many things make me cry like those movies. Completely break down. With the former, it's always a little bit because of who showed it to me. Who cried with me over it so many years ago now. But for the most part, the reasons I cry are completely detached from myself. The reasons are absorbed entirely by the movie, by the characters and events only. The real world is gone. This weekend we're watching Plague Dogs. It will be the same thing all over again.

My world's been dropped more than once. A snow globe cracked and leaking. I glue the pieces back together, try to fill it up, but each time some snow goes missing, and each time the pieces get smaller and smaller and smaller. That last time I couldn't find them all. Granular glass too small to see or feel blown away on the wind had to be replaced with glue. You can't see in very well anymore, not through the patchwork repair. I can't see out, either.

Exhaustion burns my eyes. Constant. Unrelenting. But I can't sleep for panic attacks, not without meds, and even then what I take doesn't help. not really. Too much lands me asleep for a day at a time. Forgetting the hour, the day, the week, the month. Sometimes the year.

There are great warriors, pounding their chests like drums, adorned with skins and skulls and guttural calls of some great conquest. They pass through me like ghosts, leave me on the hill under the sky to watch the slaughter.

i remember summer, remember losing it, beaten down by a million raindrop fists. i opened the door to october, and smelled cold fire and ash. it smelled of nothing. winter wormed into autumn's corpse, and the suicide trees lost their leaves. skeleton machinery reaching into the night, bony fingers waiting to rip life away. they tangled in power lines, crow-dotted, crooked boundaries splitting the sky like glass. there's a hush in the air, deafening in it's finality, and only the drowning man can hear it.

in the dark my car is red, warm wine or old blood. it is red and occupied by days long past. days of worry and a little hope, days of effort and feeling something real. the ghosts pile in, they always do, but none so boldly as my passenger, loose-tied boot heavy on the dash, arm out the window, letting the cold in.

my bathroom door is no such thing. not a bathroom door. it's just the door i sat behind so often, locking in my tears, shaking and bleeding and cowering. when i had the will to do such things. when i venture to close to that corner i can hear him, muffled, grit-teethed voice, the sharp sound of his fist against the door. frustration. anger. love, maybe. once.

the shadows like to trick me at night, when i lie unable to sleep. i drift in and out of mercifully dreamless time-loss and open my eyes to the curve of a shoulder, the close warmth of another for the briefest of moments. my dogs lie snoring in their beds, and the expanse of mine is suddenly too vast to comprehend. i think of downsizing, queen to double, to twin, but i know nothing would change.

when i watch Six Feet Under with my friend it's as close to feeling for anyone as i can come. those people, behind the liquid crystal compressed pictures flickering on my screen. sometimes there are quiet moments, so touching, so beautiful, i would close my eyes and smile if i didn't know it was the same way he used to do. so i do nothing, see him do it for me in some far corner of my mind, and forget myself.

four years ago i told the world i was giving it one year and one month to get better. one year and one month or i'd end it in one of the thousand ways i know how. it didn't get better, i just forgot. and when i glance backward, i wish i could have realised then how much better it already was. it was all down hill. when i was twenty-seven i refused to kill myself, because it was a number i didn't deserve.

i wasn't even a shadow of the people who own that number no matter how i loved them. Joplin, Hendrix, Cobain. twenty-seven wasn't an option. in a month i'll be twenty-nine. i don't fear thirty. i just have no interest in it.

i've lost all my music. somewhere between melody and harmony is where those ghosts hide, riding the waves between minor fall and majour lift. were i to give up the music that causes pain now, my world would be nothing but the grinding gears of this horrible machine, the groans and gasps as it bleeds slowly to death around us all.

everything i ever loved is tainted, and i cannot seem to free it.

i am here and planning to write;

working 12 hour days of pure physical labour (fairly heavy at that, 6 pounds of muscle in 10 days) pretty much has me in a fog; it stops after monday.

so. something then.

a thousand fresh starts later. a road of ghosts, a collection of cadence, ever louder.

white noise baggage.

a place to breathe. finally.