Speech in Praise of Eros

Although I do not pretend to understand, in the slightest, the nature of Love, it is one of the very few things that I believe in, and I believe in the power of Love with everything that I am.

I found the realization that this belief is so strong in me to be quite startling, as I am a girl of rather few such intangible convictions. This isn't, of course, to say that I'm apathetic, but rather that the vast majority of the things I feel passionate about are very concrete, unambiguous things—that violence is a terrible thing, that the environment needs to be protected, that certain parts of the government are broken. I am, by nature, somewhat of a literalist, and have incredible difficulty putting my faith in something that I cannot see, or touch, or, at the very least, visualize.

Love, though, cannot be defined, cannot be measured, cannot be predicted; defying the laws of thermodynamics, it materializes from nothing at the most unexpected times, and often is destroyed just as inexplicably.

This mercurial quality makes it easy for those not under the spell of Love to be skeptics; I, too, am often plagued by thoughts of why. I tend to think of Love as something close to divine, yet my stubbornly scientific brain often badgers me with the rather demystifying idea that Love is nothing more than a chemical response to pleasurable stimuli, especially those that simulate the begetting of progeny—which is, after all, what we are wired, evolutionarily, to do. Our genes tell us to make more of ourselves because the organisms lacking such a drive evaporated from the genetic pool eons ago. However, the less jaded half of my brain counters this with a question: if it is true that Love is nothing more than artificial feelings synthesized by chemicals in our brains, is there anything wrong with that? Is it any less noble if there is no transcendentalism involved, if everything we feel is just mind-games courtesy of our hormones?

If the happiness a lover feels is the same either way, does the source matter?

To reconcile these two endlessly warring halves of my head, I don't believe it does matter. Even if Love is somehow made less noble by not having some higher thing as its origin, it is still elevated to such great heights by the ecstasy that it brings to two people in love.

Love breaks down even the skeptic's carefully constructed barriers against the unexplainable, against rash emotions. Love destroys your carefully empty eyes, those words you tried to memorize, and as it fills you it washes away fear, self-doubt, and loneliness, infusing you instead with a wonderfully buoyant sense of belonging that serves as a lifeline to carry you through whatever hardships you may face. It is this quality of love, this uplifting, affirming sense of peace and confidence, that makes me believe in Love, that makes me worship it above all other gods.

--

Post-Valentine's Symposium speech. Written at 2am, minimally edited.

WWP6: Excavation

(www.jamesjean.com)

It was a lonely life, but it was hers.

She loved her forest dearly, of course; it's not that she had ever dreamed of leaving.

Even in the dead of night, when the darkness seemed to breathe, heavy air pulsing, pressing like a stranger against the nape of her neck, even when every sound was scared silent by the pressure and the fog, even then she would just wrap the smokey tendrils tighter around her naked body, pulling the cloud across her dripping candle like a funeral shroud, smiling into the misty caress until the sun's fury burned the vapors away.

It's true that she wasn't overly fond of the sun, either. Although she understood that forests need light to grow, she resented the way his relentless rays washed all the mystery from the shadows of the trees, scouring away uncertainties, revealing details but removing questions.

No, it was the twilight she loved the best, that in-between-time when the moon waltzed up the sky, gracefully forcing the heavy, reluctant sun below the hills.

During this dance of light and shadow, night and day, she would roam her forest haven, wandering, searching for someone-- anyone.

She'd tried forming her own companions from the woods around her. She'd made a pair of slender hounds, carefully stitched and sculpted from wilting petals and dying leaves, stuffed with loam and the souls of the moths circling her head. They ran beside her as the sun sank, faithful and silent as shadows, but still she searched in ever widening rings that grew with the hearts of her trees, searched for someone to share in the fleeting beauty of a spiderweb at dawn, its gossamer strands beaded with perfect drops of glittering dew, someone to share in her tiny circle of candlelight and read the patterns in the wheeling stars.

Still, she knew that if her spiraling exploration ever reached the edge of her sylvan domain, she'd never set foot beyond the treeline.

It was a lonely life, but it was hers.

--

This needs some major editing.

Weekly Writing Prompt 2: Reaching

(thelotuseater.com)

Sitting alone at night, I can feel you beside me in the prickling silence, feel your hands ghosting over my skin. I look to you and the world dissolves around me, narrowing, simplifying, concentrating around your figure. My eyes see nothing else.

