He left the news of a thief.

P believed himself to be “the first agent of the last revolution”. If anyone asked what his real job was he would always answer with the same response: first agent of the last revolution. No one knew what he did for money, though he was always dressed in a good white shirt, dress pants and jacket. He could be an editor, some “creative” work without any demands or pretensions of art. Not a business type, not really. But no one knew. Whatever he did for money was not considered work for him at all. In the bar he’d buy a few drinks for himself, taking time with each one and a few cigarettes. Usually he’d notice a girl and buy her a few drinks, talk for a long time, and often leave with her. Never with the same woman. If he’d left with someone and saw her again he’d smile, say hello, and talk casually about a few things before excusing himself. This part of life, which so many other men and women spend so much time under the spell of, writing about, advertising, longing about and loving the details of appeared to be simply an easy exercise for him.

What sustained him were other interests entirely, and something that very few people understood. Most assumed he was joking when he’d say, “It was a good night, I had a few drinks and left with the keys.” A jest or euphemism. We’d assume he ran off with someone’s wife. This is because our assumptions have a very basic set of rules, and P lived outside them so completely that his strangeness was invisible to us.

A few redefinitions are necessary then, to the words and the rules. When P said he “attended a party” this meant he visited a house currently unoccupied, presumably because it’s owners were out for the night, a holiday, or something similar. Always a very expensive home, the most upper of upper class. He preferred the high-rises along Central Park, but, and I have no reason to doubt him or believe him, the mansions of Beverly Hills and villas of Nice were all within his arena. When he said it was a “good night” he meant he successfully broke into a house, no one was home, and no authorities were alerted.

During such a break in he would never steal anything. He would never break a window to get in, always obtaining keys or alarm codes from doormen, buying off janitors, house-keepers and gardeners. The wealthy, he observed, are often so comfortable that the source of their comforts becomes invisible. People who maintain this comfort move largely unseen and unnoticed through their homes and lives: maids, hair-stylists, secretaries, cooks, all are allowed access and degrees of trust simply because of their low-position. They perform various duties, all considered inviolate by the wealthy, and must do so without disruption or a hint of their existence when unneeded.

When P said “the work went well” he meant that he’d successfully undone this cushion of invisibility, he’d made a mockery of the bourgeoise life. As the first agent of the last revolution he would typically do the following: enter the house, smoke a cigarette while examining the decorations, perhaps appreciating a piece of fine art, find the liquor cabinet and make himself a drink, usually a martini or scotch. He’d sit in a chair and say something romantic to himself, that his was the work of a slave against mere employees. He’d remember the woman the night before who took him to bed because of what she thought were interesting, but unbelievable, stories. He’d write a few phrases on pieces of paper, with stationary found in a desk drawer or by a bed-stand, and leave them under a pillow, or a family portrait. Specific instances varied within the uniform purpose: to leave subtle reminders that someone had been here who did not belong. Someone had violated the space of comfort and punctured the walls which keep the world, the violent, hungry, lusting real world, out of the home. Sometimes he’d merely leave the cigarette stubbed out in an ashtray, or only a haze of smoke in the bathroom. He’d lay in the bed for just long enough for it to be noticeable that someone had done so. On rare occasions, “divine nights” he called them, he’d bring a woman with him under the pretension that this was his home, and they would make love on the fine sheet of another’s bed.

We could say what he left were clues, for his work was the inverse of a detective. His work was to make detectives out of those who prefer not to look, who spend large amounts of money to not be involved with worries about the world. A cigarette butt here, a ruffled bedspread, clothing slightly out of place, a painting tilted as if to be examined, jewelry neatly re-arranged. His work was to create questions in the mind of those who don’t question and in this way to violate the inviolate sterile space of those who have removed themselves from the world. P’s most central belief in this regard was that cruelty came most easily from those who held themselves aside the world in which there is death, who function under the too-easily maintained illusion that death is a fiction belonging to the realm of starvation, slavery, poverty, or napalm melted faces, scabs over the eyes, dogs tearing at the limbs of blasted children, the murdered refuse of the maquilladoras, of serial killers, of the rape victims dropped from latin american helicopters, of simple stupid happens to anyone very easily violence. By making detectives of billionaires his inserted the seed, long buried and forgotten, of this banished fear. Detectives, after all, are those who must (for they are driven in the hearts to do so, pursued by the devils of knowledge and chaos) look into the dark hearts of the world. He made sufferers of those who lived in decadent denial of suffering.

