missing you is a reptilian crawl, a carnivore that preys inch by inch; camouflage of a river snake floating in the depths, awaiting the guileless bait of midnight swimmers. missing you is a heroin votary’s monotonous combing of dumpsters, their fluctuating fever of snap, snatch, ticks and clicks. missing you is a hissing tinnitus, bloodlust, cormorant, curdling in an ear slugged at a barfight. missing you is how i now have more scar tissue than muscle memory. missing you is someone 13, uncaged, illegal, jagged and dangerous, hunting for some kind of bottled alchemy in cabinets colonized by prozacs and klonopins. the trapeze swung between vice and cure. pills and people stacked like mementoes. missing you is a mute nightingale; a songstress with her palate impaled. it is a void instead of a voicebox; it is how the wolves unlearned their howls. it is a quiet uprooting of things by sleepy-eyed waves moving at the speed of sound. it is neither dim nor illume but the stark naked spasms shooting through the tungsten of an old bulb. there is nothing obscene or deafening about missing you; it is a muffled whirr of knife against steel. it is a clause for contradictions - an empty plate, a full cupboard; memory speckled in mercury spots you needle with a nib, its erratic silver that you promise not to swallow. so, missing you is a suitcase with its belly bursting with envelopes; each hiding the same letter - love, i am, i do, i can but i won’t. all the poems bruised & undressed; turning indigo, turning indignant against the prized solitaire of this summer. missing you is no tsunami, no - it is not a decisive end to things; instead it is a tireless, fractured faucet spilling its volume in a tautology of drips and drops till you turn to it on a bone-dry afternoon only to realize that there is nothing left to blunt your thirst. missing you is relearning how to tie shoelaces after a decade of coma. it a daughter’s life reduced to the bland corridors of a hospital rife with the odor of disinfectant. a reminder of precautions that is also a recap of their failures. merwin wrote of how absence enters us like a thread into a needle; maybe that is why i have been coming apart lately, the seams have gone limp - maybe that is why the ageing hemline won’t hold; maybe that is why the cloth of my consciousness unravels in clockwork rehearsals. missing you has made me into a patchwork quilt - i could keep another warm if they would only agree to being covered in your leftovers. #personal #lit #writing
Posted on: Mon, 15 Dec 2014 10:03:07 +0000