Road Signs

When I was very young, my grandmother had two cats. I didn't pull their tails. But I liked to feel them contort softly as they slipped through my palm; their muscles and their fur waving languidly in my hands and twisting 'round my wrists. I realize now that a tail is just a finger— and I wanted to be wrapped around one; to feel a cat's disinterest— not a lack of affection, but passive connection; animal perfection. Cats make love look so easy.

Someone is not anyone. Now I'm grasping at straws, grasping at sand, grasping at dust, grasping my hands in fists, because I can't grasp you. My hands are all I have, until someone cuts them off for all the things I've stolen— the things I have stolen, because they were within reach, and you were not. Spoils, spoiled and spent. And for them, even if I had anything to show, it wouldn't be anyone; not someone I want. It wouldn't be someone, because you are more; someone I need.

You are as The Wave, whose sublime mantle and shines warms dark shores by night. And slakes the bristles of the marshes and tall dunes in eventide's wax. Dappled and dewey, in the balm of silver hours, taking leave in ebbs. Drowning me in flow; rapture supernatural to savor gravely. Churning in my heart, your sweet pillow of seafoam I'll drink in my dreams.

In the gray, cold morn, when our solar disc is hid, there, you send a Sun. And I'm reminded, despite—or due to—dolor, there, you hold a Hope. These burdens of life, the chagrin and tight tension, vanquished by your Voice. Each day rolls in warmth, and the blaze behind my gaze, I send back to you.

Never underestimate the terror of a turning, churning, errant heart. To be convinced otherwise is a terrific gift; this is how terrible enemies become the best of friends. With half-glimpsed dreams and tear-tinted glasses, the pallid mirror cannot prevail— lest you become the pale reflection. When changes of the mind are few, let changes of the heart make do.

Winter's wry; calls to mind the will of wheat against the scythe; a sheaf of Gaia's flaxen locks thus shorn gives way— jade and gem of jaded night, and smoke of smog-steam morn.

The beaches beget the best metaphors, as do most bodies of water, and the communities they quench; where people fish, swim, surf, skate. They are frontiers; borders between worlds. Not walls, but liminality-realities for people to talk economics with the cormorants and crabs. Confounding, comforting, contradictory by nature, because nature is a series of contradictions waltzing in order to be. The ocean waves, the shore waves back; does the dance with the sun and the moon and the seasons. To be banal, they ebb and flow. Like all good Heraclitans know; things are always changing. Water, itself, is fire. But was this always the case? "No man ever steps in the same river twice..." This was never the case. Rather, no man ever steps in the same river once. No man, in the river, ever steps in the same. No man, no river, except the riverman, who is, but is, only because, and because, and because...

It's cold out, and you can't wait for twilight to give way to the moon. That way, your sacred breath can warm the New Gods. You haven't earned any mercy; the bridges you haven't burned have frozen over— salted, dried, or smoked. Your atavistic humors flow still, or feigning stillness in the flesh. Remember the flesh; the flesh is what crawls. But who remembers crawling? The crib? The days you played the convalescent? The days you taught yourself to remember, but don't? What filaments of freakishness mock your mawkish mimesis of whatever maze you've convinced yourself you're walking through? Let them light your way; lift the hedges and darken the writings on the garden wall in this, the sleep of wicked wits; a pallid perimeter, brick by brick by brick of blank slates all bent from the very beginning. You were always asleep, it dreams; it dreams it supposes it desires it dreams. It's all in this together, the dreaming and the dream-dreaming. The posthumous litters, the necrophage critters, and fire-flitters— all.