When asked how effective this “work” was P did not know. His religion, he said, dictated that he never revisited the scene of the crime, and his work, because of its nature, never made the news. It was quiet work, unseen and nearly invisible work. Thus it was maintained merely by his belief in the work. P was the cause, embodiment and totality of his work, though it stretched through multiplicities of actions into impossible corners. His small touch at each place was enough to fuel endless stories, even one act one time would have been sufficient. The possible reverberations of a cigarette in the bathtub of a CEO were a thousand lives and novels for him, and the discussing such possibilities were the only times I ever saw him close to excited. His eyes would close a little bit, the cigarette would stay a little longer from his lips while he wondered aloud how, just how, John ______ would explain to his much younger wife, to his daughter, the presence of this cigarette. Another man would have taken the step that follows so easily and written novels, but P did not. The actions themselves moved the world enough, he said, and it was not necessary to narrate actions already occurring. The goal of art and revolution are the same, which are to create what does not yet exist, or to create the space for a possibility of something new existing.

This requirement nightly satisfied he would relish the scotch in his glass and turn to a new woman, speak to her for a long time, and walk out the door arm in arm.

Brooklyn Night, Two

Vanessa called me out and said: Share it! Share it more! You selfish shit! Perhaps she didn't say it that way; I'm remembering what I felt as what I heard. I'm recomposing. Yes, all the time! Recomposing myself, you, these memory bubbles I swim through and last night almost drowned in!

Anyway, the truth is I don't share enough. Now I'll share more. Remember that Bukowski didn't mean "keeping the bowels loose" as a private matter. I'll turn myself inside out now.

---

Dear one, you’ve given me everything but a place to be destroyed. In my insane desire for order I’ve failed to build a place for this to happen. All of my creations work against me in this way: they disallow me to solitude, the community, the resolute nobility of a place for my complete failure. Oh hold this ego holy and wrong who works so hard daily against me! Fuck being beautiful, give in to my profanity for this is where divinity and I come to play, to dance, to make love together in the twilight of what isn’t said. Repeat your mind. Drawn it into the sand. Let the ocean erase the sand and draw it again. Repeat your mind. Score the opera onto the sands of time. My music is only going to baffle you even more than it baffles me. Repeat my mind. My true lover, to whom my music is somehow melodies instead of baffling discordant empires built of a child’s sandcastles. My wife, on whom my life finally finds it’s solitude and breathtaking triumphant certainty. “I don’t need drugs to do that”. Fine, I do. Several bottles and one can of Colt 45 tell me what I need to meet you here in the unspoken perfection of what pretends to be memory. Pessoa knew he truth, that a liver is of no worth to mankind but words may be worth eternity. Fuck this eternal moment for being so and denying me my happiness. Fuck her legs and my desire that nestled between them for doing the same. Fuck all that carried the holy pretensions of eternity and failed to deliver. My eyes are watching you now and though the moment passes nothing will be forgiven. Nothing will forgive us now for wasting the dawn, and I have wasted many dawns. I include you only because I believe you are complicit, but it is my failure, it is me who has wasted the dawn, who let the last dawn languish in the peaceful land of sleep when I should have attended to the war. Forgive me, I become happy and forget the war is going on, I become drunk on the gorgeous desire of solitude and forget the war is afoot and magic exists only in between it’s tensile results. I do not know of whom I am asking forgiveness, for there is none anymore. All those gods have long since been killed or perished. Long since failed to deliver on our promises, which we made up for them in our dreams and well-ordered fantasies. You whom I have nothing for, you to whom I have come with nothing, you who stick out your soul and upend the lie in your noisy heart, you who have so often refused the lie which I made with my mind when my heart was dormant, you with whom I end this night and continue this life forever and I salute in this clarity of a drunken haze.

Brooklyn, NYC
June 1st 2009
The “Glasslands” for Black Elf Speaks

Not Soon Enough

I want to fuck her
at 9am on a Saturday morning
at the bus-stop,
with the grace of hangover delirium running strong.

We can get right outside
and between
every known certainty
of us.


