26 March 2019 / 6 April 2019

The absence of a regular writing practice – the kind that isn’t really for any particular purpose, no deadline, no frantic scramble in a particular direction, nothing especially good most of the time, but just allowing the space for language to happen in a way that is both solitary and not – the absence of this feels like all the toxins that should be pushed out and processed through heavy-handed metaphors and unnecessary obscenity are all just collecting, pooling up in the small of my back, in all the places I would like to be touched but am always too tired–

language that picks up the slack for all my insufficient organs, the only way the obscure workings of my fallible body can be parsed through into sense //

my sense of touch is a sense of language //

I like to kiss with both eyes open (so the sense of touch can once again be sorted into a sense of communicated language, even if only the silent and physical variety) //

my depression lives inside my body and language is the puncture wound that allows it to flow out //

perhaps too long I have confused writing for longing, for an epistolary form of unrequited design (I meant to write “desire”, but perhaps the mistake is too telling to ignore, so it stays), and not a biological process that is ultimately about the system of myself // writing as a means of recalibrating, writing as a tool of strengthening, not as a tool of seduction, not as an endless scream that does not require breath of the drowning //

the image over and over of the body breaking its borders // of the velocity of desire // of the mutable form

I have never known the illusory comfort of being just one thing at once, and I wonder what is wrong with me // writing as an act of bridging, of overlay, again of recalibrating (where do your boundaries lie) //

chaos in the blood // the flat refusal of the closed door // the longing, the longing, the way I am forever being reshaped in the image of desire // desire both for the desired, and the desire to flee (the desired, the landscape, myself) //

I spent too many years writing poetry because I was in love with poets. // I thought somehow that if I spoke their language (forgetting that it too was mine) then we could stave off the inevitable moment where all communication breaks down, where we have nothing to say. // to have finally found a lover that does not make me want to write poetry, but to simply to look them in the eyes and always tell the truth. no ciphers. how strange, to be seen. //

now I can return to all this dashing my words against the rocks for everybody else, knowing that I will no longer turn to sea spume with the dawn.