In the hush night: You lay beside me to my left, breathing softly, falling, lulling into sleep. An easy, deep, sleep with me near. And I'm fitful save for 10 minute dozes, dashes into the quick darkness, each time hopeful that I've found my way into the thick of deep cover, and each time with the rueful fate of a thin, weedy treeline. Erupting on the other side of shade moments later.

Some secret, anxious nagging hounds me. Like a tic you don't quite feel, a disease in its saliva, making me sick in tiny increments, when all the while I hardly, barely notice. Some crying, whining childthing that pulls on the elbow of my sweater while I'm standing dry and martini'd, trying to make polite conversation in the dark.

There's the vast expanse of your warm back facing me in the half light, the rough edge of your hairline, that faithful, floating rhythm of your breath... There is a terror that grips me there, with you but alone, in the still dark of a foreign house, a new room. There are things tucked away in the drawers here and there that I've never seen. There are small monsters under the bed, perhaps, or Things unfolding and unfurling in the spaces near the closet, by the door. There are secrets hidden in the soul of you that I'm scared of, not for what they are, but for the fact that my curiosity leads me to want to discover them. Like the realization of one's morbid curiosity upon passing slowly yet another red ferrari wrapped like tissue, tight, around an oak. My fantasies leads me into their dim-lit centres, closer to you, in hopes that you'll let me see them, or maybe in hopes that you'll trip and they'll spill all over the floor like a sac of marbles, me the only witness to the loud and clumsy event. Bound to you in that. That I find myself releasing my hesitance, bit by bit, like letting out the lifeline, coil by coil, rappelling down the length of you. I remember standing in some tower in New York City, where the floors were made of glass, and looking down between my feet thinking that were the glass only a figment of my imagination, then to stop imagining it's real would be the death of me, and I would fall hundreds of feet to my death amongst strangers, liquified and draining into the sewers of those unfamiliar streets. To think that it may just be my own willingness to believe in something that can't be seen which is holding me aloft... that is the trouble with me. So skeptical and questioning, so critical. As a child, back then, I kept believing. And so maybe that's the reason I looked up instead. Could see that I was almost, but not quite, inside the clouds. But to go back and stand again, I'd surely plummet. A coming of age descent through the smog of reality, into the grey asphalt of the city.

One man's changing tides taught me to hate. Taught me to guess. Ripped the trust and the easy confidence right out of me. A tempestuous heart in the body of another is a dangerous, dangerous thing. Once the sights are set on you, for salvation or damnation, regardless, you are held captive. You are unable to get free. You are the sole live body in the heat-cam's field of view: inextricably left in the picture. And now, after the chase is over, the showdown has ended, the police cars now silent and slow as searching cabbies, lightless and utterly bland, I'm am left leaking and filled with the sullen breeze. After a while I petrify. Shattered bones turned mineral and cold, as millions of years pass, and the Earth revolves endlessly around a watery sun. I don't move. Don't even twitch. And the preservation is crystalline perfect.

Cue some fateful dawn. Cue some restless civilization. Cue the unsuspecting passerby who trips on some ill-hidden part of me- a glimpse of some wry little smile, perhaps, or a long-paused sparkle in amber eyes. Maybe the slow coming of soundless realization, and then, in a heady, groundless rush, the climax of discovery. And so the surrounding strata of dirt and clay are chipped and lovingly dusted away. The area is zoned off: "Authorized Personnel Only." And so I am naked and still as a deer in your oncoming headlights, and you glean information from my long held pose, wondering who shot me down, bangbang, and when and why. ChipChipChip, careful not to tap the fracture line, and taking it slow over every brittle bend. Some hidden, archaeological delight. Some preserved 8th wonder, maybe? Regardless, I am trapped within my tissues, hard hearted and terrified of your wreckless, innocent probing. Absolutely stock still beside you in the bed, staring at the inside of my eyelids, wondering how many taps it will take before the stone crumbles, before the wounds are discovered, before you realize Venus is beyond the paraplegic. That her loving arms are never growing back, have long been ground to dust...

05/07/2008

Posted on 05/08/2008
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