loss

what can we do with loss but try to find it, pronounce it. roll the rs even when the word is already gone beyond the procession of fences, the frightened warriors, the dried tongues, and the honeyed pews. seek familiarity with all the breathless sensations invoked--the candid scriptures, the missing hands, and the secrets of the gleaming ice.

this artifice, fully framed, picture-perfect, is always intentional.

words

i often think i'm losing words, that they are somehow trailing behind me, until i'm honest with myself and admit that those words were never mine.

a confession

i think of you, not often, but often enough. the thoughts diffuse like a broken string of beads moving down the staircase you may be descending or ascending. the beads fall nonchalantly in a linear manner, aligned and rhythmic, into an amorphous space. i delude my self with an illusive familiarity: you are alone, of course. the beads have disappeared. at the precipice, surely you think of me, too. the walls are narrower than i first perceived. we disperse facts and anecdotes. since we are on equal footing now, i have to confess that i am now thinking of death and you must be too. it is the epicentre of this building--floating, gliding, metamorphosing, alive. nothing can reverse its movement. my angst arises and i begin to falter; you are now difficult to read, you always were. i notice the brown creaks, the evasive dust, loose hair, broken hairpin, torn note, and muddied foot prints on the stairs. none belong to you.

Solitariness

 At times solitariness edges towards narcissistic solipsism, cornering oneself to escape the gaze of the other, the gaze that is always looking elsewhere.

I came across this eloquent, and helpful quotation by Paul Auster:

"Solitary. But not in the sense of being alone. Not solitary in the way Thoreau was, for example, exiling himself in order to find out where he was; not solitary in the way Jonah was, praying for deliverance in the belly of the whale. Solitary in the sense of retreat. In the sense of not having to see himself, of not having to see himself being seen by anyone else."

Though retreat, for me, is at times only wishful.

re-turn

amidst dark lashes and lilac shades the thought re-emerges like a firing-squad; the wooden fences i`ve built are as kind as unrequited love.

survival tip # 1

on the slippery scroll, inch toward the gap right below the musky moon, fill it with madness, horror, and profanities, then tiptoe away