Preludes

____i. sexuality.
a russian doll i have crowded most of myself into it. watered it.
two parts loneliness, three parts the feel of eyelids on dry lips.
if i unpack it i find cold bedsheets. i find the air as it is every 3am.
its heart is memory ; (her heavy hair fallen on my face)
______(with open, dilated eyes, our mouths kissed in my car)
each beat is the sensation of skin reverberating.

it has incorporated into itself pink bras. yellow couches. white feet. oriental lilies.

three parts of every four are just silent eyes- patient, silent eyes.
__its blood is a two-way-dream: imaginary stilletos , hunger-pangs , every first hello's heavy
__possibility , fantasy's sharp sting; and the quietly fading, peaceful blurring of memory as it picks yesterday's flowers.

it is my abdomen, tensed against lips. muscular contractions resisting. wrists pinned behind heads. humid pants. it is the colour of rum. lip marks on plastic cups. paralysed motion: what is the word for desperation?

half its luggage is saliva cooling on my neck. hairbands lost under beds. navels. elbows. clavicles.
single words orphaned from their sentences, little treasures. broadcast ceaselessly over Sunday brunch and midnight drives home. ambient fossils and little hooks. scraps of our stories, and their eroded contexts.

its parts drift into one another: every humiliation's pivot , every defeat's redemption. it pulsates between minor massacres, the electrcity of pubic hair, squandered futures. unpacked it is notebooks. giftwrap. icecream. distances not even memory can surmount- and the exhausted voices of tired throats trying to cross them over telephones.

an avalanche of our days. a nuclear holocaust in our pocket. blonde hair in sunlight. smiling black holes. venetian lace. gasps. spasms. the immutable seasons of our tinkering humanity.


____ii. prayer.
out of cold hands, through the backalley shortcut, take the train awhile, stand in the sunlight it's worth noticing, three dinners and a breakfast later-
__whatever cards you're still holding, wallets and purses and hands hidden in pockets, waiting the rain out at busstops, medicated and misunderstood, smiling hope into every prayer,

out of flaccid pillows, ignoring the locked entryways, biding time through the backstreets, smoke through sometimes boredom, look both ways before crossing, take your coffee to go and smile at Rolphie,
__despite the din of memory, whispered slanders of heavy ghosts, rest your knees- sit on the parkbench, casually or clumsily, ran or stumbled, look at us, out of calenders and black-holes and broken-backed wheelchairs, have emerged. spat, cursed, prayed and tongue-kissed our way out of our smalltimes, shanty hometowns, mispronounced last names.

out of quiet voices, take the ferry across, pay the man his due early-or-late makes no difference, follow the tracks the maps haven't been redrawn yet, lost coats and broken umbrellas, clinging to the hem of robes or the fumes of purple smoke or pills in your pocket making a noise every step you take, have fabricated a tinkle of happiness to read by through the night-
__whatever cloud you're chasing brother, sister, friend, i hope it is a comforting silence you find. consider the price we have payed: youth and transport, rent and alcoholism, backseat blow-jobs, time, drip-coffee, freshly-shaven made-up high-heeled school-uniformed painted-nails waxed-back, failed and dropped-out-of, punched and talked-out-of, every conceivable insomnia paranoia annorexia...

out of solitary breakfasts we have emerged.
take a step back, my first breath i'm inhaling a rainbow.