Love Notes
Love Spiegel
I dreamt I married a man whose family name was Love Spiegel. He was some 20 years older, independently wealthy. We lived in a semi futuristic world, and my mother was a successful business woman who worked in a Metropolis-style office building. She was glad (relieved) we’d married. She took us to her CEO office to celebrate. In her luxe car. 10 floors. Climbing dramatically up the stairwell. More fun than the elevator, she winked. More terrifying, I thought. He was calm and dignified. She was controlled-reckless. I was still me.
Love Spiegel. I woke up enamored inside that name.
Love Spiegel. What is the secret of why we married? The matte shine of silver and how I am placed against the reflection of marriage. Pierced.
Love Spiegel. I am the ancient tale. The birds have messages. The mice, droppings of good fortune. Underneath graying matte silver, raging corvids drown out song birds, song birds are cell phones, power drills too, man machines. And yet. Love exists. Good deeds, sine waves that warm weathered steel.
Love Spiegel. We are married and married and married and married and time spins out of control like a lazy carousel of ponies and mermaids. What is the secret to our love? I am denied the past and futures inosculate the present. All slow euphoria.
I wake and I am alone. Love Spiegel. You are too dignified to thin-air vanish.
Love Spiegel put me in a dream box gleaming matte silver, an escape from the only future awaiting me. How is it possible such a world exists? The world of Love Spiegel. Such is the future.
Love Indigo
When you’re young sometimes you have nothing but pretensions so you grab them hard. The World gives you nothing but expects everything and if you accidentally win some pot of shit you’re supposed to publicly announce how humble you feel. I won’t feel humbled because I won’t share my love. I won’t be humbled by games. I work hard to love. Grating fingers into cheese soufflés. Staying up nights, holding another’s body and soul in my arms so love won’t jump out the window in a delusion of loss. Arrogant. Proud. And what of it? Humble is to be controlled, tricked into eating shit instead of honey.
Love Tap
Reaching out in the middle of the night.
The shimmer of energy.
A cold nose, moist breath, night a river, my last days eternal.
Love Spasm
Love cycles in the linear accelerator. If you move, you lose the coordinates. A black dot tattooed on my hip, left and right.
Love Spiral
Does love spiral up or does love spiral down or is it an optical illusion, spiraling simultaneously up and down while remaining still? We spiral. Grabbing love with our fingers and toes. Love, a phantom sap.
Love Field
His arms reaching out as the rest of him disappears. His eyes asking me to take his hand: come with me. He did not say he was an exiled prince, and when he did, with such earnestness and force, I thought he was delusional and believed him and not the delusion. He was from another world. Another world I interpreted as country, too small for a map except a map of delusion. He didn’t say ‘think in dimensions’ though we glide in dimensions and uncertainty, scientific theories making reality awkward. In his arms, and in rapid kisses extending like serifs, what I thought was the pulsing scent of us was alien reality, though no longer alien as shifting perspectives became our own sphere, the strong force of desire chromodynamics that notch two realities separated by dimensional shutters pulling and binding, tension of magnetized bodies, bodies always alien until that first electrifying touch — flowers, he discovered, amused, are nothing but the sex organs of plants — in our walks, our bodies fed off the spectacular heat of the sun (his skin, like the moist silk of flower petals, my fingers addicted).
It’s easier to touch him, his words, too intense, voice inside your cells, your thoughts inside his even before you knew they were yours. Most turned away, disturbed. I couldn’t. His being is a song rambling inside my head or a dream that still whispers to me as I fight the morning sun. Love’s been hybrid all along. We wanted distracted connections, like the stray dog he made friends with, the dog that came and went, disappearing without warning. How does casual desire lock so seamlessly so that only violent expulsion will break the bonds?
I held his hand first. He was lost with his hands. O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do. What do hands do in another world? Will we still lock, him and me, our realities in excitation or is it repulsion? His head is gone — I no longer see his eyes, the colors dissipating from my mind —
We’re used to this, saying goodbye, our fingertips stretched until that final breaking when only a lingering electrical current radiates. And then times when we can’t say goodbye, fingertips bonding, bodies pulled together and locking —
would we look the same, feel the same
— that day of muted sun, the creek between us, its bubbling water the articulation of thoughts inside us. It seemed an illusion, the play of light and shadow, you standing on water. In the dream, I was next to you, on water, the water tickling feet, legs, eyes, senses — and when I woke the sun was down and the creek still between us —
you’re pulling my memories towards you
— can we love here and there or is it either or? Will I see things in him, a reality shift, which could be pleasing or discordant, maybe burning with ice or heat, a color that can’t exist but does and love/hate is too intense, bodies dissolving — this is too intense, to imagine horrors beyond accustomed reality — hyperventilating uncertainties — how can love last, how can love ever last though it sometimes — he’s slipping away — how long will his fingers reach out? Come with me. Yes. No. Simple binaries, switching states locked in eternity —
Love Tattoo
You sucking up spiders with a vacuum you’ve lugged up a flight of stairs; emptying out mouse traps, surprising me with new ones. Chic little black things you’ve named the guillotine.
Love is asking me what happened to the dead rat you left up in the attic that morning:
‘It’s not there? Are you sure it was dead?’
‘Stiff as a board. The trap’s gone too.’
‘The rat must have taken it — a souvenir.’
And we wonder, cats together.
Rats in the attic, mice under floorboards — rustle, rustle, snore, snore — flicks of love.
