Bend beside me love; stretch your hand across the dirt. If you wiggle your fingers right you can feel the screams of this ancient earth, long-buried, begging for release. Who would be their vessel if they knew how? Would they let me. As it stands I can only stand and listen: caverns of this blood-splashed sod voice their echoes in tremors. Are these waves of the past or future? I’m not an oracle. I couldn’t tell you the truth even as it binds me to move. Please don’t guilt me for baring my heart to you.
I play every one of my lovers a song before bed. The gesture is meant to be romantic, an individual descent into dreams. But in the night, when they sleep, I take some fragment of their soul, whatever fraction I can reach; I weave it into the song. In this way I have preserved them, have some small wisp left to keep once they or I have inevitably dissolved, back into the black pool or wherever it is that lovers come from.
Try not to dwell on these stirrings; try not to always be playing at these strings. I don’t like the person I become when my loneliness outweighs my reason. A raven picking over the carcass of this city asks only: What small scrap of flesh have you to offer me? I’d rather the heart that picks over words, that plucks them from the air coursing through my hands. Cinch them taut and watch the world fall apart and return in a single snap. If you can catch the rhythm, can attune yourself to the music rattling down beneath the surface of the earth then up into the ether’s arcs, you too can move to the motion of a world, ripping and stitching itself into symmetry of the damned everyday.
But even when caught, even when the notes are pinned and carved—if yours is the spirit that unfolds, how am I to help it? See this? This is the host of phantoms, dancing with me across my bedroom floor. And these? These are the soldiers riding their ghost horses over the hills, riding with me on the descent of the sun.
Desire spills black ink and wallowing, not in trifles, no but a tide of reckoning. The teeming, tendriled shadows of my heart cry out— Be the knife that holds me to its hilt. Be the blade that sheds my sweet deliverance, that moves in the dunnest smoke of hell where no piece of heaven can peep through to cry “Hold! Hold!” nor rout its destined path. You must know how possessed of a longing I am.
Because it isn’t enough to want your bones. I do not want your bones. I want to be the ground that cradles your bones. I do not want your lips. I want to be the water that parts your lips. I do not want your breath. I want to be the room that your breath fills, the house that carries the sound of your footsteps, the encasing shell of some larger beauty in which your beauty moves.
I am filled with a multitude—loves, haunts, the heartbeat of cities. I take every scrap that eddies its way to me—every trace of iron-lined, brownstone-walled, brutalist towers ranked on streets that felt like home and draw them to myself, knot them like rags about my hungering. I drown, down the spiraling steps of this song, the one played to me now, let it rock me to the underground. Each night that I turn out the light, I lead myself through halls of a longing, painted anew—those lost and never found, framing emptiness—those within reach, unarresting—and those addictive shadows, caressing half-forms I still have yet to fully breathe. They groan in some strange melancholic chord, then like eels inside a drum, ink-scaled and wriggling, tether my body, sweetly suffocating; and lulling I am sweetly lulled as they drag me deeply into deep. And all my lovers’ songs begin the swell of their reprise.
a literary labyrinth 