Shoebox of mysteries

What is that; that moment when you glimpse for a second a completely different world than the one you were just in –

Was it a veneer falling away or slipping into place? The light takes on a strange, gauzy, ecliptic quality. My attention is drawn to my breath, the everyday magnificence of it, so pink and gold. For a moment I think I am someone else somewhere else, unbound by the life I have chosen. Like a fading ghost during a solstice, I slip in and out of lives I must have once lived, or dream of when I don't know I am dreaming. The table before me becomes harbor becomes penitence becomes tree.

Winded by the gravity of our monuments, a nausea rises up like so many flowers blooming at once.

For someone so sensitive to the invisible world, to the soft belly of human existence, I often find myself in situations that feel so removed from the nakedness of art and poetry that I survive only through armor. A resplendent mollusk, I navigate negotiation tables and board meetings and appointments with the stubbornness of an animal that refuses to die. I listen and eat and speak and scrunch my nose and scribble notes and sketch dreams from numbers. In the day, something in me calcifies that in the deep of midnight I crush beneath my fist into pearl powder.

Pressed into my skin, it catches the moonlight.

My task as a poet is to write, and to write I must live, and to live I must make endless concessions and use my teeth. Stupidly, out of necessity, hopefully, I thrust myself into terra incognita;

Know for myself what thousands before me have known; perhaps discover a sliver of crystal they've missed, glimmering beneath a thin layer of dust;

Nurse my ennui with a love for life I see in those who wish to do good in a world aflame with moral failures;

Plunge into internal depths as friend to mysteries, threaded with a fortitude forged in the accidents of wandering –

In the process, bestowing myself forgiveness.

Wherever I go my palace comes with me. Sometimes I come home to an ever-burning hearth and perpetual twilight. Sometimes a small house by the sea, iron and bamboo, sheer white curtains blowing in saline wind.

Solace and sorrow both, that I can withdraw within its walls where no one else can follow. Become both cocooned and unmoored. My pyrotechnic mouth full of firewood.

In this dream, I am lost inside a labyrinthine mall where all the brightly-lit hallways are the same. Storefronts bearing different names lead to the same display rooms of forgettable polygonal things. Somewhere, someone is waiting for me in a warm house I can't get to. Urgently, hungrily, confusingly. In the parked car I can't find my way back to, there is a bag of food going cold and I can't recall how I descended into that glittering arcade. My heels clicking crescendo against the shiny white tiles. Late late late

When I speak in riddles, I am being violently truthful.

To dare, constellated with wounds where the pain and light come through, a jolt back to life.

It's why I indulge my senses; to be cracked open like an egg in wonder.

Why I move from room to room, dressed just slightly inappropriately for the mood.

Why I map my inner and outer worlds religiously, creating secret atlases of appetites and tempers, anthills and acacia trees. Here be monsters, there be thieves, rice fields in between.

Treading slowly in the waters of the neither-lands, I raise my face to the night sky constellated, too, by pinholes of light.

Announcements.

I.

A stunning new magazine, Hungercandle, published its first issue this weekend. I'm honored to have my poems "Invocation" and "Irruption" published alongside other beautiful work. Warmest thanks to the editors, Abigail and Julian, for carving this space.

II.

If you've been here a while and would like something a little more tangible, consider upgrading your membership to receive my monthly epistolary zine, Epistolaria. Each mailing includes the zine and a limited-edition print.