here i come; i say yes
I'm so lit. Lit up. I'm like a transparent candle dripping wax on chocolate table tops and gathering the flames within her, filagree and frail. Meta narration. Cheap shots.
I'm knee deep in work and I can't focus. I've been seeing this film major with more tattoos than thoughts. Orion constellations, pot nights, two fingers shoved in my mouth in the velvet night folds. I used to go the theater with my mama when I was super small; they always played the Pinocchio story. I always knew the part that came when he turned into a real little boy. Never once did I cry. I always wanted to be more doll-like. Less scratches, more lustre. Anyways, the curtains were the night and the stars were small decoupaged paper flecks. Golden flecks. Many on the night curtain.
I'm taking this John Donne grad seminar. Everyone's all tweed fucking jackets, black-rimmed glasses and small hearts. Just big pens to take the text apart. We've forgotten to read.
When I am dead, and doctors know not why,
And my friends' curiosity
Will have me cut up to survey each part,
When they shall find your picture in my heart,
You think a sudden damp of love
Will thorough all their senses move,
And work on them as me, and so prefer
Your murder to the name of massacre.
--
SHE's dead ; and all which die
To their first elements resolve ;
And we were mutual elements to us,
And made of one another.
My body then doth hers involve,
And those things whereof I consist hereby
In me abundant grow, and burdenous,
And nourish not, but smother.
My fire of passion, sighs of air,
Water of tears, and earthly sad despair,
Which my materials be,
But near worn out by love's security,
She, to my loss, doth by her death repair.
And I might live long wretched so,
But that my fire doth with my fuel grow.
I wanted it rewritten. For all the love, for all the sadness.
In Cuba, I went underwater. I walked until the sand didn't comb my feet anymore. I immersed and buried myself under the ocean for five minutes. Close to five minutes. It felt like forever. The strongest pelicans flew above my body. Strong pelican sinew and bone projected against the sky and I was embedded like a white pearl in the ocean. I am lit up. English is beautiful. My mother tongue does not quite have this elasticity, this gorgeous delicacy. My mother tongue is sweetened Latin; it is a pine tree on a sunny meadow. But English is a rock modeled by salty oceans. It is germanic and cruel at once but you see its kaleidoscopic turns in the mind's sunlight. It can't be put one way or the other. If you wanted to decorate the room with English, you'd have a relic that you could turn over and transform the room a million times over. Because English is alive and it is reborn everyday. It won't die like other dialects and it has cannibalized so many colonized languages. It has absorbed greedily, under its weight it has set words down and hasn't returned them once. Languages are like butterfly orgies. Papery wings transcend boundaries and alight on surfaces only to roll off the mouth again in flight. Our mouths house each other and words. Our mouths, the deepest wells of wet thought. Our fucking mouths.
I am so sad. I am so empty. I am trying really hard not to be.