Rearranging the Disaligned

Here again, again as in before, though never Quite there; as there would wish it:

Too many storms.

I take a slow purposeful walk through the maudlin seeped through, into me after the thrashing of harrow -like the blunt pelting of a buckle whipping skin for some or other wrongdoing. No more casual thought of that or this, as I step into the deep difficulty of a man vanished; nothing left but photographs and memories, both of which should by now be out date and beyond the reach of my seasons - and is not; (yet).

The almonds I roast in seasalt, pop and blister the blood. And here in the aftermath, in the ash of wrongdoing of a different sort, I reach deep for a new way to breathe . . .

I hug myself with a choice to curl up and sleep, turning my back on all the reasons I should step out into life. Roof rattling, dream-sheening rain, hard enough to melt antlers, sinks my skin like deerhide. Stiffening air through flaring nostrils, braces my mental courtyard for a trampling. Picking of poems off the thigh bone; richly tenderised silence stripped of its flesh as it melts the tongue: There is no hierarchy to the compressed flawless novel, only an abandonment of faith in the impossibility of such a choice. Fictional immensities imagined: Fictions wrought by an unconscious mind. A wanderer with no map of a heart or knowledge of its soul.

Where tenderness is cold, an evocative zero written by anyone lies in-wait; supple truths coveted in stories preserving transcendent promise. Reverence, lit by seductive hypnotic ideas of ‘truthsaying’, in the half-life of facts.

I have no housing for all the mud; just banquets of rain, heaped against the embankments of coral remnants and seaweed. Crumbed photographs encrusted and peppering: snippets perhaps, of who we might have been . . . Before.

(for “Heart” prompt by Terijo )

Image credit: Author. Rome 2011, Garden, with contemporary sculpture, in front of the Arch of Constantine next to the Colosseum.