Sunday, January 1, 2012

Breathing


The balmy touch of your silent soul weighed heavy in the faded violet hours of this year’s first morning.
I could hardly be anything than a lump of dissolving clay, tears melting my cheeks as they slid out in diamonds from the corners of my eyes.

There could have been something more to it…perhaps the drug pulsing in spicy language through my veins, circumscribing my heart with the power of its crimson verbs,
it’s tone something of a myriad, not distinguished clearly or kind, though comprised of many distinct colors.
It’s sensation an ocean’s wave rewinding of salt and movement.

I couldn’t pin the feeling down or capture it in a peaceful cage because there was no finger of mine free with which to press.
The fingers had slipped into the atmosphere along with linear thought, and I sat poised over a heavy porcelain plate like a monk in concentrated prayer.
I was emotion.
It was fear.
And the death that lurked in the haze was not one of complete truth, but one dangerously close, insomuch that my knees weakened with regret. 
A cowardly attempt to fight back over, I knew the bandwidth of my mourning was ever swelling.
It jutted unattractively in a greed that soured the swiss cheese criss-crossing my eggs.   

The timbre of your memories is cursedly catchy, easy to hear, and frequently playing.
How does one mitigate the painful pleasure in this tender recounting?
It’s as if one has no control over its loop.
Or rather, more likely, that my humanness is at its best, a fine layer of memories atop the trembling substratum of longing.
The thing I call consciousness is a piteous realization I needed your love like oxygen. 
I needed it for years because it was born from between heaving chests, asphyxiated from the choking gases of cities and failures. 
My fallacy, I should accept, is the impression that I have grown in conviction or matured in wisdom.
The illusion I have advanced in character may simply be the longing to incarnate as an epitome of loving partnership.
When inspiration was severed, I gasped in the stinging awareness that I could not cling to your speckled skin any longer for retribution.
I was alone in life’s layers now, with an aphasic catastrophe dancing in the potential distance.

We can stop hoping to be.
In this surrender to humility, the furtive germ of insight may have a chance to find us.
When it does, may it expand four lungs with a new way to breathe.