In difficult situations, I try to be in control. I try to be outside myself, to look down at the patchwork of sensation and sensitivity from a position of careful remove. Comfortably seated on the blue velvet cushion of my pilot’s chair, I look through the plastic windows of a steel airplane with an upturned chin, a neutral, cool eye. I wave a hand with a flippant, monarchical air. The plane tilts and swerves past puffy clouds, droning on. I make proclamations. I leap onto the grass of the field, and then onto the sand of the shore. I conjure concrete breaks in the waters. I push through the crowd, crown in one hand. I argue with the tide. I try to orchestrate the path of feeling but I find, each time, that feeling must take its own journey.
I pretend to be the turret of reason. White granite, a gull aloft, circling its highest point. The sky as blue as a promise about to be broken. Crystalline, unflappable. But when the bell sounds on the hour, I have abandoned my post. I am lost in the catacombs, ignoring the call of the bitter prism outside. I light a torch. The bones litter the ground. I bend down to pick through them, to examine the text on their marrow. Blood on my fingertips where I graze the textured surface. Feeble, goopy gestations. My writing, left to wither on the vine. Had these been allowed to grow, they could have only been weeds, fetid and lacking—or angels, fire trailing their instep. One entry is titled, plaintively: All I wanted. The next is: Just forget it. Both, when I click on them, are empty. The cursor hovers over the white wall with something like desire.
Everything in twos. The thing itself, and its shadow. The thing is—? The thing that it is—? Me and my twisted shadow. The mismatch between the roots and the flowering. Could we walk together? What would happen if we did? What would happen if we did? What would happen if we did? A curse, or a blessing? A request, an admonition. An olive branch, a fallen star. An offering, a retraction.
I stumble to bed and when I wake up, I am right back in a former body, possessed by the familiar, the tender, terrors of my own spirit. A pulley lifts me from off the ground. A missive, a memory, always in circulation, like blood. A broken whisky glass, its newly jagged edges like the spikes of a crown. With a jolt, I’m dropped into the horror movie of the soft, dirty backseat. Tires make contact with rainwater, sending it back into the gray air and over the cracked asphalt in a fan-like spray. The undernourished grass of the median is soaked and glistening. Rainbows that are more red than any other color. My face, crushed against the cold, wet glass. A feeling pulls me close. It holds me tightly. It holds me tightly. It holds me tightly.
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