Love fluctuates like mercury; as the summer fades to autumn I find myself beginning to doubt your solidity. Anxious, I try to wait it out. Petrified, I can do nothing else; I am frozen--longing, hoping, wishing for your return--and when I close my eyes I can feel you beside me, never close enough.

The land is bare and dead, its beauty now lying in desolation... a stark contrast to the joyous vitality of summer. I wait ever-longer, never truly believing you'll come back to me, but far too terrified of solitude to leave.

Rough Silk

Ribbons, ribbons, ribbons; my hair, your fingers, my face. Laced between our outspread arms, silken cords of what-nows and I-wonder-ifs stretch taut through cellophane silence that freezes our limbs and stifles our words. Eye-to-eye and breath-to-breath, our lungs are paralyzed in empty anticipation of speech; we are waiting waiting waiting on the verge of confession, petrified of refusal but hanging heavy and unsteady on fraying bands of wanting. Your eyes twitch with unspoken questions as I stand-- colder than I ever meant, than I ever wanted to be-- with a face that leaves no room for queries, but a gaze that begs answers. Plaiting strands of barbed wire and organza across your shoulders, I weave patternless purposeless tangles in a fool's attempt at intimacy, wanting only to find clarity and comfort in the opacity of crumpled ties, in burgundy ribbons across your spine.

Bare

I haunt the sharpest place in the world, where the trees ring with astounding clarity before my eyes, but slip, shivering, out of focus at the edges of my view; they slide into a vast, unknowable darkness of rustling wings and shifting shadows. The curling smoke spiraling tantalizingly upward carries abjection, remorse, anxiety to the sky, leaving behind only being. Let the fire burn, oxidize your raiment, expose yourself-- let it go. Forget to remember. Strip down to your bones; stand calcified in the omnipresent, omnipotent blackness, close your eyes. One, two, three hundred heartbeats pass before you regain sight, eyes open to the ever-watching, ever-patient trunks. Hopelessly dwarfed, your eyes turn upward to the great velvet bowl of the sky, as it sinks slowly downward to envelop you... swim amongst the stars, love, and condense, brighten; let yourself burn.

I'll watch from down below, ossified in my ring of stones, roots pushing ever farther, holding fast-- the waxen fingers on my weary boughs reaching, reaching as you shine ever-distant: cosmic and unreachable.

When there's nothing left to burn, come back for me-- inflame me, engulf me in your silvery conflagration. Constellations, we'll fly.

Travel

We're on a train in the night,
accelerating with such a solid relentlessness
it sometimes seems we'll never be able to stop,
we'll just barrel on through the coaldust darkness forever,
ghosting through the skeletons of ironworks
and the shuddering bones of dying industry,
watching civilization level and smother the landscape,
watching flora and fauna slowly but inexorably claim it back,
watching the atmosphere oxidize the shining lines of the city's arteries,
watching each capillary turn to rust,
watching the blood rattle tiredly on.
Bleed it out, bleed it out, bleed it out.

It's been too long since I've written haiku

the smell of the night
makes me want to run until
I can't get back home

--

you are embarrassed
and I'm just amusing, so
why try to hide it?

--

funny how sleeping
makes everything go numb
and fade to fiction

--

it's an eraser
or an ice storm, blurring to
surreality

--

I'm fading, aching
leaning, with lights flickering
I sink into you

--

I miss your music
even though now it only
makes me all empty

--

exhaustion, you see
is the most addictive type
of psychotropic

This is obsolete

We are floating on a picnic table in the sky beneath a harlequin moon. We drift out over the edge of the precipice, singing, laughing, mendaciously carefree. Every smile condenses a little more-- the moon is twitching, leering down from the clouds, the silhouettes of sedentary ghouls. The trees are melting as the air begins to hum, sounds dripping past hearing, into pure feeling. I stave off jealousy with denial, but you are phosphorous. The night is vibrating as I pull you ever closer, eyes shut tight against your plurality, against nothing wrong, against everyone else. I hide truths in lines of ruby down my back, absorbing, mending, darning all the loose threads in the stories I tell you with a lunar grin. The sky ripples disconcertingly as the crew of our picnic table/boat/zeppelin shifts uneasily. A lion roars through the reeds and I shiver with wanting, with waiting, with never-having. I steel myself to take what I can, give nothing back, and smile like the moon.

