you’re snoring. every time i’m tired suddenly i’m not at all. do i ever sleep ? all i can remember is being awake, always thinking about sleeping & walking around in a dream. nothing comes to me as easy as telling the truth—i think i was born to do it. i think once i told a lie & all my eyelashes combusted.
i’m seeing the world so frantically i can’t keep up with myself. makes it hard to expect anyone to take me seriously—who cares i might be finite ? feels traitorous to be doing anything besides writing, each minute a realisation i’ll be leaving very little behind. no dna, no kids; nah, nothing like that. i dedicated my life to myself & my words & my lovers too much & very early i never developed that maternal interest. please don’t recoil in disgust. don’t poke flesh for a uterus.
this day, i’m starting with a breath, clutching the blankets through a cough & splutter. if my lungs were balloons i’d breathe in deep & fly a perfect line around the equator; i’d be holding my thumb out, closing one eye & pretending i was slicing the blue fruit in half. i wonder what’d be inside—lots of little seeds, like a pomegranate ? or maybe an orange yoke would flow out, sending citrus and membrane into our oceans.
i often think to the future, because i am naturally anxious & frustrated at our state of lagged thinking. textbooks in posterity—if still around then—will write about us mockingly, incredulously; calling us barbarians in the same way we scoff at people from the middle ages. makes you wonder: middle of what ? i like dark ages better; seems cooler, less agitated in its glaring affront to relativity. historians, take heed: avoid words like middle, new or old. the further we travel the less those labels recognise us.
funny, though, since we’re now in the middle of the new dark old ages—the light-dark ages, the techno-dark ages; the embarrassing collision of advancement & decay. you’d think we’d be over this by now—that humans would grow tired of greed & prejudice; you’d think, you would. there are no hours where i don’t think about it—i must burn thousands of calories a day just by grieving selfishly for the world. it is petulant & glamorous to cry for humanity, it is a privileged ability; something i can do from the luxury & safety of my own quiet room. those in real peril are less able to cry for a better world, one where kindness is possible; they are fighting every day to stay possible in the first place. when existence is fraught—idealising is opulence. is there any way to move through this space without being unbearably cruel ? i have yet to learn; i am scared to find out.
perhaps i was born too sensitive to this world; maybe i would have fared better on a foreign planet where tending is tantamount to the good life & everyone speaks in little poems & nobody finds that insufferable. maybe a foreign time where a dimpled moon filled the entire world with blue, & in the evening the sun would rise & drizzle hot lava over treetops & then sleep came easily to everyone, all at once.
creating a perfect world is an exercise in humiliation. there is no perfect world: not ever here, & certainly not in thought. caveats come naturally to humans, they are impossible to ignore; thinking is our drudgery & why we are so brilliant. you know that phrase—where something is described as both a blessing & a curse ? we’re kind of like that, but more like a blessing, a curse, a curse & a blessing.
but you make a nice recess. when your gentle hum comes rafting in, i’m almost surprised to hear it, as if earlier you’d sworn you’d never return. you’ve never said that but it always feels like that. truth on my heart i am unbalanced without you—always missing something integral, always an insistent tongue. i don’t mean to cause a commotion but every time i am re-aware of the fact you exist something inside me just becomes real again. oh thank god i think. oh god, thank god, the god i don’t believe in; i whisper thank you god, oh thank you.