Excursions
Navigating spousal trauma
I sit in the dark, awake yet aware of another inner death. I breathe-in the dark with a disinclination to the cold crimes of my mind. My skin senses the failure of evolutionary processes; a certain kind of abandonment.
There is no iron cage of atonement, no ethical religiosity by which I might advocate for redemption. My bones hang my cloth of skin, an exhibitor of shame. Delusory extractions. Residue. Pivot. Edges.
What if I were the archeology of allegory, the site of erasure; would I breathe in balled blank couplets? I mouth the vowels of synaptic dysfunction, feeding the need to be right.
The plasticity of narrative prying the contemporary inequality of voice from fingering normative participation: Such intravenous cruelty. Words hug to that Dumas-quian bride of bereavement.
acknowledgement.recognition.acceptance.affirmation.equity.parity. An anatomy of Fear. verification. identity. And I breathe in the dark heat of red grass: unwritten.
Might I escape this intellectual heritage of scrutiny to fare fore-ward, to forwardly succumb to the Eliotian disregard for fruits of action, faring forward rather than a fare well?
Could I craft out an identity of material predicament so immortality remains nothing less than a predicament of material limitations? I could conjure the invasion of Ideas.
Discursive stasis. join the rank and file. all that subcutaneous blarney. I dine out and desecrate the mystery. Oscar Wilde stalks my art of intimation; every bad poem springs from genuine feelings. join the rank and file.
I am nothing but a dimension of a man’s mind. A gesture of inscription. Razor-thin deceptions percolate. We kiss and grind the sky to dust; perhaps it takes a certain kind of dying in me, to learn how to read you.
Aphrodite would swallow flowers of chalk; carrion lies vagrant, wild to hesitant hunger: Bitten. Under a briar sun, I eat the struggle, tearing the cultural fissures of biography. candid. no camera.
Unfold my body of its deep speculation. dimensions, pigment. Unrequited architectures carve cultures of sustainable redundancy. Foreshortened threshold. Nothing is enough and enough is not worth revisiting.
Graze the grass of my sky detached from ceilings of desert air. I write between the lines waiting on word of you. coming and going. Time sheds loose into consonants of mellow bone.
Salt-rakers dying in line for a delicate lunacy. On the outskirts of attraction, I step out to a falling in among disheveled shadows. I’ll take the arrivals from Elsewhere.
Outside, in the deep swallow of long grass, the constant poem lived on high hopes. He speaks of winning her over, as one who scales walls for a living. He’d craft her into vignettes of external outcomes.
She’d wrap Saturdays in a straight-jacket and turn it up into Vimeo. He sliced chaos with precision. division, alienation, obsession, Loss.
He would keep her a keeless ratite, while he nurtured his penchant for raising hazel grouse and a deeper life.
Canto.
Fragmentation of meaning into emotive artefacts. Curios for the Incurious. Art as the displacement of memory - the bait of a hundred flowers.
To mitigate, aggravate: To speak in large manipulable abstractions. The strident eye of skin. I shelve my excursions with catalogues of dialogue. Condescension dries my tongue; all conquests left to moss.
Tie me to Ambition’s floor, moored to soap rings. Let my hair loose to dance with the froth, falling short of limbs and gentle mocking. Cut solace into sliced reclusive skins.
Dilute my colour to contest the drowning sentiment. Unpick my sleight of hand and leave frailty unaccountable, for all this water damage . . .
First published in CrossingGenres 2017