Polar Over the Water

Dusk till dawn I tell myself there's nothing wrong and that I have to move on from that sunken place where I couldn't see from the darkness and the stardust, where you left me stranded, because I can't begin to imagine things getting worse, but I'm not sure if I've convinced myself that there's nothing much to worry about, don't know if I believe it, when there's a table of evidence leading me to think otherwise, and I still feel like I did not long ago.

My cold hands are in my warm pockets. Cool rainwater is dripping from my face. When I talk about semantics I can't feel the tips of my fingers. I can't feel anything other than the sheet of rain and the flute of puissant winds murmuring. Droning on. From side to side. Golden rings and hate crimes. The eye is refracting light rays bending. Soft winter snows in a Dreamland. Habits fall out from the integument as though they're flashes, visions of a future, firewood.

In a whirlpool I was pistol-whipped and frisked. Counting the mileage. By the time I got to Naples and was kicking my shoes off by blue rock, wide open to the firmament in the courtyard of a palace at the navel of the world, I could feel the ceiling of my depression above my head. All those nights I never slept, laid awake, alone with my unfettered thoughts, revelations coming out of the woodwork, aeroplanes landing at Viracopos, were running through my mind as deep as blood in a mountain. Notes briskly written down. 

With the flick of a switch I re-filled myself with faint hues. Sailing through the ethereal azure and seminars as if I was a zephyr, the pearl of the oyster, inhaling the petrichor, as if I was the Cetus of the atmosphere. It all made sense, when I took my organs and painted them, those trombones in raincoats with the saddest eyes I've ever seen. This morning the daily struggle of living was an anchor.

I never thought I would've made it through it, and I'm not entirely sure I have. There's a dusk in my mouth. A penny with the spool. Making dollhouse prayers, I've got poems for every bad experience. Dream poems and confessionals. Looking into darkness but there's nothing there. When I was dangling from reality and bursting with exaltation, going around on the Ferris Wheel of life, time stopped for a moment and everything seemed fine, but it was an illusion spun from the fibres of memories I had forgotten. When I look out of windows the feeling of immeasurable loneliness augments. I tune into radio transmissions instead of sleeping. I listen to Jefferson Airplane to drown out the silence big enough to fill my heart. I am a baroque gyroscope. I weld with it, the metal doom of the mallet, and the silver of the steel. Unfazed, unless I'm embarrassed by my writings. I succumb to the thoughts in my head, I cleave to them and play dead until they go away.  

Broken promises pucker in the same way as the morning clouds in Serifos in the cabinet where I put my sonnets and ballads. I always go back to them, to remember the jewelled flamingos, the days of ecstasy. Coffin nails sizzle out with each thankless breath, brass monkeys. Violins and looped blood vessels. It's getting tiring blazoning how I am hard done by and all the fucking bullshit I've been through. I told myself I would stop but I never truly did. The only thing that matters is my genetic makeup, but I can't tell you the last time I went to the beach. I sit like the Omphalos of Delphi.

In the shade, far away from the sunshine laden with a luminous and overbearing glow, I am boxed in. I begin to move. In my bedroom I can't remove myself from the pain. Always fluctuating. I'm improvident in the moment. Pain tightens between the neck and the abdomen. Miles from primitive touchstones and reinforced blues. The calm transcends throughout the eventide. Today was languid. So very slow. My thoughts were a red pin cushion. As red as the blushing cheeks of a valentine. Buoyant on the seas of warm weather. We're a match made in Heaven. Everything means nothing. 

Across six hundred and sixty six lakes of fire. I see streetwalkers. Whores of Babylon where cities fold and bleed like saints. Cafés labour away. The breech delivery of a poltergeist is the Soldier of a religion. Miracle valleys are opening. Water from the stone. Weighed on the scales of justice in the halls of two truths. After the smoke and the ash and the dust I am no one. After the grace notes and the willow bark and the holographs on Astroturf I am no one. Drifting in and out of riveting and bucolic scenes, picking slugs from my chest. 

