Two Shells

My mind is clicking, clicking like the ticking of the night.  Restless fireflies or some edgy eddies in a river too unknown.  Oh how confusing it's been, how blissfully confusing.  I try to keep my head upright but it's as if my boat's been capsized and turned over and over in the spiralling web of some waterfall spider who will consume me early next morning.  I am spinning round and round, reaching the surface  long enough to take a shallow breath before I'm plunged into the dark world once again.  I'm tired, aren't you?

What does it all mean?  These scribbles in my notebook?  The morning is cold, cold and I've been thinking of you since I don't know when.  I've romanticized you.  Oh the horror!  I'll never come up for air again!

I have two shells in my pocket for you.  I'm waiting.  I want to give them to you but how and why?  Because I think you'll like them, because I think they're beautiful, because they remind me of a freer time, an uninhibited time, because I cannot give what I want to give.  I only have these two hard shells, white with affection.  Two shells to say everything I can't explain.

splat!

macabre dancer in the company of macaws.  sugar plum fairy and a cough in my throat.  trying to expel something, expel something non-linear and non-secular.  half moon lights upon my right hemisphere begging release of the sun from the confines of my corpus callosum.  in day dreams i feel you.  what if you passed me in the grocery store while i priced cheese?  so much is known about cheese and so little is known about you. 

so many things

the road to Zion was never easy. 
i expected it to be lined with cherry blossoms.
i expected it to be mind. 
but there were no cherry blossoms (though it does shine, still) 
it was glittered with glass
that i soaked up in my heels
and hurt myself
a very pretty thing. 

(i miss
you vision is
nothing is
nothing
and in-
complete)

it is not easy
to write poetry
and even if it is true
it is not necessarily poetry
but it is
most necessary
and it is
you


 

Gloria

Gloria was your name, is your name, will be your name.

***

Dear Gloria,

You had me going so that I didn't know how to stay still.  Legs swung off the tailgate like a body hung and shaken by the wind.  What was that place?  Looking at your hair as it covered your eyes, I saw that you didn't want me to see.  You were dying.  But aren't we all in some stage of death, daily, hourly, moment-arily?  And when it does come to a close, is there a purpose anymore?  Of course, I didn't ask you that, just as you, in your final weeks, didn't tell me you were afraid, that you couldn't stand the sight of me, that you would have rather we both turned away before the whole thing got ugly.  I listened to your breathing, harsh and troubled as you exhaled.  We were sitting on the edge of this tailgate looking out over the ocean, high up on a cliff, waves crashing under our feet.  One of us was ready to die while the other, swinging her legs, hoped for a miracle.  It's cruel how some creatures get more time on this earth than others.  I put my arms around you and nestled my face into your fur.  We promised to meet again.  You whimpered and licked my face as the cool evening air rushed against our backs.

***

I fell in love with you the moment I found that you could talk underwater.  I was born underwater and never surfaced.  It was important, though difficult to find others willing to communicate with me, to chance opening their mouths even a moment to release a sound.  They feared, and rightfully so, the vast expanse of liquid depth, the dark blue deep, the weight of meta-living, that would fill them so completely that they would, undoubtedly, be inseparable from their watery context.  Most won't choose this life, but you, you and me, we're hopelessly sunk, so embedded in the metaphor that there would be no returning to the surface.  And who would want to return?  How we revel in our octopus' garden, swimming in and out of stone castles on the sea floor. 

***

Whose memories am I writing?  Whose stories?  Mine?  Another mine?  Gloria, who are you?