This is old

She stalks ever nearer, raindrop footsteps on the soaking grass, shadowdancing, cloyingly coy, unreachable but never quite unsensible. Her taunting tainting eyelids, dark with laughing, shining with flirtatious sidestepping, hide nothing; I don't need to see your eyes to know I'm being played with. Roadmap toes caressing the mud, she waits to run. I tie on my blindfold and give chase.

Insomnia

I'm mesmerized by fireworks and thunderclouds, lying on a sinking island in a swamp of navy and sepia, alert as you sleep, crushed, failing, falling as you rise. Overcome, as always, by hesitation, there's something hooked behind my solar plexus that won't let me go.

Caught unanchored in the center of a counter-current cyclone, I'm adrift. Catch me, my cavity; collapse.
Pure lymph, pure ache, purely hollow.
Collapse.

Endolymph

The walls are breathing as I lie tilted and tumbling slowly in the cotton darkness. I can feel your arms around me like ghosts, cold with waiting. Lids close down and the universe shifts twenty seven point four degrees left and sixteen degrees back right as I jerk ahead and stumble over a crack in the floor that your dripping faucet forgot to mention as I crept across the cramped and crumbling tiles in search of a patch of air to place my potted plant, somewhere where the walls don't steal all of the air to sigh it out, chilled and empty, against my blind and blinking wrists-- pale, taut and trembling, always waiting. I focus my retinae to needlepoints to create a tiny one-moment, one-centimeter void, a lack of sensation, a relief on all fronts; potassium gates locked, pumps off. Sighing out to acidosis, concentration dropping, fingers twitching, pulse racing and nerves crackling. My bones release sounds and stiffness into the soft shoegazed abyss, but they leave energy with no will, windows with no shades to cover the unfortunate exhibition.

Three

exorbitant speed
pulls me apart, rips my seams
blurs all my edges

--

mesmerizing dust
coats our hands and our faces
we turn to the sky.

--

you walk down alone
trailing a shadow of thought
into a streetlamp.

Attraction

if you wanted this
you should have picked me up before I melted into the sidewalk
it pulled me in
as I swirled my fingers through the cracks
they pulled me under
my nerves tangling with the roots of the weeds
I reached in
the clay soft, quiet, choking
I sank down
floating gently in the silent world of tiny worms
suspended
dark behemoths rising beneath me
I fell towards the sky
as the cracks widened with every step
you pulled
viscous resistance, apathetic limpness
pulled me out
the sun was blinding, but you were there
holding me
closer than ever, after it burned
I pushed you away
cold and dripping, caked in concrete
don't want this
let me sink back into the sidewalk
I'll hear you
the echo of your boots on the grey cement
reverberates
I'll know when you're near me
but please, just let me go

These are old

oh, sweet apathy!
why hast thou abandoned me?
it's too much, too much.

--

exhaustion's stolen
everything you thought you had...
my body, my mind.

--

you're delusional,
don't think it's all behind us....
open your damn eyes.

--

you are my caffeine
I am giddy, ecstatic
and crash-- empty, low.

Spin

Floating in an effervescent sea of thistledown
Rocked by your infectious, fevered pulse
Washed by waves of black ribbon
That extract all thought
All emotion
All sense of being
Leaving only a body
In an ecstasy of pain
Reaching, reaching, reaching
Never quite enough.
Jumping, always waiting
For you to catch me in your brittle arms.
You never will, will you?
Not until I've already splintered on the smoking ground.
Twist me out from your spindled tongue
Or send me shooting up your spidered veins
Make me a part of something beautiful
Anything that isn't me.

More Haiku

your skin is honey,
but I'm not a bee, no, I'm
just a tiny moth.

--

leave me alone, please.
this dirigible only
holds one psychopath.

--

my nose just floated
off of my face, I'm afraid.
can you spare some bread?

--

your shed has been the
base for all my secret plans.
(ignore the bloodstains).

--

wow, that is a large
basket of hummingbirds, sir.
mind if I steal them?

Several Quick Haiku

hello, old man sun.
burn me quickly, won't you now?
I'm a lobster girl!

--

no matter what you
say to me I cannot cry--
I am an island.

--

why'd you take away
that piece of my sky? all the
daisies are screaming.

--

A SUPERNOVA!
That is how I want to die.
Implode, then, flashBANG!

