“Being with you or without you is how I measure my time.”
Luis Borges

?

The lead is back in my soul.
It’s almost an ache in the bottom of my rib cage. It’s like a thumping, pounding bullet.
I don’t know why, but I think I might be falling for you.
Or rather, falling.
Because I’m definitely not flying. There’s no air in my heart anymore. There’s no helium in my lungs. There’s just those sleepless nights, that lack of self-forgiveness, that obsession over the tiny things I remember. Those dreams and those days spent alone with my thoughts. But they’re hardly about you. I don’t know what they’re about. It’s almost an obsession with the sadness of falling again.
I feel like my mind is remembering how much it hurt to pull myself out of this before. But then I had gone in too deep and I was suffocating in a cage, a clamp of iron and lemon and salt around my soul and around my tongue. I cut through the wires that held my soul near to you, and I rose up, scraping my eyes and my lips and my heart against the bars, but when I reached the sun I put out my hands and I laughed.
And now I’m falling again. The wires are creeping around my soul.
But there’s no forgiveness this time.
There’s no laughing sun, no bright stars. Because I know I won’t pull myself up again.
I don’t have the strength. The words come pouring out of me like some liquid inner darkness, and sleep runs away with all the light I had before.
Is it the elephants again?
I don’t know.
Because I don’t know if it’s you. When I know you’re standing before me somewhere I need you. I want to see you so badly I bite my tongue. But when I’m around you, when my lips are touching yours and your taste and your scent are wrapped around my throat I don’t feel anything but lighthearted.
I can’t bear to see you gone, when you’re gone, but when you’re here I don’t believe that it was you, all along.
You might as well lock me up. Because if this is the elephants again I don’t believe you.
But what if it is? What if the pounding in my heart is their feet? What if the breath in my lungs is their scent?
Well, then. At least I understand my soul.

Mint and Lavender

There’s so much to say I can’t hold it in. It’s pouring out like water, like milk, like blood. Melting like ice. Dripping down from my eyes and my ears like wax.
My hands feel light, like bubbles are hiding under the skin.
The happiness is bleeding out of my forehead, out of my hair. I can feel the place where you touched my wrists. I can smell your scent still in the air. My thoughts are cold and warm and hot all at once. Do I have a fever? Maybe. Maybe it’s you, going on and on and on and on…..
I don’t want to brush my teeth because it would wash away you. I don’t want to move from here, move from where you were.
I’m cold.
It’s dark.
Where is the light, where are your eyes? Where is the beacon of your skin? All I can smell is lemons and the stale scent of nothingness, of myself in this space which is black because you are not in it.
Something stirred, in the corner.
Oh. It’s just my feet.
I am writing, writing, writing, as fast as I can get words out. We have the same heart, we have the same soul. Our blood beats in the same rhythm like the stampede of a hundred elephants. You lift me up and I know I will never fall. I know that if I fall I will fall with you and the helium in our lungs will hold us up together, caressed by the air.
You fill my soul with helium.
Every time I breathe out you breath me in. You breathe out liquid gold, purified in the chemicals of your soul, changed by the alchemy of our hearts.
Thump Thump Thump Thump.
Press my thumbs with your thumbs. Let us begin again.
I’m getting used to not speaking now.
I begin to digest and retain my thoughts, to prefer to put them down on white white paper instead of letting them hang like leaves and lead in the air.
I want to hold them in. I know that my thoughts are you, that dashing through the crevices of my mind and peering out my eyes is yourself. If I let them out will you go, too?
Will I forget about you? Maybe.
Never.
I will remember you with the scent of mint and the smell of lavender. I will remember you with the cold and the damp and the dark, and the softness of your eyes and the music that fell from your lips. I will remember you with your hands and your soul and your arms and your throat.
I will always keep these memories. Always.
I will stand and wait and feel you around me. I would rather have your arms around my waist and around my soul then I would have anything else, or everything.
I will never forget.

