last one

Though a single story, they would be a thousand and one, were I given a thousand and one nights. -Clarice Lispector, The Fifth Story

Maybe the most pathetic thing that I have ever done is grieve this hard. I don’t have to do this, I think to myself. I know that I could just continue, just take an extra dosage of bitter, prescription amphetamines and operate the machinery of a legal high.

I take my normal dose and open my notebook.

The artifacts that I uncover of the last several months are shitty poems and journal entries and poem-journal-entries that I hardly remember writing. But the feeling-content, I know well.

Black ink, smudged, crossed-out, wetted-now-dried with saline tears, assumes the form of the moment when myriad yet-unlived lives converge into a single image. The moment when a heart thinks that it has found a stable rhythm.

A vast expanse has opened before
Me; encompassing reticent mist
And, squinting, through the damp air
Is a distant song
Primordial song, uncertain song
When we regenerate, seven years from now
Moonbathed with tobacco odor
The time may be too late:
I hope it’s too late.

What a terrible poem. It meant a lot to me to put some of those feelings into words at the time, though, so I suppose I should be nice to myself.

It had told me of an Emil M. Cioran quote: “It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.” Those words floated from its tongue and wrapped around my head in an arresting geometry. I found that exciting.

Morning chest tightness produces a blunt friction in my whole sternum. My heart palpitates from the medication.

The lines of your face,
are a veil.
I am transfixed,
flexion of taut muscle
interface, ark
Stratified and separated.
I claw at you piecewise,
To expose
For but one instant:
something beyond these textures;
In my eye is murder.

God, these are bullshit, I think to myself. I wrote this while it was away on a road trip. I suppose I was neck-deep in the kind of love and excitement that bores some bad poetry. I may still be. I will ask Lady Hindsight when she shatters my window some night in the next week.

I forget these feelings: the avenues of my memory have congealed around this poem. I suppose that I was thinking about locating it beyond the interface of bodies, touching the soul or something. As one does.

I could not bear to read another one of these old things. I find the next empty page and grab the 0.7mm pen that it made fun of me for using. I do not know what to write.

I do not practice, but I think of being there to support it in prayer. I think of the glint in its eyes when I said its name in a ruby register. I think of the way it would blink, scrunch its face, and disappear into its hands when it got flustered. I think of how much I love these things. How much I love it. Even if the love was juvenile. I still wish it could have matured.

Empty margins between blue lines on a page whisper their serrated taunts. “That is unrequited now,” they say. I shrug, put my pen on the page to frame the spine, and close the notebook, slightly ajar.

I go for a drive. It is a fresh Tuesday morning. The highway is rife with commuter traffic. I choose to be one of these wandering souls in the asphodel of asphalt.

I choose to grieve the short-lived and sweet image of a single life, and I let my heart beat in irregular rhythms. I am one thousand lives from my destination.