Did you love long what very soon you left?
Come home and take me in your arms and take
away this stomach ache, headache, heartache.
—Marilyn Hacker
After all these years in prison I've forgotten how to love, relearn the Lost Art of Tears. The past is gone forever and with it a world of unconditional terms—a heart confessed and festering in the silent umbrage of another animal encounter—like a god demanding our submission. I once equated desire with affection, as if pressing my flesh between a woman's legs were the same as injecting her with my pulse. Silly little boy performing his necro-tango, I mistook the end of the dance for the dance itself. Spiking the punchbowl was a Breakfast Club-game. Cute kids did that. We dispensed with child's play and took to the janitor's closet, unslaking our innocence in a gale of humidity and musk. Pardon the cliche, but I can't remember their names—only their sad, lovely-colored lips. Hemp fog swarming around our heads like a cloud of dandelions. A leaky umbrella of night letting in tomorrow's tempest. And riding home, my eyes closed to infinity, incapable of imagining myself in a pair of greens, courtesy of the State, only three years later, I could sense my daily rations of freedom depleting. Looking back at the time when everything was easy, when warm supple bodies graced my bedsheets, when Death revolved around me and Lady Luck fought to join his orbit—a fruitless attempt at extracting an ur-text from within a floating narrative—seems pointless without foresight, but I can't stop myself from babbling in thick plumes of burning laurel, as if my future self were sending me smoke-signals.
* * *
In pharaoh-pose, I dream of celestial tresses, eyes decanted in silk, an immortal-mortal friction, like water against stones or wind against trees—delicate abrasions polishing our souls. I unzip her dress, let it fountain at her feet, and watch her step out that cool black pool with a grin, before vanishing into untouched places, my bristled chin plowing her spine. God, she boils inside. Then we empty ourselves of the memories of others, questions fading as I awake in cold sweats, in the dark—my heart lashing against the walls of my chest, like a convict in a cell filled with the ache to fly. I am a song, a veritable chorus trapped in the sparrow's beak. I hear it thump into the window and shriek. Weep. Bleed. Die. Who can tell one from the other? Who knows the rules of engagement and its tender aftermath? After last count the silence negates our moral calculus or just divides us by zero. Simple arrhythmitic. Love and war. Either way, I wonder if another human being will trust me enough to co-adapt to loss, to stand unscorched in this flammable cursive waltz, to share in a ritual deeper than any need to survive. My biggest fear? Leaving this place with the boy I was rather than the man I'll be: a man whose eyes irradiate like two geodes—cracked, content with being broken. Unashamed to cry as life reaches in. Squeezing. Wrenching.
* * *
Be my water and wind. Let necessity and time fossilize these words under the surface of our skin, somewhere deep in its bedrock. Rock, rock, rocking us to sleep. There's a higher law at play here: a body in motion tends to stay in motion (even that of the Sphinx). In some ways, I'm still that kid running from the prom; yep, still figuring out the logistics or whatever they portend. Still, I can't pretend we're moving toward anything except a posthumous point of view. The next time earth blinks, this skull might become a bouquet of weeds, a demon's ikebana. Maybe we can share a plot, entomb our tale as thorny lovers, vines intertwined. Till then, feng shui my heart. Ignore the baggage by the door; understand it's to keep these stealthy drifters from barging through or leaving with the furniture. Who's the super in this slum?! Please forgive my knack for punctuation. My unpolished pen. My penchant for putting people in parentheses, knowing they'll disappear in a dash, dropping a trail of ellipses, which, for some reason, or lack thereof, I'll follow elliptically, like an idiot-savant, since, as I tell myself, there are no periods in history. No way for me to undo what's done. Our lives aren't suits—worn, unworn—collecting dust and moth saliva in a closet beside our skeletons; popped tags annul all returns. I heard St. Peter works in customer service, but, then again, I could be wrong. (It certainly wouldn't be the first time.)
* * *
Synonyms for "incarcerate" ... "unrequit"? "revirginize"? Above this prison, directly overhead, is a sky-crypt for lifers (no pun intended), for those who'll never come home, who'll never know the little death until the big one enters the clinic bellowing its love-war cry, until tattoo tributaries replenish the estuary of their genesis. I wish I could save them—I really, really do—but they're collateral damage of then and later. My memory's shot: these eyes are exit wounds leaking into the present. I cannot hide what I've seen. Pupils recoiling to gray mists, hands stiffening to dead tarantulas, and the subsequent incantation of acquiescence, slow dance of night and day, water and wind's opera seria—wherever it is late poets go in their vain apotheosis. If only every blessing were a song sung in the present. If only. If. Only. I don't have emotions, only a motion of the soul and a holey hand-me-down love one can wear in the morning, maybe wash and return, since the Walk of Shame's easier in twos. Or threes. There's plenty to go around, I think. I hope. (Menage-a-mois aren't the best gauge of our empathy.) I've never been a cutter, nah, just a self-inflicting indian-burner: these High Society rags, stocked with girls with daddy issues—two-dimensional mistresses—are my sole form of affection, unless of course we count all the vigorous pat-frisks endured over a decade and a half.... Porn doesn't teach faith, only technique; yet it reminds us that we're human, that we’re animals, so, for that, I'm grateful. I'm blessed. The kind of woman I want, today, is a different breed of crazy, one not unlike my own—though I don't care if her past is shady, full of stiletto heels and broken bottles, as long as she's more than a leaky vessel of desire and her laughter rings with enlightenment. Rings like her eyes. "There's nothing worse than hurting others by being yourself." How true. Deliver me from here—not because I deserve freedom, but because I want to make up for all those years of tightfisted hunger and contrition. Deliver that little boy. Transmit the Lost Art of Tears, so I can remember what love is or, if I never knew, discover it in you while eternity tumbles around us.