your red lines
(Ji, look! No hands structure!)
your red lines
you say: life is not a crossword puzzle
(as I remove your outer garments with words
and other stripping agents. gentle.
no need to dissolve all of the pigments
that convey your mystery.)
I disagree; life is difficult to figure out and
life is full of emptiness and
life runs through you in the red lines,
and death to your heart through the blue.
I am tracing your veins as though I am holding a pen.
the newspaper tells me about children starving in africa.
I say: but it’s a lie.
(it’s not news; it’s true, but not news)
you say: death comes to us all. and death runs under your skin.
summer heat and sex and you are
red all over.
and we drink coffee in bed
and there are old black words on
your new white sheets.
you paint yourself with the star of david and
you present yourself as canvas and
you say: how does this make you feel?
I say: in these gold specks I see you need
a bright exterior intervention,
and in these red lines I see you living in your own
(chronically creative)
way, and in these thumbprints
I see that someone else has been here before
and in this patch of shadow I see
nothing at all.
you say: how does this make you feel?
I am not comfortable with these modes of analysis;
I am reaching for the familiar. for example:
I am scored with inked red lines that
exist in parallel and never
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - overlap,
mementos from an editor more ruthless
than yourself. you refuse to annotate
the margins of this love; refuse to acknowledge
the margins
at all.
(but I require boundaries in black and white
with clearly defined spaces
and clues to direct the words that fall between.)
for me to learn your language, for me to speak of
sinopia
& sanguine
& sienna
will require a compromise.
there is more to life than your emotion,
there are dryer words than you know,
there are children starving in africa
and the star in your nativity can be split into a series of lines:
hydrogen - blue. methane - red.
for me to recognise the meaning inherent in your form,
you must submit to this refraction;
you must be prepared to pick up a pen
and underline my faults.
you say: what’s black and white and
read all over?
I say: that’s an old one.
I say: but it’s a lie.
(the lie is: you are far from
textual in your context -
all I get is ink smudged on my thumbs,
all the better to press against your skin,
leaving a bruise with whorls
of newsprint.
art, worth nothing like a thousand words.)
the lie is that I have never read you
cover to cover.
instead I put my thumb against your shoulder and
align myself with your blood and
turn you straight over, turn straight over to
the crossword page.