39

Journal,

Her and I continually discovering each other and abandoning the cruel fetters of ‘past’. She must think I’m a strange one, constantly mumbling on and on about things of the spirit, divine ideas and conversations with God. When I speak to her of these things, her eyes go away, she disappears, she cares not for these things. Usually, this bothers me about other people, a fury rises in me, but calming me is her gaze - a fragile recognition, a secret gnosis of love and intimacy. She strokes my hair and all of the worrying about my calling ceases into the ether. I worry so much!! With her I can see true things, her pale alabaster skin a sheet of silk where beauty herself sleeps beneath. I can’t believe it journal, I have been so far from home.

Tomorrow we go to Los Angeles to get away for a week. I’ll write more when I return.///

38

Her breasts and hands
Warmly transfigured
Blood on her hands
Milk on her breasts
She was mother to me
She bent over me
With her ivy and lily and daisy face
And her chocolate and kisses and lullaby mouth
I reached in to tear out my heart to give her a piece of me to her to her

And I cried tears like the Thames at the flooding hour
I danced on white washed tombs and ate up her nectarine skin
Swallowed the blood of her veins
Sweet blood of her citrus and sugar skin
The candy of her dying eyes///

37

It is a softness between us journal, soft and slow. We whisper to each other, fall into a deep trance together where only our souls dare to speak. Her black hair is wild, and when she wants to cut it I beg her not to. She laughs and everybody around turns, the kind of laughter that gives a man hope. I have hope now. For so long I thought I was mad or lost or confused, but I see God in her, a reflection so deep that she denies it, but I see it, she can’t ignore it much longer.///

36

Picnic day with my love. I brought out all the stops for today, not like the last trip, lost in hills.
This time we reached for tangibility, the accessible, the familiar
Drifting of wind under our clothing, at our mouths. We stumbled into an Eden today, creation mumbled
Bleak lullaby. Scattered whirligigs with sessile heather. Leaves of fall in careless choreographic.

I removed hair from your eyes and gave my first butterfly kiss.
I only wish that once the world could see.///

35

Full of December
Full of cinnamon
You shake out little notions
Your tongue to kiss and kill
Collides through my barriers
Guards that have left for their wives
I am unmanned and defenseless
Invite you in for the spoils
Full of Spring
Full of daffodils
Full of setting suns///

34

You fell around my hand like prayer beads, spilling your hair, you fell down my arm and slithered to the bed.

Aphrodite, I’m sorry, trying to catch you failed.

Perhaps I should have been there first as you poured from the sea,

like this moment, falling over me, crashing against eager shores.

I have tried to capture soft lips, cage them

and kill them, and hear them sing praise,

and a lily floating in a bowl of water,

is the monk’s only way, to understand.

///

33

Dear journal,

Dreams Dreams I’m poisoned by them.

My last dream took place somewhere in the South - hot, lush, swampy overgrown with voodoo and bizarre. A few of us, I don’t know who, probably the kids from the Doctor’s, we were all of us running around on what seemed to be an ancient burial ground, maybe Indian, only it wasn’t a burial ground - it seemed as if someone had taken a plantation and lifted it up from the foundations until all that was left was the skeleton of home huddled against open field. We took turns exploring the desolate place. We played in the Jacuzzi where that used to be. We tumbled about in the graveyard of what once was a master bedroom. We danced about with spring flowers in the heat surrounded by swamp and the sound of croaking insects, pushing each other down. We began to laugh and all of us couldn’t stop - but then I felt something different. It was a dark presence and I began to slow my laughter. I looked over my shoulder and a man was standing there about 40 feet from us - he was clad in a jet black suit, balding, his back to us. Someone asked in fear who it was. I didn’t know. We moved slowly to the vacant Jacuzzi, holding each other. We were filled with fear. The man stood there with his back to us and I called to him and he still just stood there. After a time, he turned and began to stumble over to us. No one moved. His face was hidden in his chest but his head was clearly bald. He came over to us and stopped, with is back again to us again, 3 feet away. My friends were shaking and making terrible fear sounds and whining and whimpering and somebody threw up and then somebody saw that and began sobbing more and for some reason I felt like I had to touch him and I reached out to his back while I was screaming and sobbing and afraid and I almost touched him I almost had him I wanted him to turn around.

Then, my love woke me up as I was in a cold sweat. She calmed me and I went back to sleep slowly. God is coming for me journal.. I’m sure of it. But I love her as she lies next to me. Pray for me journal I cannot now.///

32

Chopin is so wonderful you say. I didn’t know you even knew him. What else do you pretend not to know? Do you hide from me your love for God? You must, because I see it, quiet as lambs and asleep. But just now, this moment while you sleep, I lie here confessing it all while your hair falls across my old pillows, your breath steady against the sheet. Lone dancers, we drain out into little canals and rise up like tiny mountains. Rise to the air. Rise to stars. Where I confess that you are more beautiful than all God’s works.

And where us, clay figures, crushed up and tossed into each other’s dirt, are reborn and glassy eyed, smiled on, no longer pictures but mirrors.///