Commentary: Originally the poet deceived himself by writing, "I want to fall in love". Inaccuracy and immaturity are the likely causes. He honestly wanted to fuck the girl at the bustop, and fall in love with her during or afterwards. True, her certainly desired love, but let's not tamper with the obvious carnality of the moment just to keep pure his precious and righteous point of view.

But That's All Over Now

The torrent of desire has never been more than a pretension of deliverance. Downstream from the flash flood of a canyon with eyes closed and arms raised in expectation we catch ourselves waiting for the word to arrive. Our faith is gone in anything but this. Like good believers of all religions we put on our medals and sing the songs in imagined eternal voices. Like fanatics we hate work, just as I hate the work that would bring me to her or her to me. You’ve got to give up the ghost. The flood that must arrive, and I wait for it, just as she must get up from the table and come over to me across the void. This that she only does in visions. This that she does one thousand times in a single second, which occurs again every time I raise eyes to her, and which never happens anywhere else.

Neither the vision nor the woman will arrive. The stubborn resistance of those with will but no action, like all the worldly captains of impotency who lead our armies. I try to conjure the image, but I cannot. I pull out the birth of love from my memory, lay it on the table, and stick a knife in it but it refuses to bleed. Only stale and limp, because what I cannot do it give it life again. I know that R is only there in the past of conversations, that this is where she once had to hit her father, where she made love to a woman for the first time, where I encountered the gulf of longing with her and imagined I learned everything. There in the past I would imagine her coming as the same flood, as an arriving ghost in my house, or as a vision of the rose manifesting before me after staring too long at the road. That’s all over now, which is the same as saying it can be said, which is like saying there is nothing left to kill or give except to raise the cruel knives of literature and memory to open myself again.

Once, R told me, she lost herself in the desert of California with nothing. She didn’t tell me the details of how, but I imagine they are like this: leaving the car she walked up a canyon which twisted upon itself, wrapping her into a womb of rocks and sparse trees, of cacti and a barely present breath of wind. The sun left no shadows, there were no clouds or stars, and in the world nothing seemed to move. As a lie I would say the world was a dream, just as this may have been, and nothing would change. R related to me a dream, and nothing changes. Impulsively she would have walked up the canyon. Hours later she would have noticed her lack of water, map, or any sense of where she was. I presume to know this is how her mind work’s, because my love for her was itself wrapped up in freedom. A body more free than my own, a mind more elastic and unchained than my own. For R to lose herself in this way is precisely as I imagine. What I have always remembered, far more clearly than any other details of this story, is that she related finding her way back by the side of the rocks on which lichen grew. Lichen which, in the desert, is a pale green almost imperceptibly faint. Some direction is indicated, and after orienting herself she found the way back to her car. Here there was triumph but disbelief, because my sense is R was also capable of exaggerated lies. Some emptiness had to be filled. I believed everything she said. I did not trust my love to be compatible with truth.

R made love with L one night near to the end of high school. L was on her period, so they went into the bath and sat in the water together as R went down on her. Neither knew which movements to make, what to touch, that with bodies it takes us a long time to learn that desire itself is not enough to make a conquest of uncertainty. Our pleasures are more sure than our human awkwardness, and our bodies far from the natural beings we imagine to be guided with sureness of instinct. R licked at L for twenty minutes before she came and the point of telling me this, she said, was to explain how much more foreplay was needed. Now I can think maybe this was directed at me, foreplay for me, but then, not knowing my body and barely knowing the world, I had no idea. R was a foreign instrument and too radiant to touch. To touch would destroy the perfections of love. Even to touch with the mind, even to read out the dulled hand of longing. The perfections of a poet’s love, a lyric poet, a romantic: the kind Keats would know in his youth that he didn’t live to surpass, and which is only really written with an immature mind that still graciously believes in the world. A man knowing nothing of body or cruelty writes of this love: the body is salvation from the starvation of the spirit, and he wants to be possessed far more than he wants to possess. Here also is only another kind of tyranny itself a self-perpetuating prison. Alone, in my dreams, I would imagine countless sexual pleasures with girls, but always with the objects of beauty over the reality of R’s too real body. Here men are lost, women are subjected, and all the romantic tyranny of youthful poetry is written.

