sorry

i approach it always from the wrong angle. the light always shines behind my back so that i throw my shadow upon you. then i want you to feel sad for me. i want your shadow to eclipse mine and we make sparkling darkness. glistening obsidian i saw once inside an ancient volcano in the desert. now all i have left are the purple beads you gave me for christmas. the dalmatian you promised me for our wedding day. the sand i photographed as you were walking ahead.

i am sitting on center stage. and it is the day of your death but you are there paying for the feast. you are shaking hands and thanking the butcher for killing the pig. the butcher's face contorts into a grin. your hand is nothing to him without your money in it. the gardeners are already packing it in, the palms and fruits that are beginning to rot on the table attracting tiny buzzing insects. and then you turn to see me crying. and i see the question upon your countenance before you ask, why are you shedding all these tears my love? i do not understand. see all of these people who came to my wake? they love me you see? it is a beautiful day. why are you shedding tears my darling? go outside and water the spring flowers with them.

and i am not writing this so you can feel sorry for me.

you me

it is a mask i wear
a happy mask
one that won't allow you to see the real me
i avoid her
until the small hours of the night
when she wakes me up
from waving goodbyes
too many of them
won't you stay just a while longer
you on the beach
didn't let me hold your hand

you i scream the magic word
and you calm me
you are so much me

taste it

how many lives have i lived already. i saw the old couple get chopped into pieces though i wasn't there. the assassin left on his mission and told me about it later and i could visualize the scene. then i find myself walking down the path back from the beach over and over again. i am sick of these scenes from my own head. sometimes i would like to switch heads with someone. i am sick of self-portraits though it is a compulsion of exploration that i cannot escape. i am sick of starting all of my sentences with i. couldn't they just start with you always? when i have you on the phone i am just light. when you are not there and i wait and wait the ghosts return. i love it when you wake me in the midst of night. and you you you are so many, how can i put them together? and it is me also.

i am stuck in this nutshell. when i was thirteen i was part of a music recital and when i was finished i sat back down in the audience. a wasp crawling up toward the halogen lamp above mecaught my eye. i thought how i would remember this moment years from then and that i would possibly be seduced to think it to be a profound moment of reflection how this wasp was slowly dying from the heat of the lamp and still couldn't help being drawn to it. always drawn towards what will kill it. at the same time i was wise enough to realize how pathetic this would be to find profundity in this scene that was just so obvious, this fact of being drawn to that which destroys us. already i was aware how life's lessons are just more subtle, if they exist at all. i never take my thoughts seriously. part of me laughs at my tendency for pathos. though sometimes i like to be obvious. sometimes i make very damned obvious observations about life and love. like in this image, venusian lamb. i hadn't planned it that way but it came out as some sort of scarred body being offered to the goddess of love. i don't want to be her. i want to lose her now. it was my mother's burden, not mine. though the scars are visible, the joy and the willing abandonment to a new love with all of its footfalls and ecstasies wins me.


death awaits us anyway, yet it is not the nature of things to be drawn to it, we just simply end there. in the meantime we are drawn to the light. life-giving light. life holds more than death. i can feel you across that divide, i can feel your love stronger, purer. we are not drawn toward death, we simply cannot escape it. in the meantime, let me taste life.