Six

And so I can begin by saying that the water was not heavy enough so it floated in the air in giant forms over the city, not quite stuck in the metal apparatus of the cranes that litter the skyline.

But this is not how the day started. It started as usual with a nurse coming in without having entered. She was just there. “guten morgen” then she vanished without exiting in a burst of cheerfulness like the oil from an orange rind when peeled.

No. The day did not start like this. (m) he (I) thought to get to the source of it all. In order to do this ( ) had to become very young, to shed his years like skins of a snake. At once (he) was staring at a rock. ( ) could do this all day.

A rock;

A repository of sound, it sits in wait for the air to vibrate. It absorbs these pulses and holds them in a deep breath that may last years. (Once I vowed myself to never use the word, “like” in a text because things are what the are, even if that means they are something “other”) You can help a rock by cracking it open to release all the sounds it has collected for hundreds, no thousands of years. It then can breath again.

How did that huge boulder get there, standing alone as it was? ( ) had not yet been told about how rocks were the children of volcanoes. At any rate, like the boulder (you) sat alone and silent. Had the stone given (you) its solitude to safeguard? Lizards walked light footed on (my) skin when turned to stone and snails drew silver maps on (my) body.

Is this spell to keep ( ) alone, or safe in loneliness?

The doctor asked me his office. I am very sad things have come to this. I want to know what has happened. Later I watched the sparrows in the poetic grass at the canal. They were devouring the remains of a picnic. One I noticed took two bits for itself and the third bit it would place in the beak of another, which remained by its side. I imagined that they were lovers and this was very touching. Soon I realized it was a mother’s duty to its offspring. The afternoon sun was in all over me.

After however long I have been here I can finally sleep. I can see the end of this stay, but fear it. I have stabilized because I am safe, but all the darkness remains inside me. There are several caves in this hollow body, a network of them. The thin earth that separates these spaces has collapsed leaving one immense emptiness. The walls have been partially rebuilt and the myths that sleep in them rest for the moment. I fear the unity of these myths and the spaces they dwell in because together they are stronger than me. My parts are greater than my sum.

I have not written about the history of this place. They broke ground in 1962, on December 30^th, or in 1939, or any other year, and there was snow. When I was too young to know about suicide I wanted aliens to take me away, but I could not leave because this room was not ready for me, and Franz and Marcel had not been born yet. Later I wanted to die but could not because Franz was trying to be born and Marcel was too young to be fucked up. Later I found out you could replicate dying by oblivion, which was most easily achieved through drugs. Marcel was in school and Franz was still trying to be born. Fuck, how long does it take? Later I experienced too much death. All around. Everyone. Finally Franz had been born, so we spent some years being damaged while they finished the hospital. They let us in our finished room in late April 2010, and at least we sleep well.

I never refuted the future, I just simply never believed it would come. In the years of my early adulthood it was near the end of the cold war, which seemed to want to go out in a last gasp of fear. I thought that between Reagan, Thatcher destroying lives in their own nations, and the risks of nuclear war between east and west, that the world would not see another eight years. It was a time of coups, of wars they fought on weaker nation’s soil. Anyone with half a brain knew what they were doing in South America and what this meant to the lives of the poor there, and we knew the real danger that was potential with war on the Soviet Union.

Then came HIV concurrent with my being sexually active. Then it was fair to say that to choose love meant to choose death. This was before Silence equaled Death. I chose love. Also at this time was a utopian subculture that fed our dreams and also our nightmares. It was fed by the immediate, not by the future. I was very surprised to reach my thirties, and now am astonished to be in my mid forties and facing a future. I do not know how to do this.

Forgiveness

If it was a fantasy I must forgive myself

If it was real I must forgive others

In each case I must ask or be asked for forgiveness

To simply go on

Tuesday at 9:10 in the morning I go over the past

With not so gentle a comb