Except for here too is where we find the orphans, of which R and Rimbaud are one and the same, as Bolaño might say. In the orphans, without a home and with no direction, there is the tyranny of love replaced with only an inexpressible longing, torment, fever. A thousand nights alone with many lovers, but never the true lover. R once hit her father in the car during the last year of high school after an argument. When she later attended the same deaf university as him, a choice made though she herself was not deaf, she would find he had ganged up on a gay student with other boys and beat him in the yard. I don’t know if she ever came out to him. Perhaps it wouldn’t matter. She only had to hit him once.

Between us, two orphans, there was no possession. We never held the other, only beheld the other. Over long distances, with long silences and nothing but a multitude of thoughts between. In the subway station I remember we saw each other as naked as any two people have ever stood before each other without clothes. Both our eyes feeling hot tears from the ridiculous acidity of love and impossible failure or our abilities. Nothing left to burn and out of doorways.

Here though, after that is all over (which is a lie in itself), there is more to say about the after than the actions. There is more to say, which is that all this remains a lie for not speaking about courage yet. R to me was a courageous and liberated being: at that time my absolute contrary, being caught awkwardly with a courageous soul but timid body and voice. Her body and voice surpassed and overcame the awkwardness of her being, the horrors of her body that could not have children, the terrible orphanage of a child who learns young to pity her parents. These are the births of strange people, those of resolute weirdness who are the makers of our consciousness. Precisely who give birth to love, because we love their spirit over their bodies. R to body that I did not need to touch, and R the holyflesh of triumphant overcoming that I was compelled to be near. Here where there are only the dead, only men and women caught on the wire of regret and sustenance, here where the brokenhearted few are tied upon the racks, or crucified on the tables of order, the orphans are the heavenly virtues of the lost.

Still that’s all over now. R brought order into her life. She drinks less. Fucks less. She will finish university soon. When she visits family in Kansas her cousins play in the countryside and even in letters some kind if happiness enters her voice. Yes, I imagine her sad here, and usually do, for all orphans seem creatures of divine melancholy. I imagine her still in greater loneliness than myself whom I never am concerned with, though I have known longing of high orders. That’s over, her life likely better, and I’m caught with a monstrous sadness for what has been lost. I’m caught in a demand for that same being, in the tyranny which demands a kinship out of all love and a sustained understanding from those who see us utterly exposed. I want to say: “My flesh is nothing. You may have it. Give me the you who knew my soul.” Yet I don’t know what a soul is, let alone what happened when we reached two dirty hands into our hearts those years ago. A stain, a sigh, a bright and shining medal of Failure worn by those who have loved enough to let that self die. I see them, which is also us, facing each other in the subway in the museum of moments which I keep in my back pocket, and commit to knowing they are gone. Too much, too entangled, more to say: Kierkegaard and his two knights, all the resignations of loves bitterness, all the holy breaths of it’s triumphant stains on the consciousness of man, all the suicides under bridges and walking dead of lacklove, all the nights spent with self alone, with yourself alone, with yourself alone and all the heroic noisy orphans of the spirit.

Noted

I wrote this on a note and stuck the note inside Beautiful Losers so it could come back here to be with us:

All these moments unrecoverable to which I was brought only by desire’s hand, only by the woman and the everpresent demand of the heart to be written.

Buried Outside in Piles of Love

Lost in her mystic hair I railed against forgetting and the realization that I’d been caught in the vacuum of her eyes for at least three centuries. I slept that long, abandoned to the ticking of the nothing-clock beside our bed: numbers flickering one form into another without settling on numeric symbols. This small room and my deprivation, moved into a poverty of senses to find happiness, and moved from happiness to experience truth. Finding neither, I stood up and removed the blankets covering me up to my neck overheating my body to a burning point.

- I’m going out, K tells me.
- Where?
- Need to go to library.
- Silence just kills love, stay and talk.
- Too slow. I need to be up. You can stay here.

Stubborn needless insanity. Clock too early for living. Sirens thinking about someone dying. Guilty infection of inflection.

- I’m going out.

I roll over and face the pink wall of her bedroom. My shield is the impossible distance between morning dream haze and her look that I didn’t return. Not enough this morning to break on through. Here I stay, composing the integrity of the moment. I get up and have cereal with milk and Joyce. No one else in the house. Snow piles up outside.

