I’m definitely meaner than I’d like to be. I don’t feel the need to apologize because it’s most imperative that I follow my emotions out to their absolute edges. The way this plays out always involves some impulse on my part to expand my private life, as if the bigger it gets the deeper my thought process. And it makes sense: if I’ve had to experience something and that which I’ve felt gets buried until bloomed relevant again in a poem; then it is the process which becomes malignant, then therapeutic, then the sole commissioner of the work. But this work is not about the process, rather about what it isn’t, which is only you.
First I need to explain the nature of grand gestures on paper: it was so dizzying to see your body not in-my-mind. I couldn’t hold you all together enough to make you visible. Because it’s not easy to digest a body that only feels soft and firm, when it also feels like Summer got an accent in Pays-Bas. My hands needed to make you.
I think you exist only to convince me of how impossible I am. I can’t stand me. But it’s fun; remember that one time I felt so hard that a meteorite fell from a building onto our bench?
Maybe I’m supposed to believe that showing you all the things I’ve ever enjoyed is unfair to me. What if you like them too? Talking makes me like things less, and I’m a bitch for that.
Even now I am writing this to not text you.
Because you are too big for me.
Because I’ve been sending letters and I don’t have the right stamps for you.
Now the business of the world is slow, so slow, orbiting air and huge swaths of sea. I can’t pretend that I’m distracted, or lamenting, or out skateboarding to the beach. One after another a family of birds visit my window and I form grand relationships with them, to see if maybe then I’ll want to draw them. Mostly I don’t, and they just sit and pose while I get out of hand:
Oh baby! I lost my pen and the room is on fire, just a kiss will do--
Resentfully they fly away. One time a cardinal flew right in through the netting doing laps inside the walls, spinning dives, and landing axels on the ceiling fan. This one I drew! I swore, and my neck was so horizontal that I tried to hold him in my hands but the room wasn’t amusing enough.
Fine, you dumb bird. I have you down! I have you where it matters.
But back down on the page my hands had made you.
Could it be that if I told you this I’d have lost the poem, senselessly venturing out of the process into an apathetic grudge? No, no
Again,
This
Is about you.
Which is the opposite of myself in confidence which is why I’m telling you about it
05/06/2020 6:45PM