Love and its Necessary Compromises
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December brings with it the ones I love. This marks my love for them: a response to suffering which leans excessive—more volume, more booze, inflammation, broad strokes, another bar, another restaurant, thoughts that trail from cohesion into nonsense then back to notable brilliance. Such is December, brimming with cold dexterity, the gift to write without reference, footnote, or citation. I know what I know. Music finds me. I meet someone that sees the magazine cover the way I see it. Not needed, but warming. Otherwise I want my time to be mine. Every second spent by my count. Every secret close to my chest, kept closer. Like last night, I rested face-to-face with my partner. There was nowhere else he wanted to be, nothing left to plan. He was mine when sometimes I spend my time thinking of women I will never get closer to. Earlier he had said, I hope you were wearing your underwear with the lining, about a lunch I had with a woman that might have been a date. He knows who I am, visible regardless of my belief. I’ve lived in houses, each of them mine. I watch the world from out the window where clouds cover rooftops. Words tumble in the aftermath—a channel reaches through the body and grips. Energy becomes my gut. I let it run through, let love have me here; the page is vast, possible. In our pillaged season of gratitude, I want you to see me bare. There is a person here, despite absences. There is a young one mining through the sunflower field where she found her mother haloed in what looked like light but animated as lack (not her own). Even then I was helixed at center and hidden, investigating the field of loss, self-inflicting in the search. All of life is never enough to put things down. In December, I am forgiven. It comes in quiet admittance. Outside the body, the air awaits disruption. I had wondered what it would be to reinvent the subject, the one speaking. I forgot my tone, how to dress. Facial expressions changed foreign, shifted out of control with little remorse. Then came the first instance of estrangement. Not localized in part, but whole. I could not point and say this part will die. Death was all over. The subject refused to speak, lost tongue, watched as power justified its killing and the many who turned away. Saw those selling something erroneous, inappropriate. Attributed the numbers beside their static image to an auction, their heads severed at the neck. Couldn’t stop seeing it. Addressed the subject as perhaps depressive, perhaps too attuned. Considered alternatives: love and its necessary compromises, isolation and its fruit, forgiveness and its ignorance, intellect and its callous avoidance, the future and its certainty. When the self goes dormant there is a winter, a stillness, a beauty. The subject is now an actor, perhaps happy. It is difficult, when wintering, to understand what you must do with the advertisement of joy, which in this season—so close to the election—is limited to the vision of those that only care about themselves. Lunacy is a natural response, a dead star outside time, a way to track territory and go viral. Because this star is so far out, so unconcerned with our sky, and because you never thought to wonder… I don’t think there is a diagnosis. All of it reads as evil among the garden. The promise of proclamation. Not the lie that we’ll be saved, but the fact that we’re fallen. We impart our imaginations and history mocks our patterns, holds them up in front of us and laughs.
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