things organised neatly

When things scatter, I try to go back to the places where things make sense.

1. The very rent material of life, the fabric of me and you and those that we allow to hurt us this way. Family the warp, friendship the weft. The tools of the trade, the world trade centred in your heart and your head and the vast distances between them. The books that you want to read, the Bbe ehHi lloTy, the Hindu scriptures, the phone book that at last contains that I can call that you will answer. The song that sums up the senseless and the simplistic, your tongue sucking at the sibilant stream of air between that mouth snake muscle and Eve’s edgeline of teeth. These are the things that are not in use, this is the polluted environment. My desk is littered with the childish things and all I want is to see through a glass, darkly.

2. It is at last night time, this is the time to go home at last, and I want so much to put away everything that is not in use. But I am using my eyes, letting them dart wildly around her house, ricocheting from the walls to the shelves, to the unexpected items lurking with humour, a plastic miniature pig laid out upon a dish in a cupboard. I am using my mouth to drink and to eat and to smoke and to drink and to catch that sound in my throat. I am using my ears to listen to this song, but only for a second before memory chokes me before nostalgia defeats me before attention relinquishes me, I can’t hear the silence because it’s prickling my heart. I can smell nothing but burnt plastic. Lingering almost as strongly as the smell of burnt hair. I am using my skin to hold me in.

3. Love is like suffering is like kindness is like freedom from jealousy is like the absence of pride is like the privacy of what I know to be good and right is like unselfishness all the way down to the loss of very self is like the absence of resentment is like the hatred of evil is like the breath of honesty is like the ability to protect is like the trust of righteousness is like the begetting of hope is like the perseverance of joy is like the triumph of anything greater than faith.

4. What can be aligned to the fractal disbelief of the place where the ocean meets the shore?