--

oh my god, your hair
the ocean in my fingers
entwining, sleeping.

Failed Attempts

I am an emotional sink, a lightning rod, if you will
I draw in the raving and hysterical and shudder their shrieks down my bones
Twisting my entrails out and jolting my nerves in an electric ecstasy
Too blunt for effective attraction
Intended catharsis still doesn't work
I'm sorry I don't know how to hold you together when you fall apart on me
In the middle of the night when you're besieged on every side
And the persistent thud of the ballista and the sickening rumble of powdered masonry
Makes me drown myself in stale chocolate
Laced with nostalgia
It doesn't really help, but I do like to pretend
That bitterness cancels itself
Rather than building on every regret
Every reminiscence
Do walls hinder or help, here?
Should I render myself defenseless before you
Or would a strong solid facade be better?
As much as I believe in honesty
I don't think omitting how shaky I am
Really counts as lying
Does it?
I just wish I knew how to hold you together
Without lying to you completely...
Trust me, I wish
I wish it could work
It would do us both good, I think
At least for a time
But I just can't risk that
It's too much
Too much
The stakes have risen far too high for this
I don't care if the shrapnel collides with my body
A shield may be all it's good for anyhow
So I'll catch your pieces, love
And put them together as best I can with bits of wire and
Binding twine
Scraps of ribbon
Don't worry, love, no needle.
But my hands are far from deft
I'm sorry
I'm sorry
I'm so very sorry
I wish I knew what to say to you
But everything is mud, now
All my clarity... did I ever have any?
I wish I could remember how I used to handle crumbling minds
Instead of how hypnotizing you smelled...
Why can't I go through and erase all that?
I really don't want to remember you anymore
I was so much more content when I didn't know how lonely I was
But I don't understand
I'm... I guess I'm glad
But I don't understand why...
Hell, I don't understand any of this
That's why I run away and up
Into the wings of the night on fire
Into the spectral current far above your uncaring head
I walk up her fingertips
Crown my head in flames
Because I can't believe you anymore.

Everyone else is drunk

Nail-file air conditioners drill their way into my ears with the steady tap-tapping of the drip from the uncleaned overfilled overflowing gutters ten feet straight down onto beige aluminum as sirens wail in the distance, on their way to something they or someone believes to be urgent enough to merit flashing lights and an alarming cry. A train whistle resonates in my bones as it rumbles heavily through my backyard. Timid crickets tacitly attempt a two-note lullaby to lull me into a two-toned dream world where everyone lives in an enormous canteloupe and all their shoes are verdantly neon. The wind rustles the leaves insistently: 'no, don't sleep, don't sleep, you don't want to go there. Trust me on this one. You'll only have dreams that you won't want to remember, waking disoriented, disconcerted, anxious and angry and feeling like you've gotten no sleep at all. Better to just lie awake and listen to machines rolling obliviously by until exhaustion consumes your brain and you fall into true unconsciousness. Trust me.' Your mind snakes its way insidiously, amphibiously up my leg, across my sun-baked cacti thighs, your scent intoxicating, seductive, corrosive and compelling. There's a void between us as you bask exotic in the sun and I erode in the tired familiarity of the absolutely ordinary. I can feel you, I can feel you, and everything is velveteen, the softest dove grey into the burgundy stretches of late next week as our paper-crane wishes and basketweave lives overlap and maybe, maybe intertwine for a nectarine moment of tasting ambrosia in your hair, and everything will cool to an igneous black, if we can keep ourselves from bleaching out to alabaster as I desperately trade you a pocketful of buttons for your needle and thread.

Squinting, nearsighted thoughts in the dead hours of the night

Sometimes when I'm talking to people on the phone I forget that they have substance and that they actually exist at a concrete point in space-- they have an environment that they must interact with. I just think of them as disassembled, disembodied voices suspended in a fuzzy black void at the other end of the wire-- which itself is becoming ever more and more imaginary.

You have a way of picking me up so that I am floating in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, laughing and gazing down at the birds like ants below the vaporous clouds, but also of plunging me down to the very depths of the sea so that I lie, swaying gently, in the murky sands, nibbled by unseen creatures and watching the eerie lights of bizarre and grotesque fish drift by before they disappear into the gloom.

On the edge of sleep, my bedsheets are made of barbed wire and eider down.