When love falls apart at the end of the summer I’m tan, snatched, anxious. I have an ear infection, and relatedly, a cough, coming from somewhere the cough drop won’t reach.
Could it be that dick is making my "body” want a baby? Does my body want to prove to me it can become pregnant? Or do “I” want to prove something to my body? 34 is somehow eons beyond 33, in terms of everything, including reproduction. I will no longer act like life isn’t mine to live. That the regular aspects of it somehow evade me. Life at its high is made of the same stuff as life at its low— a free and frustrating pile.
Love falling apart means pacing around with its burden and no address. You have a home in my heart, but the key is your absolute desire to be there.
Does casual sex miss me because I get off to self worth? It’s distant prospect, the fantasy of its inevitability? A hard dick enters my mind’s eye and I let it pass like a cloud. I have to choose between AC and Hitachi. The ceiling fan blows the ghost of cold air around.
I let it pass like a cloud and land on “genius” as a glass bowl of colorful candy, baubles, “all sorts”. New shapes and brightnesses. Crazy, sexy, funny, potent.
[Love] falling apart shifts into benign days of relative solitude. I cook simple meals, take out the recycling. The days become narrow, lose their middle part. Outside the apartment is oppressive, sun and concrete. I have lost track of the temperature that hovers around 100.
With just a few degrees of rotation, my mind could love the fact that passion and its absence are equals. AC or Hitachi. I start this new phase of days with a google search: shade in Glendale, shady parks in Glendale, shady trails, trails with water—
One woman named Jaclyn teaches me how to track the sun, ads float over her instructions and I want an easier answer. The routine search ends in blanks which match the heat. An inside out winter. Summer got expensive and now everyone is busy before it ends.
The start of summer remains the greatest promise. We all live for what we hope it will be, what it was once. But lately the creek is randomly brown, etc. Sweaty sex in different beds, fireflies, hot dogs, storms, some better timed than others. Dead pigeons and rats, shit cooking in the middle of the sidewalk. Heads bowed to phones, balloons in the park.
In my dream there was a vibe, encouraging my waking fantasy of you. We were razor scootering on Mulholland drive. I woke up with no sense of having slept, the sun pointing at my forehead.
I check in with the absence of passion so often, to ensure it’s still gone. My head is a gourd filled with a weightless rubber cement. I wake up around 3 and cough from my ear. Everyone in the surrounding apartments seem to always be awake.
I dreamed myself to where you are traveling, your waking movements opaque to me. Sorrow and discipline. Plans become a sculpture. In dreams, the plans were so touchy, touching the fact of being up too early.
AC or Hitachi, murder ballads or industrial. A hole over there, populated. Small bright piece of information, I am in a ring around it, coughing. 5:25 am— its place on the clock rhymes with my place in the ring. Sometimes dark equals quiet. This morning the quiet is more loud than it is nothing.
By the end of the summer my conviction is slippery but picturesque. You won’t even look at yours. Your attention moves across continents, hearts.
Haunted in bursts by your brown eyes in July. Bright and with me. The attic library during the rain, the thin blanket crumpled. Walking downstairs with the motion sensor light to pee after you fuck me. Returning to your embrace.
It falls apart at the dry creek bed which makes me thirsty. A huge fly lands on my infected ear. I was singing that song around you every day but didn’t know yet that it was about you. The sun became a polyester blanket. I climb the mountain anyway, draft ideas for yours gifts: datura, everywhere in ragged patches. I am ruled by unstable, linguistic associations, by jealousy in liquid form, filling the shapes of words.
“Life” rushes through me in the form of cotton, black and white striped shorts. I bought these as a teen from a punk shop in Toronto. They were originally pants that I cut. Clothing becomes a powerful vehicle — green and silver shoes. In this outfit, I am pregnant. I see my teenage self and future pregnant self who is also younger than I am now. We cannot imagine our lives without the un-lived ones they contain. Anyway there is love, floating in pieces.
