can you tell me a story?, about love.

____since feeling is first
____who pays any attention
____to the syntax of things
____will never wholly kiss you;

____wholly to be a fool
____while Spring is in the world

____my blood approves,
____and kisses are a far better fate
____than wisdom
____lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
____--the best gesture of my brain is less than
____your eyelids' flutter which says

____we are for eachother: then
____laugh, leaning back in my arms
____for life's not a paragraph

____And death i think is no parenthesis


________ee cummings



from the season in hell by Maxwell Loren Holyoke-Hirsch,
courtesy of my love for you is a stampede of horses


____i.
it starts, has a middle, then fizzles out.
usually slowly.
hurts all the way through, but for different reasons.
sinks and rises so that underwater you can miraculously breathe,
and on dry land you sink and cough.
(that's if you can tell the difference, which you usually can't).

you learn to speak to cats,
become soo lonely you want to rub your palms and lips against tree-trunks,
and stay up late into the night listening to the sound of breaths till
you can't tell body from body
(that's if you can tell the difference, which you usually can't)

and in all honesty:
who'd want to?


____ii.
you were drunk again.
late in the evening you call me, whimpering, guilty sounding.

on the drive back you throw up out my car window.
it's still there on the passenger door the next morning,
in the light it'll look worse.
(history stinks most when it's left out all night)

back home you apologized, undressed,
and made sure i forgave you for all of it.


____iii.
we've been friends for...
____god, like eight years.
you're one of my best friends now, you know that?
how'd that happen?
________(right, how?

it's sunny.
we sit on a grass hillock.
i stare at your feet,
____when we first met they were younger too.

i'm comfortable around you, that's what it comes down to,
____(time is tideless with you,
you've digested each of my failures as they happened,

the grass leaves marks in my skin,
but you like the sun on your legs.
i lean back.
you look towards me quietly.

yeah, i know.


____iv.
after the dreams wear themselves out,

news of you dries up too,

so the memories grow brown and yellow,

and make crackly noises when stepped on,

and we walk without really noticing,

and i hope someday, when i look at the moon,

i'll see the moon.


____v.
love is a story you tell with your hands, and your eyelids. everyone wants to say the part they remember best: there's the skin behind the ear that knows something about lips, and the shortish hair at the back of the neck that remembers some fingertips and being wrapped and twirled, and there's the buttocks that remember nails and there's the belly that remembers another belly, softer, and belly buttons that remember coming together to form a bubble of empty space amongst a unit of flesh magically bound. it's a story you tell in movement, and dance, and words, and you have to whisper it and scream it and cry it out, and hate it and be angry at it, and wish it all over again, and never hope to see it on the corner of a road in a foreign city somewhere because some genocides always happen twice, and shiver just at the recollection of it, and letters need to be burnt and framed and memories share that fate too. it's a story that can't be told in anything less than a lifetime, and it's the memories that sleep latest at night, so when you lay awake, it's the only song you know how to hum.


____vi.
and to conclude,
i say this:

all,
everything,
moments,
universes,
seconds,
meteorites,

somehow don't matter.


*___*___*

i might delete this soon... so get it while it's hot.