Three hours and she was still absent. The snow fell harder past the windows covering every car on the street; nullification of all these centuries of progress. The ground has returned to blankness. Void again. Risen up and covered. I’m sorry, there is nothing to see here. Later excavations will recover. Separating the plastic blinds from each other I stare into the street covered in white, sky white, roof-white heights and blankness of my anxiety creeping up from a below that destroys all virtue with a single claw. Tooth and nail. A magnificent claw, wielded by many, perhaps many more than wield tired virtue which is far too unfashionable to be common usage. The broken hearted few. Everyone embarrassed in their virtue except for me, who stumbles around with it daily tied to his shoes chasing it down streets as one would a top hat caught by the wind. Hope for this action of futility to bring me to you, or to someone better. The core of my actions, the hope that these desperate acts of chance in longing will bring me to at least a crumb of love.

The crumbs are difficult in themselves. Hope for more and you will get it. Too much. This truth may be much more uncomfortable than crumbs, those so easily left behind. More and the way out will disappear. No place left to turn, or burn. We stumble upon an answer here, the root of fear in this voice. Capable of imagining all possibility, but only alone. Not up for the task of bringing impossibility into love, though that was the birth of the same love.

Deep and hours into reverie. The perfect sonnet of longing on my tongue for so long I’d manifested a chorus of angels to sing it with me. Three graces and four virtues. Forget your perfect offering. I left my offering in K’s lap years ago in the Spanish sun and didn’t look back. I remember it. Mistaken and nothing left to take. Everything but temperance. Hope in her tattered red evening gown sipping on the whisk. Getting ready for descent, the last end, the snow falling gently to cover us.

K returned and asked me to come back to the world, which I did with gracious relief. We acted the rest of the day only on the restoration of her warmth, her small body next to me in the film-light under blankets again in her parents house. Warming the heart of it, warming the neighborhood and the world. Radiating out in waves of song and fragrance. Trapped in the heart of it, dying for the heart of it and to be a part of sliding down the raw face of love. We circle back on each other.

One bus failed to come.
The library shut it’s doors.
Making circles around each other though she wandered far in body and I far in spirit.
Until we see, taste and touch.
Until my body is warm next to hers.
Until the light comes shining

- From the west on to the east, I had to whisper.
- Hmm...? Sleepy.
- Should we get up?
- Mmm. No. Stay here.
- It’s snowing. It’s all covered in snow. I’ve never seen it like this.

Our hands holding each other tightly in the afternoon dark.

Never mind. I tried to leave you. No one has let go. Fingers reaching out in a gracious touch. We find each other again endlessly. New again every day. Our lives dead and covered under the drifting snow each night and entangling around spring roots in the morning. K new again when neither of us could remember the future. Let me in again, she’ll let me in again and I’ll stumble back through the doorway of her eyes.

Listen

the walls of the world
are the words
i speak everyday

All Tricks - Poem

I am capable of
more than this:

A flash of
scales, silvery in
the morninglight
is not the only sleight
my hand knows.

She is such a
decadent artifice, and
my God
the body
dancing revolted
in the mirrored hall.

Believe it
all tricks anyway, but

I'm going to fail
and it's going to be more true
than anything you've done.

Lovestrained and Piano Sickened

We aren’t going to be here anymore. Deadlines of fictional fractured moments! Her voice shouting across the room from another scene

“Listen! Listen! We’re here again. We’re back in it, shit! Did you see that?”

Piano blasting away in the background that someone’s tried to plug speakers into it. They sit massive on the floor, cables snaking under the lid and bouncing around as the keys get pounded. Long time since melodic. Singularities of notes beaten fifty times into the white stained imperfections and followed by another seven, another thirteen. Like how she does, in denial of every plan. The score covered in red and purple crayon. The world going on like this for hours.

“Look at that! You don’t hear me, do you? Words and words, what about all this noise! Haaaahahhh. Noise! I have the ocean in my ears, full of music. Anything to say? You’re better at saying than I am.”

