Limps

Limps

"I'm just thinking about the void," I said as he snaked his arms around me, closing the physical gap that is more than physical. Hands lowered to the ass, flesh selected and grasped.

"Oh, yeah?" muffled through a mouthful of net, attempting to kiss my sternum through the halter bra. I bought it because I wanted to feel young and stylish.

Oh, yeah? He used that sex voice, the one that sounds as if the speaker is simultaneously attempting to calm an agitated dog and tempt a child into a large van.

"Yeah.” Chin resting against the crown of his head, his hair partly buzzed and partly long. In fantasy, a kelp forest.

"Yeah, just the nothing!" I said, chipper, almost shrill. "And how the nothing lasts forever!"

"Mm-hmm," his placating affirmation, his everything everywhere, face gone down.

I suppose I felt a little ignored. It's a specific neglect, when one is speaking and thinking, but all of the focus- that ephemeral force field- is zoomed in tightly on the body’s parts, abstracted, like groceries, or goals, items on a treasure hunt checklist finally within grasp.

The neighbor with her cupful of sugar, patient smile for the child and his child’s game.  

Like having a lover that so obsesses over the vagina, it begins to seem as if he actually believes it's food.

And all of the fledgling pride that one feels, for embracing the void of death, and trying to imagine that the void might be real, and how one might feel about that, -such new bravery- is effaced, because this momentary partner, bearing witness to one’s little, profound moment, has known about the void for a long time. He is a bit ahead, and thus, not in the same state.

He wants to just be alive as he eats the body and fucks it, to consume, warlike. All his femininity (that French lisp) discarded.

To be so ignored while somebody is literally inside of the body is very strange. There are many kinds of voids, I think now, and they are not all technically death.

There are many failings of language, many triumphs of physicality, little erasures and collisions.

I wonder at the fact that every street on Earth isn't teeming with people walking with slight limps.

Cortez the Killer

Now I am twenty-seven and I have returned to Neil Young despite the fact that I am afraid.

I hope that everybody I have loved understands that, well,

That I love them. That: I try to navigate life from my position in a hole in the ground.

Try to live despite my strong inclination to climb into a hole in the ground.

But I know, I know,

Why rush it? The hole in the ground.

I could tell a hundred stories about how it felt when finally I got what I wanted. I wanted intimacy like a hot knife to the groin, intimacy, all soft-hearted and clay, raw organ, saliva.

Intimacy from ______ because at some moment I decided- I don’t know- some bullshit about why I should have what I want,

Why I should have what I want and I’m prostrate again, in the smallest of the cabins, the one with the haunted window, and ______ is there and we are kissing and my selfish sorrow manifested a pearl to grind my teeth against. How nice.

How very like licking a mirror, just cold, and it does not give and ripple as true reflections do.

I have been the last to learn that I am loved as well as all alone, and loved and alone, avoiding Neil Young, because he will tell me, it’s still there- gesture to the hole- that huge hole so big a desert couldn’t fill it, it’s still there that hole in your spirit, that hole in your pocket.

(And it hardly bears lisping but no hot knife is gonna warm you.)

You are most yourself maybe in these moments of aloneness, all baffled and sickened, and aware. Most yourself maybe in that moment before you awaken to awareness of the ghost.

Or maybe most yourself in joyousness, in distraction, or maybe in fear because it electrifies, or when you’re grinding the magic mushrooms in honey & propolis, or when the vision caresses a far corner, leaving only confusion-

When you are down and out, and on the way up

garments

Do you remember what you wore the day your heart was broken for the first time? Or maybe it was the fourth time, but it approached with the rush of an Amtrak, and it didn't pay any mind to your swaying limbs, tore some off and they ended up the same place that tumbleweeds go-

thereafter, you commiserated with Faye Dunaway's Bonnie, with Joni Mitchell as she sang of lovers on the street, that looked so high. (She bumped into a stranger, and they both apologized.)

I remember that it was a long cotton dress, it was sort of Antigone, and brushed the tops of my feet. I still had long hair in a braid and those woven leather sandals with their little wedge heels. I was driving Ventura Highway and listening to John Phillips, John the Wolfking of La. 

Have you heard that album? It's one for the ages.

This is not an interesting story in cold fact, but I think the story's accessories are interesting; the garments that the gross, tepid story inhabited, old fish wrapped in a mermaid veil of seaweed.