my sister asks me to consider

my sister asks me to consider what would make me happy.

i am living fairly innocuously in a town where tall trees make shadows on the wide paved street and the sound, at eleven o’clock, is of left over rain drops descending through layers of leaves. tonight i am listening to music made by people i used to vaguely know. there is something going on in this world, just a drive away from where i am, but it seems like another world to get there, like a space suit and a golden key sort of trip, if you see what i mean, to arrive in one piece, to arrive in style.

what would make me happy? to be gay. a gay man with this woman of a body, this woman shape, these woman arms and thighs, woman breasts and woman feet. to be a gay man who was once a six year old in pink leotard and tights, who grew into a fifteen year-old girl with defiant eyes, who made friends with the cafeteria ladies and disappointed the faculty and should have been in trouble, but wasn’t.

now i am a typewriter and a guitar clerk and a speckled egg with a hawk inside who craves the tender jaw of chipmunk fed her by the thing too giant to be recognized as mother, who must therefore be god.

what would make me happy would be to fall in love while stepping across a river, while stone-walking in a stream. what would make me happy would be to negotiate traffic on the way to a yogurt shop where the walnuts and passionfruit wait behind a glass case to be mixed in.

it is not as if these words are just waiting behind my teeth while i grit them. they come and go as taxis, willing to pick up the next ready passenger while my tongue plays dumb fumbling with foreign currency, protracted by the plan to organize the phrase, as if it were in an unmastered language: how much will it cost me to get where i’m going?

if i slip

if i slip, i think i will continue – i will find myself at the back of a giant tongue, heading down the slide, past the uvula, down the back of the throat – sliding, sliding, sliding.

i will slide past words i have forgotten how to say, past the memory of tastes i have stowed away, past kisses forgotten and remembered, past loose molecules from last night’s frozen pizza and even an atom or two from some sweet mash of baby food. everything is there to be seen, between the teeth and the length of the throat.

a couple of nights ago i dreamt a dream i have had before – lock jaw. an inability to open the mouth, or an inability to close it once it is open. no speech. inability to vocalize. this is the terrifying dream of wordlessness, squeezed tightly between the parenthesis of physical pain i cannot overcome myself.

i don’t know how many times in my life i’ve had this dream, but the first time i have a memory of it, it’s 2005 and i’m living in the mint-colored room in a building other dwellers at the retreat center where i am working refer to as the nunnery.

around the same time as the lock jaw dream appears, i go to see a massage therapist to contend with several episodes of being woken by a cramp so intense in my foot that i struggle, wake up writhing and gasping, tears running down my face. in conversation with the masseuse, she discovers this lock jaw dream i’ve been having & suggests a connection: fear. a fear of the loss of my ability to self-express, one of the few things i have a real sense of confidence about, a skill i even draw a sense of identity from. and then there is the fear of  pain itself.

“what would happen if you let yourself experience the pain, instead of struggling against it?” the masseuse asks me.

i think, for a moment. not struggle against pain? it’s too big – my body moves before i think. but you see, when you writhe through a cramp, the cramp worsens without end. however, if you go to sleep knowing what you must know, when the cramp fires you into consciousness, somehow your body allows you to give it a new signal: don’t fight. get calm.

so what happens if you believe you cannot maneuver your jaw to speak? maybe you’ve just convinced yourself that your body’s natural reaction to feeling inarticulate is to struggle – not to feel the pain and, somehow, miraculously, trust that somewhere inside of it, the elasticity of unguarded articulation lives.

mix tape follow up

if i kick off my shoes and vacuum to this, am i in some way together with you, mix-tape-maker? these tracks are heavy with the non-presence of some memory of listening to them together, jumping around the kitchen or driving out to see the woods or getting warmer under a blanket, shifting around in our daydreams. i can’t decide: is this the sound of giant swaths of what i did not know, or what, if i concentrate gently like meditating, i can still discover?

kick off my shoes, put my sox to this dirty floor, pick up what i’ve carried in, gray on the bottoms of my feet – get the vacuum cleaner out, make the bed, do the dishes, mop, take this long sleeve shirt off, scrub the bathroom clean, get down on the floor with the remaining tracks, or, put those i have already heard back on, on repeat, pull out the study guide for the infamous GRE and enter calmly into some kind of studying with you, man. the evening is painted, the paint is on your hands and mine.