Blue on the walls in dripping waves. Others splattered red. Nevermind while watching it all drip together. Someone painted without finishing, or paints without diminishing the running delight of flaws. Frustration exhibited in the violent bursts as if a whole bucket had been used. Our remainders thrown all over everywhere. Faster notes out of the piano, still maintaining all discordance. She notices the light which has started pulsing in time, first from the corner of the room and now taking over a better part of the ceiling. It beats in time. She throws in an Am to see what would happen and the world manifests itself now in green. Up to a C and we’re purple while orange chords the shape of a globe float around our feet.

“That’s not the point.”

I thought shouting would be necessary but this is a whisper. Glistening of a iced slope or fingers through summer woven hair. Nothing is ever the selfsame, and myself? Of the fate that was here before, fated in this here before. We weren’t, and she wasn’t, but Shit Not That Again. Getting lost in it. Whether to be out of it or in it, here with a dull rusty blade of indecision sticking out of my back.

Three chords in a row. Descending and without coherence. Random notes chosen with perfect precision in denial of all attempts at reconciling order with chance. Watch the fingers fall into place. See! Anything but an accident. Everything thrown back into the sea again, imaginary unity a sexless tyrant. Previously melodies carved into our faces with a pencil and now just easily forgotten. Says, who? Nothingmissed again. A lamp in the far corner is slowly turning something between yellow and goldenrod. Hard to tell, with the ceiling lights in continual mad conversation with the microwave in the kitchen.

“Don’t you want to solve anything? This can’t go on. It can’t. Last time we were here for two days. Not again. You’ll get up, same as always. Same...just like before. You’ll do all this, I’ll do all this, and we’ll end up there again. Always there again. I don’t want to. You’ll have to say something, you’ll have to tell us.”

Her eyes stay closed while fingers slide down into something like a waltz.

“There is fine. Why not? It’s cozy. We’ll be safe. Startled and safe again. Not even worth the effort? Not easy to get there. Haven’t you noticed. No...just all work? Two days to find the right keys. You try it sometime. Rather than just words. I can’t transmit anything with words, without context, there’s nothing and I want more”.

Mystery and blackest corners of heaven shining phantoms of light through her dark eyes. If I opened my own for long enough to witness the world we’d see the same as there is now, altered only by the gorgeous rupture of perception. Electric star-light and constellations of the mental-image that we’ve burned there night after night. The notes continually explode in new bursts along the tangential radius of our thoughts. A lamp rises up, flings itself down upon the table. I wonder if we’ll be done soon, if any of this ends ever and then if this is what I want at all.

“I really want to get out of here. Can’t we get out of here? What’s outside, do you remember? I’m not so sure. Can’t we...out of there?” Sequins and sequences, the lights flashing against windowpanes that we’ve never looked out of. Something stained on the carpet under the table. No reason to be seeing all this now. She’ll neverstop, that’s it, what has to give way.

“You’re caught in it again. Relax.” One note after another. There is terror through the door. Caught in it? Reflective; I have mirrors in front of and behind my eyes. One can only see forward and backward, not down. Not now, I can’t see Now. Hear it? Try.

Endless noise and static we’re dancing and sliding inside of, that moves through us potent and bloody. The television isn’t on but the universe is on too many wavelengths. Thousands of channels mixed together and overflowing with what can’t be picked out. Screamblastsorrycrybombmagichurricane, AHHHHH! Torrential rain, the globe spinning backwards right into our future. Sirens down streets at...time? No, no, there can’t be any of that here.

“Where’s the clock? I need it. We should know. Isn’t it late enough now?”

“We agreed not to.”

“I know. But we need to know. I can’t manage. This isn’t going. Not at all. We’re not it. Not yet. We won’t be. I need time. We won’t get out. We’ll die here.”

“We agreed not to. It’s gone. Forget about it. We won’t bring it back now.”

I don’t even know if it’s dark outside. Out of the way, way out down the way and the stairs. How long? I don’t know. The sun never went down. It didn’t come up. Soon I can look out the window and it will come. Across the street red brick and windows illuminated. Palette changes in the scenery and the mock walls of night collapsing. An F# throws the room into vermillion shades, forested endless space. Maybe I can crawl. Maybe the door isn’t that far away. No! Is it time? Where was the end again? I’ll open the door, we’ll tumble out straight onto a wheat field and grab at hopping crows.

“Will it work?”

“You know it won’t. It’s not yet. We’re here now. Stay.”

