"it's now after all" ( lyn hejinian )

What stars fall on you? Is your horizon still? What rules do you break? Do creatures in myths live for you? Have you watched Orion sliding westward in the ten o’clock hour? Do you twist your hair as you watch TV? Do your dreams have orchestra scores with violas and contrabassoons resonating like human voices? Do your ghosts glance into the distance for you and name troubles that are barely spectral and flutter harmlessly? Are you haunted by the river, its hurry and eddy and snags, bald eagles unsummoned and pressed against the distance, and the sound of water flowing and fish plopping that you cannot catalog but only be continually surprised by? Do merciless memories visit you at night, mirages looming with awful, distorted faces made of slapping words, and do you sit like the shadow of a bird on a wall as the lamplight keeps the terror at bay? Do your cats pretend they’re in the circus, performing astounding feats of feline grace as they leap to catch super balls in their mouths? Does disarray or revelation come to you unexpectedly? Do you have toys from your childhood hidden in the back of your closet or the basement? Do you lose track of time when you explore the dictionary, page by giddy page? Is your life wondrous? Is your body a map, a color-riot of lines, freedom to see the world openhandedly, or does it inhibit rebellion? When grocery shopping do you write poetry for the squash and apples, the clamor of the floor wax machine, the 40 varieties of tea? Are your thoughts apparitions until you pull them down ravenously in solitude? Would you throw your alarm clocks to the wind if daylight could wake you by softly calling your name?

Will you tell me again? Will you tell me all your stories again? I was curled up in a rocking bed full of broken bottles, talking to what-never-did-exist. Sometimes all I do now is turn from side to side, not knowing my fate, or if I have one. My eyes are full of tears because I’ve just caught my breath, or do I mean I'm trying to set it free?

Thick: my flailing silent questions, spasmodic breath, longing.
Your laughter: high red bursts, mind's drop of honey, the life ...

a false-spring dream

1.
Nothing happened. Not when the sound of you walking down the hall so completely fucked me up for two days that I wanted to drink. I missed you and was very lonely. But since when did getting drunk alone ever make me less lonely? I stood behind you in line at the coffee shop and felt myself growing rawly transparent and disappearing when you walked off without a backward glance. This proves we can exist in the same world without being together. (no! all it proves is that life is a burned puzzle, a heart stutter.) Judy Garland sang "Get Happy" all day today (we're heading for the river / wash your sins away in the tide) and the warm air, the inquiry of spring, made me sadder than still feeling how soft the inside of your wrist, the blooms breaking now and no one to tell, remembering the last two Aprils, and how I want to unblacken my betrayal, give you back the love I stole, and how I want to carry you past the hells I made and into prayer. How I want you to write your secret languages in the palms of my hands, walk through me and back like I am the wind in your room, and then hold on.

And nothing will happen. Will you ever read this? I can't take anything back. Only carry myself for a little while and settle my nerves, depend on the river, and lead another life altogether.
(a burned puzzle, a heart stutter ...)

2.
Nothing happened so why not blot it out? I daydream things that are implausible and stupid. I am effacing myself, I have wanted to efface myself. Do you still hate me? I have coveted suicide and tenderness. What self-pity does after an adult life of it. I am nervous with gutter bravado. I fall in between I belong here and there is no place on this earth for me. And yet I am gathering strength even as I don't understand.

I love what I should not love, and cannot see the end of it.