Soul

It sounds so wrong to say your name, when all I think of is some ghost with your voice and your soul.
When I walk around busy street corners, I can see you standing there. I see you in strange places, in the dark shadows, in bright corridors, in streaks of rare sunlight.
I see you on buses, seated at the back. I strain my head to catch a glimpse of you, but then you evaporate, and all that is left is a coat and two blue eyes.
I can feel you wrap your arms around me when I think of you. My legs suddenly are cut off from my body, and I can feel a sigh building up in my lungs.
When I listen to music, I think of you. I repeat your name whenever I can, wherever I can. I write about you nearly every day. I want to tell the whole world that I held your hand, but I want you a secret, too. I want someone to understand how I think, how I feel. I only want your eyelids.
I compare everyone to you. All of your faults seem priceless, like the streaks in the heart of a bloody gemstone. When I touch someone’s hair, I picture yours running through my fingers like liquid fire.
I want to walk on, and on, into the streets. I can’t bear the though of walking to your door---you’d think me foolish---but I cross my fingers in my pockets and hope to see you in the alleyways. I want us to meet secretly, to cast glances at one another and warm each other’s cheeks against the cold. I want to lose my head in your scent.
I hate myself for wanting you, but I don’t want you.
I only want a soul with your eyes.

I want to listen to you breathe

I don’t really have much to say.
Actually, I do.
I’m depressed at the moment and I don’t know why. I’m listening to sad, soft music. I just want to be quiet and think. Either that or softly talk to someone who understands me perfectly.
I don’t want to think about sex. I don’t want to think about relationships, or lust, or perfection, or what I can do to make anything or everything better.
I just want to be held. Close, against someone’s heart. Someone who I know wants to hold me the same way. I want to stay there, sleepily forever, hearing the soft pounding of their heart and the slow breeze of their breath. I want to wrap my fingers around theirs. I want to lay my head on their shoulder.
I want everything to be the same again. I wish friends would stay friends, and secrets would stay secrets. I wish no one had to control anything.
I wish everyone would just let life flow with the air and the clouds and the water. I wish people would be content to live within their eternal bounds.
I wish I could sleep forever, and listen to the rain softly tapping on my window. I want the coolness of the air to flow over my face, to rustle my hair. I want to be lifted up in the cold wind, to be baptized in the sleet and in the frost.
I want the warmth of your hands in mine. I want you here so badly my soul aches.
And all I want to do is listen to you breathe.

A poem for ya'll-----The Storm

A block of ice falls to the earth---
Like clouded glass
It shatters, breaks
Cracks into a million different shapes.
Electric arches cross the sky
Dust from the hardest stones
Of the secret spheres guarding the gates
Across the wall---
Into eternity.
Like paint
The coldest drops of liquid
Splatter on the garnet grass.
They hit the floorboards like a chord
Of screeching minor notes.
Fog, like smoke, blows across
The curved green fields
Every existent life in feeling
Screams of life---
And golden being.

Time:

It's September already.

This year has gone by so fast, I hardly know what to say.

Isn't time a strange thing?
I watched a documentary yesterday---it raised the question of time. Could it be that everything exists side by side? That our minds only invented time because we couldn't understand side by side...well, everything. Think about it. Almost everything we describe has to do with later---a chain of events, your mother telling you to not put off cleaning your room---I know this is a really weak and pointless argument, but if we didn't think about pointless things where would we be?

I have a good friend who says she thinks about things all the time. Deep things, you know, the concept of time, space, the death of morality, politics, the future, etc etc. So to let herself go she talks to the general ditzes. She enjoys chattering on about men and lipstick and the latest movie because it relaxes her. Oh well, I suppose it's better than what I do, which of course is sleep. And I don't even do that that often.

But that raises the question of who is the smartest; the happy go lucky girl, reveling in makeup and fashion and the present, or the dim searcher, reading philosophy under the sheets and arguing psychology with the dog. Obviously we can see who is the most romantic---and I don't mean that in the traditional sense of the word but in the purely platonic real definition---but romance doesn't generally make for a good life. The great writers, artists, dancers, and musicians generally have a dreary, friendless sort of life. Alcoholics, addicts, friendless, broke, and alone. Not usually words we use to describe the height of happiness. But somehow we get the most brilliant minds out of the gutters.

Today, romance is associated with the likes of Edger Allen Poe. The down-and-outs, the paupers, and the street bums, bound to the pitiful writing and secretly delighting in the pain that nobody understands them. But the mall girl, the fashionista, and the store clerk, although unlikely to ever be someone, generally lead a happier life then the average suffering artist.

Maybe we can apply this to our lives. Perhaps it means if we endure we can achieve greatness. Maybe glorying in abstraction from pleasure and the bohemian lifestyle can make us great---but isn't it better just to live a happy life, unknown, unapplauded, and ordinary?

Well.