Inside, entering the mind through the portal of the body. My hand rests on my thigh. She has one in her hair. Did we have clothes? When we began? Sea washing, washing and over enveloped and sinking into sand. Harder to rise. I’ve put too many lies in the way. Limp cock between my legs that’s useless here.

“Stop looking for a way out. There isn’t an end. We won’t get anywhere. Not better or worse than here. Neither happens. The next isn’t better or worse. Who told you it would get resolved anyway? As if we’ll arrive. Have you, ever?”

Revolving doors and we’re stuck in them again! Worse places to be, without glass, and through it the world in blurs never quite catching the moment clear. I’ll be back soon. I’ll be there soon. Something is going to happen and never does. Just more notes on the piano. Scene. Again. Scene. Already happened. We’ve already. That door isn’t the exit! Not anymore, not anytime. Overdue. Looked so hard. Kept staring at it. She’s right? Resolved won’t solve won’t salve won’t...again against the sideways sea! Sand in the mouth and tumbling. Water retching up from the stomach. Her naked back to me.

“We’ll get there. Get not anywhere. You really should stay. You really should choose to stay. Say it. Choose to have went not anywhere. No one can do much more for you.”

“No one?”

“No one. You’re already at the only in. The only end.”

There! Off in future distances. Headlights rush on past as we speed longingly. Lost, lost in all the waves of fragrance and stuffing the etherized rags of loss into out mouths. Kids, look out the window at the kids out the window! The end is close and tying my eyes to the upper part of my soul. Where the fuck did the lower part go? She doesn’t have it. Thought she did. Maybe in the chords and waves of tension. Never found yet. Just listening. Just walking. Stroking the infinity of noise and hoping more gets found.

“Is it light outside?”

“Does it matter? What would we do if it was?”

“Look at it! Open a window! Walk! Doesn’t anything move anymore?”

“Any doesn’t move anymore. My fingers move anymore. Our mouths making this. What do you find in the noise, the noiiiseee.”

She sings it against all harmonies, against the grain of reason and love.

“I don’t know what this is about anymore. I don’t know why we’re here. I want to. I’ll even go to know it. Straight into the streets I don’t remember. Why are we here?”

“We decided / to stay here / until we didn’t know why / we’d come or gone.”

“No. No. No. How are we going to get back? How do we fucking get back? What did we do about that? Didn’t we think. Wasn’t that part. It’s nogood, haaaaaaa nogod, no good without god’s grateful globs!”

“Don’t do that. You really should not do that. I’ll stop playing if you do that. This isn’t madness. Into dissolving isn’t the way. There isn’t back. Looking the wrong way. Listen goes forward. We never arrive. No derivations from our arrivals or departures. Do you get that?”

“I’m worried. All the sea is coming back up! Too much. Did you see how much I swallowed? God in my stomach, saltwater and the cells exploding! Get it out!”

“You got it out a long time ago. None of that here. Take my hand.”

One still banging on the keys. When was the last time a moment ended? Softest touch and warm clenching. The notes are transmitted straight through now as tensing and relaxing muscles. Each one of them palpable. Not words. Sensory delight and rapture of touch! I have nothing to say about everything. I have something to say about nothing. If I could transmit my desire through all sensations at once I would expect you to explode. There is not enough in this mode. Her hand clenching mine and the notes roll over us together, knock us over and fill us together. Bodily musicality. Scent of my sweat, smoke of the room, on my other hand that was between her thighs.

“Taste! Give me a taste! I need to taste!”

Back between. Away from the exits.

“We’re right in the middle of good and evil and neither owns us. DId you even notice? The fucked up horror and beauty of it?”

Scentualized sensations while raising my head up, warmth and wet on my face under my eyes. Close enough to feel the room dissolve, before and then erasing the errant paths of memory and desire. Close enough now to feel Present, to her body for it to have never been before at all. Kneeling, both of us right in the doorway. At the far extremity of in-between. All the way past in-between. Far as is needed to for once be in-between.

“I don’t remember. I know.”

“Why?”

“No. I don’t know that.”

“I wouldn’t ask that.”

“I know.

“Yes.”

No word, camera, voice, sight, sense, seen, been, comprehended nothing, dropped into unknown and without direction all sitting here lovesickened and perfected between her legs while the piano plays.