Morning Unfortunately Is What Is Coming (from A Book of Nightmares) I’m staring at the sofa against the huge window overlooking the East River in The Sinister Exaggerator’s apartment sipping scotch the girls bustle around the British kids from Oxford a rock group with a single on the charts all of them attractive and aloof and there an older scowling woman in a cowboy hat once the governor of Texas but not anymore I am here in the study and The Sinister Exaggerator is talking and The Pilot is sitting on the couch talking to those guys from Oxford with Margaret and I am leaning half drunk against the white woodwork listening to The Sinister Exaggerator tell a story about Africa he is not telling a story about Africa at all but a story about a person he is standing in front of a poster advertising a story he wrote about Africa and the boys on the couch are in a group a pop group and behind them the East River and in the water the corrugated lights of New York City we finished working about an hour ago I’ve been drinking since a half hour before that and I’m listening to The Sinister Exaggerator which is like listening to a tuba tell the tale of a mouse in brief stories full of clowns moving from tent to tent laughing at every pole and Margaret is kissing one of those boys I can see her red hair I can see Firefly even though I know he is not there and Isabel though I know she is dead two years ago in hot August in the middle of all this heat The Sinister Exaggerator is talking he is telling me a story but more telling it to the young girl standing next to me Isabel Isabel Isabel I say to myself and she is here like sleep slipping away she is with me like fatigue in my muscles always eventually there I love you I tell her I want to die too I will not spoil the moment I will kill the moment unintentionally there is no doubt of that I love her I love her along the longing of every second she grows inside me so easily I want fall away and be less which is to say form space for her for she is the child of the stars radiant and better I love her and maybe I’m tipsy tricked by an image of her with each sip of scotch I look out of when I am looking through the obstructing images but she seems to be in the spectrum of what’s possible here in The Sinister Exaggerator’s study in his eyes his gray hair I see her I want to not waver I will not infect them with the sadness in me because it does not consume me but is me and this is true I love her as Jupiter’s shadow loves Io Europa Ganymede and Callisto the enormous space between I would die for her if she would come back just for a moment I want to lie down I am tired I will not sleep she may or may not feel similarly or understand or agree I want her to love me but for the scabs peeling off or the crickets crawling out of her buried hair she once loved me perhaps as I love her I accept the postulate that she did and I will love her more than any man here will make his mark on Manhattan I am so tired a tiny drop of my blood falls to the floor to defer dying is better than a woman required to answer my allegiance to her and to myself but in this moment more than I intended or would have thought I am consumed with Isabel and all of me is saying so but I want to die as I’m standing here seeing her in the faces of the people as I’m talking to The Sinister Exaggerator I am reaching for her I am aware of her prodding her telling me yes her absent kiss on my lips it hurts here more than when I was told because I would not let her be touched by the creature that is me that I am that I rise up and become which is similar to the intricate complicated architecture of purple irises at the time despite what is happening I want to think this through I love her and I cannot stop will not stop and will not pull her into the shadows where warm things become cold and die I want to flee I am leaning into the idea of running away and I am practicing not remembering by picking at the scabs until they are wet I recall the flowers we planted on the mountainside in Wyoming for a dead friend which is my whole person saying I miss her I am tired she was tired I want to take care of her she is dead I have dirtied her I am foul I have grown fouler but I love her in a different way than I or anyone ever needed to speak with eloquence or persuasion was ever devastated by crushing beauty or horror which is a way of saying I love her more than the more others have used to describe quantity she has become all uniqueness to me all touch and explanation though every manifestation she can assume has no voice especially a flower unfurled and dry and so painfully pretty I want to die because I love her when she is helpless and delicate and when she is not delicate I cannot will not stop and I want to stop in the same way I want destroy and reconstitute time because I do not want her to die to be dead and I want her to love and be perfectly loved because I love her I want to open and swallow the insignificances like a dirt swallows the mouths of a flower that with her very presence and brilliance says I love you and means I love you and continues and persists which is a way of dying beyond the physical person which is how entirely how effortlessly I continue to love her inside the length of two years I want to hide when I say I love her but I will until the part where I disassemble until the moment I want her to love me back again and then I want to be falsely hidden I do not want to sleep like her not because of the terrors in sleep the unmovable stiff hands in the coffin the large eyes of subterranean creatures seeing me or the tiny achievements of wet bullets but what is not there which is her so pleasing in all ways the most flower of all the world’s pleasures simply to imagine her is to want to love to want to die I do not want to sleep except with her shaking and fresh out of the shower a flower dripping with warm rainwater a fragrant oppressive scent all night fatiguing me with smiles a desire to love to sleep to want to love and be loved I love her it is so hard it is impossible I want to lay down and die when the shadow’s ineffectual consolation wraps around me I want to fall when talk I want to die when dream I want to die then I see her I want her to be holding my hand standing on the cliffs overlooking Tartarus staring at the depths imagining the world’s first light being born I want her I love her I want her I no longer know how much is a lot or how to go on which is to say how to stop but god I love her she is she they are they she is gone The Sinister Exaggerator is no longer speaking is no longer in the room the story over the boys gone The Pilot gone the whole city on its way to sleep
Posted on: Wed, 17 Jul 2013 17:24:09 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015