AFTERNOONIt is the way the afternoon sits on the far hedge with the maroon aura of a monk at prayer, these are nameless hours, trapped in parentheses of barren remembering, scraping sour probabilities off the edges of clouds, the quiet that hovers over the thick air sweating salt into the shape of my listless wanting, steepled fingers running through the hair of the wind the way thought seeks to curl a thread of time into itself, long ago becomes a point on the far wall when promises were whispered against naked skin, but it was raining then, a deluge that swallowed earth and sky, columns of monstrous wetness holding up nothing, rising from nothing, a drop tracing the smooth cheek of the window pane in a nihilistic line, pain too is a lump of purposeful nothingness in a cross legged chant for release, its shadow at noon falling at its feet, prostrate, the light a wall of grotesque truth holding up nothing, rising from nothing. It is the way the afternoon sits on the far hedge. THE OLD HOUSEthe blue clay jar I brought from the market in Marrakesh slips through mother's wrinkled fingers shattering on her polished red oxide floor, she bends quietly, picking up the pieces, one by one as brown teak rafters sag low to examine her bruised hands, grandpa's empty armchair peers through his round glasses, his long sleep shaken by the sound of earth on earth, the frightened kitten flattens against the cat-shaped shadow on the whitewashed wall, just as the flowers in her hair fall over her shoulder, wild jasmine; we sat there long ago, at that very spot, she, telling me a story about gods and demons who churned the ocean for the nectar of eternal life, me, running away, my cup of milk turning on its side, a dusty, pink stream leading a breathless path to the unresisting door, now, years later, I pace the old house searching for myself in the guilty corners, while the yellow sunlight from a far desert freed from its terracotta cage stretches in the cool shade of her orange hibiscus flowers.
take me in your hand, i bend towards you, phototropic your yellow heat burns through my stomach rises up out of my mouth until i breathe it out in dimples it’s difficult to imagine someone else feeling like this hot-mouthed warming, warming, warming pinpricked through white sheets, being eaten alive, how wonderful it is to feel weightless to not exist, to not feel the red of body but yours so light it melts on the tongue like sherbet
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