Something Eternal- With Scraps From The Waves

Image Description: A pair of lost shoes on the shore is accompanied by footprints on wet sand. The light reflects dusk on the sea. White horses are spread upon the image above and surrounding the shoes.

This extreme fatigue 

I name it tough luck, but I will be prevented from forget, you have spit on dead leaves [she is a ring, a good dream, a nice one]

I was smaller when I would experience a recurring nightmare, some dream about rings of bright colors 

They would extend and then shrink, making this overwhelming series of burnt red and green and blue behind my eyelids 

I never knew what the dream meant or why it was so frightening, why they felt alive 

Once I read the first line of The Waves I was taken back to that nightmare and if I close my eyes still, I can see them, taking over me 

Saying your body is young but this life is fast and so I will consume you 

So close behind my eyelids, making a mockery out of restful sleep

Arbiters of my youth

Rings 

I don’t know how productive it is to think of the past, but I do it often

I don’t know what contains these memories or why they hold so much of me, like acts of desperation, empty grocery store bags tugging on mandrel fences against the wind, all they do is pronounce fiction—they don’t exist 

Though they are semblances of dead things 

Scraps of sensation I no longer have access to

And so nostalgia forms a bubble around my brain, because history does not feel concise 

Though it can be recorded 

I think of Sartre, he says memories are coins in the devil’s purse, once opened, there you will only find dead leaves

Dead leaves

So they tend to rise and shake and represent some cosmic thing about life and the recurring birth and death of every year, might be some spring solstice or an old bathtub this milk-white waiting to be filled reflecting yellow as the comedown of the sun trails the hazard curb, reassuring worthy of its pearlescence, for it is prone to decay if bodies reject it; because nobody wants to take a bath in the winter

But this here is simply now 

And seasons will keep circulating when you die 

Egotistic, foreboding, they work like seaweed on the shore, detached from that which always pulls them; the reality of progression, some other illusion I have failed to find a name for 

A memory is a weird thing, so preferring daydreams when I can’t sleep leaves the past saved for pockets within each day

I let moments hang behind me and repose in a baseline grey, some awkward encounter, the sum of my life are covalent bonds encountering themselves in this quivered dance

What perverted shadow, drills questions of productivity through my skull

“What is the end of this list? Is that bad habit still around? What list? Have you called her yet? Why won’t they look you in your eyes, and do you know you are not one but many? Do I look alright today?” 

And there is eating

Oh, then, I am recalling a memory

If not resistant, forgetfulness means all is lost, if not the thing itself at the very least, the semblance of that thing, despite distortion, could bring back a time– a soft nudge reminding for a brief moment that you too, have in fact felt joy 

It is precisely exhilaration that seldom drops in

So hold on

They are stagnant, then blur

I turn then to the waves, and they do not trace linear motion but staring at the sea long enough might find one in some solace or forward-ness, grief maybe 

Can’t capture exactly what that’s about 

Cathartic I suppose, Sirius must have gleamed down light years past watching eyes streaming hot and hectic in front of the Atlantic 

Or the Pacific, it’s all the same

Nature is indifferent, and so meteorites pass despite our families dying and wars discourse continue endlessly and indignant legislations are signed, letters are sent 

Taking its natural course of things

Human obsessions with violence do not obliterate the earth, until they inevitably will, so hold on 

But we know the sea is not indebted to commerce or obliged to avenge some personal infidelity

It simply persists

The sun will punch in for its shift in a circle, despite broken watches and standard clock time jerking forward, rinse, repeat 

It may well be an involuntary routine, still, our sun commands some sort of acknowledgment 

Indifferent, however, to your every frailty 

In any case, life is but a procession of shadows, and god knows why we embrace them so eagerly and see them depart with such anguish 

Feels like time is dependent on light, but time will always knock at the door, saying yes; I will spin around you 

I will hang over you, demand that you know that I am heavy 

And a drop will fall 

And I will carry it on

I am hoping to catch up with this stream, this Monday to Tuesday to Friday that Bernard knows so well 

The disillusionment of time, of phrases too

Reckless matter 

So why should someone hurry, because the in-between aches so

And get on with it

Those fangs of old pain, fangs of war abroad, they will come home to bite the mouth that fed their leaders so well, and greed will take its toll on you too

You might not be its solicitor but like that body of water bodies of empire are indifferent to the corpses they prune over

Like memories, they see you as Sartre says: dead leaves 

So hold on

But Time tolls forward, and the Swallow will withdraw from its hiding to caress another spring, 

Meanwhile, snapshots of light slip intense self-consciousness, and for a moment, time out

A spillage of something representing, that sapid taste, held inside a mouth as long as possible before the nervous system delivers its function, you swallow, carelessly sending moments to the pit of your stomach

The means through which you live you take for granted

This life 

The one that Virginia writes so well 

And so, listless became the air in her empty room [my war, why did you die?] after I strike spurs into the horses, and I fill your hands, and bid you goodnight 

Your face, eternal

If you were real, surely you were, and I said to you, and the sentence did not finish, and I do not recall praying over the phone before the day of the Knife the way you asked 

I overflow white heat, I miss 

Tripping over every step, I can’t catch this breath, what pathetic necessity it is to catch up, I render intention to finish, but I cannot bury things 

There is only sinking, and overestimations of fleeting relief 

But you, intrepid; forever better, purer than anyone I will ever know 

My war my war my war, you are not one of them 

Your project gilded, completed too early 

I have laid down my brush [the machine still exists, and so mourning will go into hiding within the ordinary day, and I am not above having to progress though your end seems to have made all seconds impassable, it seems you have invented the halt to a body once breathing, it is fell] 

This extreme fatigue 

I name it tough luck, but I will be prevented from forget, you have spit on dead leaves [she is a ring, a good dream, a nice one]

She, lying with a protruded stomach, once had hands, and they trembled just as yours do

Carried and never spoiled the water, or the pencil, or the dog; hers always softer

I want to borrow her good

This extreme fatigue, let me on 

My war, and this stupefied regeneration of atoms 

Nothing but lowered voices from now on, and the task to carry the serenity of a Gentlemen’s gentle man  

Filled is the air now with scattered leaves only defined by absence, I have covered the whole street 

I look back at you, into the sea, into everyone I flush 

I have had my vision, hold on