Eve
I
It’s a story that began in middle earth, where the relentless energy of all we cannot control or understand
travels across right and wrong and down through spirit valleys into the unseen shadows of light between our human bones.
It’s a story that I already know and I wonder if you do too.
It’s a story authored by a tramp with a santa beard and a mischief heart who spins and spins on metal discs in playgrounds
then flings himself off the second before lifting the pen.
It’s a story I thought I didn’t need to hear again
and now I too am reeling in circles, giddy, dizzy and alone in the end.
The end I’ve read so many times, yet here we are fighting so fiercely,
so dangerous and defrosted and naked
over what happens in chapter two,
and I’m going to let you write it,
oh god.
Am I going to let you write it?
II
It’s a story whose ashes still fester in my abdomen
refusing again to rise to a better place,
and now I see the cinders there
staring back at me from the genie lamp in your iris,
your strangely familiar face.
This story is a staple meal for Beauty, Agony, Loneliness, Magic
and even the Gods of gods, Life and Life in Death.
They eat it like coconuts, smash it open, slurp its blood, taste it on their tongues, their throats,
revel it its descent, then they rip it apart and gnaw at its flesh and throw it away, an empty shell of a tiny story,
unrecognisable now.
III
In the shell of an old story I will sit with you and watch on curiously as you touch me for the first time:
the arm, the head, the hair in my eyes, the shoulder, the waist, the mouth, the cheek, the mouth, the mouth, the thigh, the breast, and yes, that’s right, I told you to stop, to stop, to... stop.
IV
In this story I’m the addict and you know all the tricks: poetry music magic far away mountains lepricorns and russian ushanka hats,
oh, and they way you kiss my ears like they’re the secret key to the only box I was trying to keep for myself.
It’s a story in which even a kiss is culturally subjective,
and I’m on all fours again in the sand, making mud cakes with soggy, salty treacle
only I’m too old now to read this
without feeling sick.
V
I know this story as it begins with a naked girl
with sticky hands and a broken tongue alone in a room with an almost stranger,
wondering what happened
to the beautiful clothes she planned on wearing
with the dying flowers that no longer look fit to crown her head.
And it ends the same way it began with the forceful, thoughtlessness of a beautiful young man
who believes in magic and makes sure he gets it who ever it belongs to
even if it’s mine and I carry it in the heart of my womb.
VI
It’s a story that’s a lot happier than the way I remember it.
Euphoric in fact. And yes,
I’ve often had the audacity to call it love.
I like to read it again and again, sifting through the pages for the exact moment my ravishing need for Life becomes my
downfall.
Perhaps I’m thinking if I just knew
I could forget, move on. Forget. Move on.
Perhaps I’m calculating that there’s a certain moment
in a certain chapter, where, if I hold the pen really tight, I might just escape
with most of my soul organs in tact.
Or perhaps, in fact, I’m only reading, reading this story
because its author is my muse;
this giddy, musical man, half naked, unshaven, in the playground without a home, dancing to the sheet music burnt into the disc of the sun
as time goes by unnoticed on a silent metronome
VII
recalling time
a jacaranda seed, an upside down city,
a red scarf, a white lie, an undelivered gift
a familiar face, a stolen grace an almost untraceable prelude to the saddest, most beautiful eulogy
ever sung on the eve of a birth.
