all of it, and none

everything has no meaning and too much meaning all at once. frequencies cancel each other out and all i hear is a low melancholy hum in this saturating heat. i am in somebody's car chain-smoking in the back because that's all i do these days instead of the other. did i say i've become a ghost? how then, so visible?

you're staring, don't you know. don't assume my eye contact in the rearview has meaning. Old Man and the Sea was about fishing, after all. but something more too. and that's what you're looking for. you won't find it here. my face has been saying you don't know me, you never will since i first learned to wear it. 

i suddenly become very interested in a hangnail on my right index finger or maybe in the cars rushing past, their breeze whipping my hair. still smoking, and smoking. you say it's like i'm grieving. i say nothing. maybe i am. how many lives have i lost, living just this one? i want hair that looks best at its worst and hands that touch things in a certain way and meaning to solidify and condense so i am not so terrified all the time. 

i have that urge to run again. too many know too much. surreal cities breed existential thoughts. my tights are in tatters, i'm all used up. 

but i won't. i won't run. where else is there to go? i'll stay and learn to expand space and create distance out of nothing, out of silence. how many senses fall into atrophy while we look and look and run our mouths? i would like to hear in your silences what you are really saying and leave you not knowing i know it. another secret you won't take. 

leave it all take nothing, but there's always something left

here's wishing i hadn't been born. 

here's wishing memory wasn't a slippery little fish with spines that poke and draw blood and a hook in too deep to pull out without ripping off the jaw. 


i am laying here gasping drowning in the air, ribs heaving gills useless and the dead weight of fourteen atmospheres pressing down. 


i've been reading books about memory, Kundera, Primo Levi, books to slow time, books to vanish into. i'll live in your world please. preferable to this half-life, this gravitas, buried here beneath stones. 

grey blustery days, the hillside colors in sharp relief

wind gusts through me as i thought it would, spectre as i am today. half in this world half in the next, mirror-child or the real me, can't discern any more. smoking surrepticiously at the small dog park, no hiding here, no space. everyone too friendly. leave me to my disappearance, please. if i pretend enough i will cease to exist the way if you pretend to sleep in time you will.

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and then the rains come, cold and matter-of-fact on my skin and it does not fall through me but splatters on, drips down my lank hair. 

and somewhere at the core i am so blushingly relieved.

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