Originally published 4/24/20

sometimes my eyes despise everything they see, and
seeing is everything
seething—

I can bend backwards to feel a stretch
and some relief
if I care to
if I care to stop self-abuse for a short while
I don’t always care to.

I am nothing if not soulful
at holiest war with myself—
always the warden venting frustration
and the prisoner simmering with resentment
biding time.
what a curse it is to have a prison cell as vessel from which salvation must spring
the body is prisoner of the
Soul.
(or perhaps rather the soul is the very architecture that allows for and maintains this hostage situation in the first place, that perhaps could allow for no other situation, that is built for this purpose alone)

absence bears down upon me like an incoherent behemoth
and when I seek shelter it makes itself gaseous, seeping
into the smallest moments, where my guard is down.
I was once so much more full, and it won’t let me forget this

sometimes you’re just not okay and it just won’t
get better
and there’s no pleasant conclusion because life isn’t a fucking novel
shit just falls apart and it’s up
to you to pick up the pieces and put them
together again in poetry or in song or in
sex or in paints applied to canvas or paints
applied to walls and street signs and car windows or
in newspaper boxes and trash cans and those same street signs
and old mattresses and maybe even an old beater car
piled into the middle of the street
stopping traffic in lieu of our hearts but likewise “for honor’s sake”

blessed is
           the match
                    the flame
                             the heart

but really what is there to actualize of the above?
there is poetry, written on my laptop on the desk next to
the plants, writing punctuated by uncontrolled bouts of
crying in full view of the window, of the world.

there is song, occasionally, but not like before, when I was more
full, or filled up
with sights and sounds and the energy of fellow bodies,
and with a freshness and inspiration and audacity towards creation—
how far I am from that face-to-face world weaved with song, that I
weaved with song.

there is occasionally sex, but only with myself
and only occasionally is it sex;
it mostly is coping
with an absence.

I don’t have any paints or canvas
but have been meaning to get some spraypaint
it is the medium that I feel most connected to maybe, right now,
I like that it is equally an artform and
a weapon.

as for the rest:
that’s all pretty hard to pull off with just your depressed ass as
a form of weird, symbolic conflict therapy
isn’t it?
one day, surely (isn’t that what I always tell myself though?);
but perhaps I can grant myself the vote of confidence that
not only will the day, days, of fighting back come
but that they will be lived with friends, that we will
take care of each other, that we will
have joy and also have
tactics and strategies that we perfect and revise, that
together we can forge something within rupture that is
not just a dignified way to die.

I just feel lacking the patience for the delicate
and sometimes not so delicate
task of building a life worth living
it allegedly happens due to consistent construction of habit
and not in one earth-shattering instant!
I’m not interested in this tepid incrementalism!
but all is not exciting.

thinking of a spirituality without the soul: “what is marginal,
paranormal and unformed within
and between us”
being without interiority
let the inside out//let the outside in

dreaming of a redemption,
of a salvation without eschatology.
delicately kissing my wounds 1000 times a day
a communization of the psyche
a sharing of the
“troubling nuances of our collective selves”

but the very idea that there is a formula
to make it all right
doesn’t sit overly well with me.
I think the desire for neat and tidy answers
is part of the problem.
probably we have to befriend contingency and indeterminacy
in order to love ourselves
in order to love each other
to love our selves-as-other and others-as-self
.
.
.
this rain keeps me more locked inside myself
soulful
but is ultimately a friend I cannot live without—
I hope it helps ward away the worst of the fires
(though maybe too little too late)
I worry for all our lungs.