Voices swing from left to right, hitting the walls of the room and bouncing back into my ears. My body aches but I don't know why. I feel contagious, with my darkest secrets, looking for whiteflies and aphids. Colossal whispers on the pheromone trail. The pilaster is tumbling down. There's no way possible I could rekindle what has since disintegrated and formed ashes in a pile at my feet.

I have no motive. Everything was a piece of cake until the cult protest in the kiln. The pantheism is a dominant hand. I am submissive. The unswerving mind won't bow to the sky's heroics. Solitude is a warm blanket, a cocoon of security, a silky trap I can't escape from. The mallard is skydiving. I am honorific to nothing. All the longest days with no sun are adding up. The axiom is dying in its tomb. It wasn't my intention to be like this with my bones crushing from sadness. I can't pacify the desire or even cure my bedside manners. Sicily is a cudgel beating the sun, the blacksmith beating wat iron. Pleated sparrows sit like a Norwegian mother or an Italian vineyard fat with ripe wine grapes. Moving around. Moonstone. Moving around the obstacles. Now I've vowed and it all seems marginal now. 

Memories of 1940 have taken over my body. At the locus where I beam with light. I am a child of Sylvia Plath. She doesn't know it, how could she? But she has taught me everything I need to know. It troubled me when I learned of your death, how you must have been warm in that oven, but never more cold. How there was nothing I could do to possibly stop it, how you were impaled on dark magic. You came before me, and I came after Ian. You lived through the decades I missed, seen ghosts calling your name through letterboxes. I think about you, the high voltage, and feel baptised. Sometimes I hear them, the children in the walls, children of Gehenna, with angelic voices, talking about reckless sleeping patterns. The frog in the night. The strange odour under my nose. Discoloured. Ecchymosis. Last to stand like Sardanapalus. The mother of a culture. I never got to thank you, the victim of a war. Gallant but destitute.

We walked down the same road, yet missed each other by a lifetime. The newspaper articles say they never could have seen the flames from the side of an eye. I never could have seen it coming. Purple electricity. What a funny thing fate is when we finally meet it. When we are maharajas and lionhearts. 

Insomniacs hanging on to sudden realizations. Tight-gripped Ganymede, ancient incunabulum. I can hear your church bells. Feel like I know you so well. Soft metal is echoing through my body with waterlike movements. It has been drummed into me. Art. Diving headfirst into it. Beleaguered. I am covered in war scars. Silence has prevailed, it always does. I have taken off the black veil. The clouds of sand have disappeared. I can't find them, no matter where I look. I see your face, a rose of folklore.

I have poured my heart out into verses about this weakness that has made inroads into my life. Resorted to desperate measures and divided the medicine allocated to me by a positively charged ion. Clockwise and filling in the gaps. The betterments are bell-shaped. My instantaneous reaction was to repair the dislocation using the fickle power of hoping. Put the dreams in rabbit holes by oak trees. Off balance, on an even keel, out of place, or in form. Unctuous until I get what I want. I'm fixed to the feeling of being empty. All I have are momentous memories. Motion pictures playing over and over. 

Rejigged hexagons lunging into hallways with salmon wallpaper. On the azimuth I suck the saps of tall water plants and all the time we have is slipping away from us. I'm familiar with the facets of isolation. A bellyful of emotions flood me and waken me from a daze. Confined within the walls of my secrets, getting cold, never wanting to let go. I'm vehement and reticent. An amalgam of emotions comes rushing out with a torrent of tears when I hear those synths.

A rhapsody. Slanting at the edge, at sudden bends, dog-legs. Made of rigid grooves and bandaged wounds. All the times the sun came through the window are gone. All the times I was waiting for trains on platforms are gone. I'm left with waxy fruits and whalebones, symphonies and infections, seahorses and bookworms, grouses in elastic funnels. Bittersweet souvenirs. In a jar of honey. Good at hiding the skeletons in my closet. Lapping up drugs to the hilt. Made of thorns and ivy. Washing away the whit of sorrow I feel. Unnameable things. Lovely milk tooth. Cawing raven near the end of an uneventful month. More crazy than I've even been. It's innate for me to continue through the murk in my gumboots when I can't see the flowers at the end. Even though I don't know how to get out of the dark I'm trying. I am never going back again. Going and never coming back again.