More Than A Year From A Dated Corridor

- 5 Chills and Sore

Was it two our four am? She was feeling chilled--- sweat cooled and the wind was cold. Shivering, the fan off and huddling under the blanket, she felt her body complain--- It was just sex--- The body reaching for an orgasm, almost refusing entry; It had hurt and its protests were unheard. The body found itself responding more to mouth and hands.

I shake my head--- What foolery. While I--- I refuse to divulge my secrets, silent once more.

“I don’t know what you’re thinking…”

The body is there but I am not; the mind thinking of the end, here it is, at last, the last. Her womb recoils, stretched, and now moans its soreness. But, but, there was a moment--- clothed and curled into each other, she had felt like being home, returning.

Still, it was stolen time--- I said: A sunset that lasts through the night. Before, she had wished that they could stay in that room and they would be happier people. Still, the morning always comes--- I said--- This time, nostalgic and poignant, the end.

Her body protests and my heart is saddened.

+2 Courtship

On rum, finally, I spin and do not recognize the scribbles of the pen. Half-naked, I spin, like the fan in the ceiling. I am watching my heart spin and my heart spins, connecting tangents, mouth numb. I snap the fingers that become numb--- I snap ligaments and muscles--- These, my flesh.

I am watching--- witnessing--- my ligaments break. I watch mouths talk. Fuck--- Verbal---Not even a dance, just tiptoes, a damned tip.

“When I’m drunk,” she says, “I’m in another world.”

+7 Ticking

A back held--- over a name uttered by a loner in this room, “Allan,” I say. And hands open--- still, I think about honor. I think about honor in the past 12 years—You--- Who could have been (and whom I could have taught many things, you said). I am here, alone as if I weren’t. And now I think of you. I would like to thrum--- like a string--- and I wait. I have been waiting for 12 years--- time, in your time. I count back always what you don’t remember. But I do. I drink as if my other half is not here, as if I weren’t alone--- as always:

A juvenile singing of thwarted love.

+ 8 Non-membership

Another baptism, another vicarious stint as a godparent, I rekindle ties and smiles that have gone stale in time. Still there is that cord connecting 12 years and after. Now we are the only ones without wedding or honeymoon or pregnancy or birth or baptism or birthdays.

There is two, as always, in our pictures; the unlikeliest ones combined. I begin to feel like the lone bachelor in this group of letters. I think about other lone letters and names--- Do they feel this? Do they even feel… I remember how cold we had seemed for years: oblivious except to our paths and arrows. I now remember my wishes and why there are always bubbles.

I---

Think about promises made and unmade by time, broken in time. Yet, in silence, keep mine. There are so many--- like the unspoken vow I made at 10 years old onwards. This friendship rendered impossible except when we’re in bubbles--- What has become of us, dear friend? That we cannot even be friends…

Or---

That when friends marry or have families, I cease to exist, becoming foregone matter unless the real becomes hell. I piece you all together and I open my palms to set you free. They remain open for your coming, now and then, when I am remembered--- usually when your pain almost becomes a shadow that has a heartbeat.

Then---

Someone always comes: a boy or a woman in the cusp of what would mould the soul, wreaking these stings. Like this boy lost--- young Brutus becoming a brute to his wife. Or a goddess feeling the mortality of love, another fatality. Or what once was a stunted woman now blooming like a flower in her sculptures.

Then time interrupts.

“I don’t know what you’re thinking…”

Each time I wanted to say, “I no longer want to love you.”

++Now

It is but just a dance, hola Chico mi amigo. I wield the ligaments of my fingers so well, thank you. They were rapped by books and rulers and teachers since I was 10. I counted thirteen times I broke them. Just thirteen in almost 5 years and yet remembered.

Understand that when I look at the dance floor now, in paper or visible space, I want to make the cha-cha into a tango and the mambo into the samba until two-left feet can dance.

So that if one scorpion that is a mirror-image of my tornado says to my You’re a Black Gigantor , “No such robot. There’s only one Gigantor.”

I say, “I’ll write using a Black Gigantor and that makes it real/factual according to Mr. Google.”

I stick my tongue out and then there’s laughter (while the tornado is pissed).