Songs of Hope and Peace

You can't write about deserts and native myths. You can't sleep under the geometric patterns of the desolate night sky, dreaming of the Elysian Fields, by the water of a land or the red humps which is not your home, and write about what you've lived. You can't look into the eye and find a muse, or take a mushroom from someone else's forest. The keeper of gates is waiting on the road of hardship, where foxtails are turned into dream catchers, where blood grows from the alluvial soil, from the crackling of a fire in a soul. You must stay placed. Stay quiet. Do not walk far from your salt, from your sweat. Remind yourself, you are photons in vacuums, you cannot stretch love and turn it into leather. When you amass raindrops from earth, you are not allowed to speak.

I have been told my voice is useless, but I don't need permission to walk through deserts and feel inspired. The birds come back for the seeds like a sweet toothache to sing their songs of hope and peace. I tied my shoelaces. Who took your tongue, the mother from her son? Write poems on the rooftop of a building in New York, from your bed when you are too sick to function, where you let your feet anchor. In the perishing weather of 2 a.m. I neaten myself into every crevice, in the hot rocks of mountains. I drift with words, with snows, on a dangerous course. I fall into the moon's periphrasis, into unrivalled arguments, and sink faster than ships. Each thought dies from inertia when they won't evolve, deep-seeded into the skull of decadence, dearth in valuable brain matter, adorned in the self-loathing of a drunk afternoon.

When the berberis is picked, when you learn about those native myths, red rubies shimmering in dirt, you make memories out of cotoneaster. You remember the aromas, the bellicose way of defending what you hold close to your heart. You meet men in the vestibule, streaked with blues, talking about the things we've been through, being human. We are drills, boring into atmospheres. We were innocent, we were ignorant. You cannot change what the fourth dimension has written, so I sit like the past. I wake up content in the morning and I open the curtains, with a raging joy to be alive. The day is in my palms. I respire. I open the matchsticks. I pick at the gray, things starting to decay. Life unravels in a special way. I float through time and space. I land on black rock. People like me are speechless, and people like you don't see. 

Your body is flooding me with ecstasy. I am as soft as a baby's fontanelle. My eyes are crystal droplets, crystal dust. I am subservient to my desires, I listen to them. The years have been filled with glory and imprints of sadness. My head is filled with madness. The night hasn't even started. I have given my pearls to mathematicians, told them about two dogs with the same ear infection, my name on my birth certificate. There is no greater satisfaction when your bones repair. The new craving impales me. The hairs grow back. I rest on the marble worktop, next to the brown envelopes the postman has just delivered. I didn't climb into this mindset, I don't regret what I said. I hear the birds have awakened. I pour the water from the kettle. I sew myself to life in an awful attempt to console myself, I think of cake. I wriggle out of the day. This apartment has been up for sale countless times, more times than flickering lights. At once I feel the punch of the acidic memory, the punch of saltwater, all blended together. Silence is the biggest burden I hold, but I won't be silent. I will peel the spitfire from the rhyme, from the cry of a howling wolf at midnight. I will wash ashore. Suddenly I appreciate life all the more.