.
I’m melting in this heat. Everyone is clinging to my body
(including thoughts of the past).
So, i’m cutting out concise black lines & drawing red bars, the glue residue is drying up before i affix anything to the page.
There’s music in the background, placing me in the debt of sleep, but i keep working. My hands are stiff with the fact i cannot find your address, no matter how many time i ask for it, i can’t bring myself to this last one.
I have all these little inserts, plans, stratagems; for i used to compose you all the time. Blearily, in a little cottage, the sound of rain jarring me on the roof. Was it raccoons? an intruder? I couldn’t call you, as signal failed, so i was left in an idea of love – love from a distance, how convenient. I wouldn’t have to pull myself open & face my own judgement (or yours).
I once gave one of my lovers a blood moth (the wings coming off carefully, with tweezers, the stamen tickling calloused fingers) – my stamps have butterflies on them. I’ve been drawing mutated wings with black lines, hovering over perfect pages with gray backdrops, rainbow eyes, sullen hearts in thought bubbles.
I’m good at love, in theory: i create the art in my head, composing letters & how-it-would bes, but when it comes down to it, i don’t know where to put my hands. Do i hold them in front of me? Behind? What about those cards? A five card hand, three card draw? Something more subtle?
I am out of practice; with pennies or with massages, with letting go, with asking for, with exposing, without deleting, i can’t use names, of fear that they change,
my journal pages were void of names, because i was afraid of being discovered. Discovered & all curled up, as a fraud, as someone who tried to prove herself of being more than what was lessened to a nub. So, the internet, when it was a safe space for me to come & spill myself, was eventually flitted into by those masses, so i find my journal appearing to be a simplified version of what the internet once was,
and the internet, surreptitious for me. I have to leave delineated sketches to my love(s), messages to them late at night, when maybe they won’t glance, or know, or suspect that i’ve devoted an art i’m trying to move forward past, because art is something you can control, but love isn’t a sentence i should complete.
I can fall endlessly for you, for you, for you, but the incantation fails if i don’t believe in it. If you don’t believe in it, if you don’t read your name certainly in every word.
(photos by Flip Cassidy & modeled by myself)
