fragments of stories and poems

Here, just here. This is the place you can stand, unadorned and naked if you want to. You can stand here in confidence because there is nothing you can do to fail. No one to be disappointed. There are people here, only if you want them to be. You can tell them what you want to say because that’s all anyone expects. All they want is to hear it. Invitation only.  There is a table filled with all of the things you value. No. There are glass cases and lights to illuminate them. They are are laid out with placards delineating the date they were discovered and maybe where they were found and who you were with and what they did to your heart. And they can say these things and you don’t have to be afraid of who sees them. Because only those who you want to see them will. This place is like a home you can carry around with you. Its as big as the universe and it spins with the same dark weight that compels the arms of our galaxy to rotate at the exact speed of the center. Its small enough to hide under your tongue or behind your ear. Its warm and its very important. and you designed the door. there can be locks and bolt, wire mesh with watts and amps, steel bars and reinforced hinges. Or maybe wooden latch. Or maybe just a screen. anyway its there and i hope i see you there.

&

I just once wanted to tell you that if you decided to do the thing I can never tell you to do, I would very seriously try to fill that inevitable void. But don’t ever do it because I just realized that I would never forgive ourselves for failing.

&

When I sit and listen to Margaret speak about the river I’m awestruck,
left wondering when I was carried out the window and placed on the dock, waiting
for the small boat
two coins swimming in the palm of my hand, listening
to the rhythmic approach of a single dark paddle cutting the water and pushing the inevitable
to me. When Margaret cups her hands to cradle the flame to light my way back to my bed
I can lay my head down breathing
deeply, waiting for her to become my breath and begin to untie
the ribbons which bind me to my body
letting me fall away until I breath again and she is speaking,
her body lying
next to mine

&

Sometimes I just close my eyes and hope for the best… but that hasn’t really proven a trustworthy practice. So maybe I’ll grab my abacus and start to long-hand everything out, start to make columns of quantifiable data and extrapolate everything. I’ll slip on my glasses and make notes in my field log about everything; from the way you hold your hands when you’re asleep or the things you say when you know no one else is around. Where you’re eyes go when you’re unsure about what I said. Or how long it takes to lose the upper hand. Then I’ll create flow charts and graph the results to make a coherent and well informed decision on wether or not its fine for me to just take a deep breath and walk out into the water until it covers the tops of my feet, my ankles, my knees, my hips, my chest, my shoulders, my neck, my one deep breath, my eyes and my head. And In the night water which looks silver because its outside and the moon is looking into it, let the bubbles sneak out of my lips and lie on the bottom with the weight of everything pressing me softly into the sand.

&

Do you remember when I was six and I found the baby bird beneath the pine tree, the same tree where I found the tame pigeon
Do you remember the hedge that was often a portal to another world and how strange it was when my dad was trimming it like it was a hedge
Do you remember me picking up the tiny body that I realized was dead
Do you remember how I spread the tight branches of the hedge and hooked its would-be wings in tiny twigs to keep it off the ground
Do you remember the tiny prayer I said and the way I walked backwards from the hedge-turned-mausoleum
And how I went back a few days later and the bird was gone and I had always secretly hoped the bird had grown old and grown wings and found a way out of the hedge and back to his mother and father and brothers and sisters

&

If I become a linguist and introverted after we are married, do you suppose, amid our lost conversation and amid years of squirreling away hours into our respective activities, we could invent a way to return to communication? You might fall in love with the delineation of abstract mathematical theorems, a hobby gone obsessive, perhaps. When we have driven ourselves to speechlessness is there, do you think, a way we could return to one another? Perhaps something non-verbal, perhaps even non-communitative, in the traditional sense. Perhaps a feeling which might grow tenuous at first then become something known and felt as our bodies lose their electric energy and fullness to old age. I wonder if the sounds and transcriptions would become murals of your features or the equations, epigrams of my face.