paradise

The summer chill at the beginning of day is dark and humid, caught in a second of disorder, the mourning doves drinking from muddy alley puddles as the rain bores little holes in their bodies, the mathematics of flight leaking from them onto the soaked gravel. An hour ago in the mirror I was falling into my own arms, listening to a Billy Joel record I bought when I was 12. Don’t try to save me from this knotted past, listen: songs echo down memory corridors, shoulders are pressed into stone, shadows fall around doorways. If you touch me your fingers will break. One of us will crack. I am the undeniable result of inaction, but when the thief comes in the night, I will cheerfully load him up with everything you ever gave to me: the Rothko dish, the coasters with the floating circles, the skeleton watch, the glass bird with a tiny red heart that will never beat.

Yesterday was the time in-between, today is the during, tomorrow will be a neat progression of tenses with no end of verbs in sight. I too was created in eternal haste. Black brackish coffee and pancreatic enzyme tablets, the results of inaction on a partly cloudy day, the dehumidifier chugging in the bedroom. Now that I'm the object of your contempt, I sleep much better. You tell me that I cannot be depicted and you cannot be claimed. You will never be mine and because of this, my voice goes from one end of the earth to the other but is not heard. In this forged paradise, the angel of death eats cherries from the tree of life and becomes a hallucination of himself, spitting the pits into the hole to heaven where my name sounds like something I can't spell. I take in chestfuls of chilly summer air from 1982, so clotted by a future of eternal love that I can’t breathe out.