And when I was sick? Where were you then? Where have you been? Where I go to seek you, will you be there? Where will I go to seek you out? The mountain? The valley? When I am there, where will you be? In me? In the leaves or the sky or the grass? In the heights? In the depths?

I guess if the past is a dead man, I'll always be performing CPR on him. It's gotten pretty disgusting lately, what with the rotting and decay, but I cannot let him go. Sure, sometimes I give up, stand up and take some steps away, but I seem to end up kneeling again aside the bloated carcass.

Even in my steps away he is what I'm thinking about. I'm thinking that no matter what the truth really is I will forever be deceived by myself and better off for it. Even if I can't run from my deficiencies I can at least hide. Perhaps they will catch me eventually, and so be it. But for now I will convince myself of the right things in just the right places.

I can't take a compliment. If it would help you understand I'd do it. But it won't, nothing ever will, so I don't try. It's not that I don't believe what you say, it's just I believe you to be mistaken. Everyone is wrong. Everyone's wrong about what matters and that's all that matters. I'll never really be the type of man I am. I am not anyone's type. Anyone is my type, and around and around and around. But it's not like I try. It's not like I try to be cryptic. It just is. I just am.

I've gotten pretty disgusting lately, what with the rotting and decay. Just wait until I mean it.

Do you believe in me?

The earth is shifting, even if I cannot feel it. There is a glacier moving through my life. It is scraping all the stone off the top, crushing and tumbling and depositing all the substance of me in places I don't think it belongs. But I have no say in the result, I can no more stop it than I can melt it.

When I look back on my life what will I dwell on? All the romantic things I remember with disdain. Not because of what it meant to feel them, but what it feels like to only remember. It's not the romantic things that eat at me, but the remembering. We only remember what we no longer have.

Can you prove a desire? I think we can desire things, but we can never demonstrate our desire. You can hold hands, but it might just be to stay in place. You can hold her, but it might just be to keep warm. It all starts where it ends.

I remember Her. Her is not a flesh and blood; not a mind or a soul. Her exists within me. When we have Her sad songs have a strange effect on us. We mourn how those songs once made us feel, how we know we will feel again one day when Her disappears. Yet we rejoice always that we have Her now. Even as our eyes narrow and hearts flood with the sorrow we remember and the sorrow we foresee, we are numb to it now. Her is fleeting. I remember Her. I just wish I didn't.

Let it not be that I get what I deserve, even if that is what I want. I can’t talk to you; you are inescapable. It is of no use; there is not an end. Bothering all the time with where am I, how are you, what will be, and most importantly, what has been.

What can’t ever be? Can it be there is never a we, always, only, a me? And what is me? A collection, vast and above time, of all we’s. The we that cannot be is the only we that matters to me. Blasphemy.

Again, ignore. Brush it aside as one and once and for all. I just want to give it all away. I don’t want what you taught me, I don’t want to remember anything anymore. I just want it gone. I want one. And you took that from me. I took that from we.

God, if I become anything, let it be that I become something who trusts all things, instead of something who reviles all things. Let it be that I become all things; it is my separation from all things that takes everything from me. It’s not that I hate what I am, it’s that I hate what I’m not.

This all starts outside the window and collapses toward my widow. For there may be some woman who has already lost her husband to all this. She’ll never know, but does that prevent a tragedy? It doesn’t seem so.


In some future (perhaps the one that begins at the end of this sentence), I will be something worth confiding in.

Triad

I lost you last night. I’m not sure what is mine to lose anymore,
but I lost you. And it hurt, but not that bad.
It seems your heart has gone from living, vibrant, pumping in my hands
to ash. You’re crumbling and
swirling about with the soft breeze that turns up my
collar. Bones around which our flesh once hung now
pound drums in mourning of all I never could have been.
I hope these are the last,
last bubbles of air escaping as my
hands hold our head under water,
last time I’ll turn in my sleep and turn myself back
over to the suffocating, gasping
last breath of you
and I.

I became a machine of valid
and invalid,
ought
and ought not.
And for naught.
Gears and cogs
gear up to bring down the pendulum
first across my pride, then back into
my soul. Ticking slowly,
stopping not.

Amid this most fruitless wandering I
Find a wasteless way.
Two roads diverged in a wood and I
Sat right down between them.
Choosing neither and hating both.
But furrowed brow and bitten tongue could
Never have made it known
To me that all roads here before lead but to one
Unknown, that all roads here before lead but to
Home.