You are so deep in winter, the bathroom faucet knob squawks when you turn it on in the morning. Something like your shape in the mirror, but you don’t want to look. Even your body lies to you, hunched shoulders and blackened eyes telling you stories you wouldn’t dare to believe. What you say to yourself as you brush your teeth threads through the mirror frame and gets tangled up in itself, the text snarled in the frame like knots of your hair you haven’t brushed out yet.
So deep in winter
– cats sleep in broken-windowed garages
– you warm yourself running from bar to bar
– the wind is caught in the spaces in fences
– you drank seven cups of hot tea today, all different kinds
You believe in things like picking up the check and true love because they represent God to you. They make you feel better. You can live from day to day with some of your words missing, stuck in the mirror frame along with the river water ghost you leave there each time you study the way you look. Your drafty, windy head blows itself off your shoulders and you're left with the reverb vibrating the springs of your ribs. The winter is so long and at the end of it, we will pull your body from the ground again.
[ Philipp, one for you: I’ll tie some poems to my shoes so when I look down while walking, I’ll think of you and beauty and perfection and derangement. Ten years since I wrote that to you, and finally the poems on my shoes are my own. The text is being threaded through the frames and the story coming out is mine. I'm impatient to find out who I am but I'm just crawling along. Regrets piled high wherever I have been. ]
2 comments:
I love when you write things like this.
these lines are still the most beautiful and tender words anybody has ever said to me. and i dare to say that they are the most beautiful and tender words anybody has said to anyone ever.
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