34: a draft as sharp and crimped as a severed tin can lid

with this
i will learn about you.

not what you eat:
what music makes you.

here is the stack
i got for my request -
labeled in your writing:
four options for first pick.

these four writable discs -
this is sort of
anything but
a firm handshake -

it claims a greater breadth: to be
a kiss hello, a kiss goodbye,
making love, dissatisfied nights;

trembling hands, hands that do work,
hands that wave
hey! hello!
and also that signal
goodbye.

which track is this? where are you now?
silent, lying on the floor?
dry lips mouthing words, the beat
memorized so that you
don’t have to tap your fingers
to feel it in your arms?

here. can you see me? now i’m listening,
—learning you— no, fuck that.
i am seeing you, and,

in seeing… in seeing you: feeling you.

or, in feeling me feel these
songs you picked, feel what we
don’t, what we are not,
but thought we had it
in ourselves
to be.

(i said, “why didn’t you come to me?”/ i said, “why didn’t you talk to me?”)

i see what i see, feel feeling me,
feel you.

you -
you loved me.
and under the earth’s crust,
no matter the height above sea level:
lava is moltent lava:

this chorus was written at creation,
to hear, for the first time,
today,

so, with this, listening,
can i?
can i know you any better
than i knew you when
i made my request for this,
when what i wanted was this,
to feel you, to feel, to feel me
feeling you?

upon the engagement of an old friend

in the realm of affect, who the f— really knows what’s going on? a younger scribblelip was known for her expressive silences; “what does that face mean” or “i know that face” or “she’s making that face again” — funny sort of dictionary a circle of friends writes to acknowledge definitions nuanced in ways only intimates grow to appreciate, and that’s where the 52 muscles that make the face make faces gain the scope of meaning.

if a photograph is worth a thousand words, a photograph of an old friend is worth those thousand, plus all of the definitions you think you’ve come to understand to be linked to eyes, cheeks, chin…  but, sometimes, i guess, what you think you remember from those old vocabulary quizzes gets shuffled around. does “dearth” mean you have too much, or not enough? is supercilious a character flaw or a quality? did that taught look about the forehead and jaw mean consideration or consternation?

i guess i missed a muscle or two last time i saw a picture of you, old friend, because the thought bubble i inferred read “help!” and i thought to myself, “friend, run!” but social media chuckled at my reading, and poked back at me with a slender finger – not the middle, but the ring.

shiny, shiny

i wish
you looked
happier
in that picture
of you
on new year’s
eve,
holding a
champagne flute
in your
beer-hand,
wearing a
shiny, shiny
shirt
on your
second-hand
t-shirt
back.

i want to jump in,
grab your hand,
run you off,
laughing,
screaming:
the beach
is ours
tonight!

view from the desk

the view from the children’s circulcation desk, nasser civic center
monday, 01-02-12

4 PM. the sun widens against the back of a cloud, behind the black hill,
making a silver light, a goldish light, bigger than any summer sun,
fill january’s windows.

outside, city hall, with its dirty cement facade, is swallowed by the mirror-
light which makes of human faces a mirror for itself.

seen from harris hill, this light would spread –
the sky would appear greater, perhaps,

but the edges might cut
less precisely than they do from here,
where the light is bound by
framed sills,
driving, like an anchor, through the wet exhaustion
of the year’s second afternoon.

when it sinks
it will sink with the weight
of sleeping bears, with the force of
astral flames extinguished in the terrestrial atmosphere,

until the blue that hosts the moon closes around it like a fist.

in the light made
by early evening, it is easy to sense

what you have learned
before the year was new
is taughtly sewn to
what you will learn
in these lengthening days,
these lengthening days,
these days
still without ending.