The Mode, not the Explanation

I dream of being held in your hands. The utter poverty of using language to name or describe color. Ordinary patterns.

 

A juncture at which Valentines Day stopped being fun and became stressful, and then the sweet juncture when I found the one who ended holidays altogether. I murdered snakes – that is the verb – and to this day cannot make myself regret it, which failure I regret. Ecclesiastes is the mode, not the explanation.

 

Smoking cigarettes at Center Cemetery, that little bench by the stone wall away from the road, lonely but not too lonely, speaking between inhalations to the dead. My body was not my own until well into my early twenties and by then a lot of damage had been done. Dust motes passing through pillars of light, how happy I was when there was time still to see it this way.

 

Truth is, I don’t like sharing stages, which is really my way of saying I don’t like sharing audiences. Stores that spell “shop” “shoppe,” make me happy, I can’t say why. Lost in small towns that idolized my suffering in ways to which I did not consent.

 

More meetings never solved anything. Something opens in me when I pray sometimes, and the prayer stops and all that remains is the vibration of phenomena, which includes what I call – but which is not – my body. The rain when the wind blows, gathering in sheets, undulating in the air like the idea of ghosts before we had screens.

 

Aquinas wrote that "a man would not believe unless he saw the things he had to believe, either by the evidence of miracles or of something similar," a truth that I don't think the religious among us have fully grappled with. We never buy antiques, Chrisoula and I, but we are oddly happy wandering through antique stores. Say that when you leave you will return, even though you may not mean to.

 

There is a way of being that has to do with nonresistance. There is a way of folding your self into yourself that makes you both messenger and message.