“All day I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.” – Pablo Neruda
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How easy it is to slip out of each other’s texts, playlists and event horizons. Watch a ship fall off the geodesic surface pinned down with the dreams and spittle of a billion-fold, parasitic species; watch the seas swell up with yearning for its wooden inhabitation.
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An ant scampers dead leaf to fruit, moss to concrete honeycomb in search of (?) to drown into;
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A girl walks out at (?) o’clock to fade into never-heard-of-before beyond an alleyway painted with her worst fears manifest. Violence is scraps of dried lava like the last bits of wet stuck in her throat, like an incomplete scream;
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I crush a fly at the corner of my dinner plate because I can, and watch the water in my glass swirl in its own mourning;
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Language is (?) to mother tongues. One morning you wake up and pledge yourself to one; the very evening you discover it is molten ash, fluid uncertainty lodged unwillingly in your teeth.
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A tree stands in the backyard and calls me to its restless arms; I throw my ghostly hands towards it in insistent desire. My hands are marked with a history of unanswered prayers.
*
One day, a man told his wife to turn herself into the ocean, so he could feel her heartbeat all around him;
the next minute, she lovingly proceeded to drown him into a green mass of flowing stories as she disintegrated into a million molecules of liquid, song, heartbeat;
*
My mother fed me her madness intravenously but starved me of her faith;
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Ever heard of the girl who whispers names like sacrament across crowded hallways and sweltering nights?
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Sometimes, my hunger makes me grovel through scribbled names of lovers on monuments.
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And what then? What now of lakes stranded alone in the highest realms? Do they carry our complaints to the roots of the ancient oak? Do they sigh and evaporate when they see us, trudging along, floating in our longings?
***