a snow of butterflies: texticity, October 2004

by Tomorrow's Man

January 2001

Monday, 1 January 2001

The perfect day to wonder why it bothers starting all over again. Time blinked the way it does, and we shared sour champagne smiles and sweat. Nothing changed but for times batting lashes, a little longer now.

I feel a bad breath coming. A hard year. I hope this feeling is just the cold eating my failed, incompatible marrow, the dark bubble welling up through the false joy I have worn like a skin these last three months. Many said the end was near, and I am not convinced they were wrong. They were only mistaken because they were waiting for a scream, when most of us knew that the end would come in a long, decaying whisper, a final bad breath that will call the worms to us, hungry.

Tuesday, 2 January 2001

I know what it is. I want to go out on a peak. I know that all the joy I bring you will crash fire into your lap soon enough again, scorch you through to your blood. I want to rise and rise, a phoenix from your lap, and soar off with Icarus to help him blast through the sun. I want you to always be looking for me smiling, upward turned faces to heaven.

I want to die high.

Wednesday, 3 January 2001

I have to say, I'm pretty disappointed in this here batch of maniacs we had this time around. A whole millennium gone by, and not a bombing, mass murder, religious cult mass suicide, nothing. Okay, one office shooting of 7 people - but that was a coincidence, he was just scared of his tax returns. He does not count. I have to admit, I think a surprising amount of NYC is still standing, a surprising amount of L.A. not smoldering. I have to say, these past two New Year's Eves have been quite disappointing for us fans of entropy.

Arbor Day is coming..........

Thursday, 4 January 2001

I'm taking a swing at this shadow of mine. (quote, unquote.)

Thanks, Dye-vid. All it ever takes to get out of the morass is an angel, gilded wings sooted from walking through the fire with a thin cynical smile, eyes crinked with laughter and the knowledge of how to ball-kick death, hair a mane of tangled fire, the breath of babies behind her, floating in giggles and plucking lyres in the air, alabaster arms and long marble thighs that hold me like the stickiest spider's webs on til the thunder of morning. Here she comes. I can smell her. She smells like the womb.

I can live again.

Friday, 5 January 2001

Thursday's gone, Friday's here, meaning: we made it to another day while the salt of spew from between their yellow teeth ate away at what we held so delicately in our broken fingers, and now as I become the man and the man becomes the child, she becomes more beautiful than a human deserves to be, causing us both sacher-masoch threshold pain;

We wandered out into the cold just to eat the sand, and when we found it came with a free drink we thirsted and drank of the draught heavily, never sure or caring if the salt would explode our veins - still, though, so far, we subsist, we exist, and she is still too beautiful for eyes to behold, causing us to stare through home-made carton-tube glasses, she is the sun going out, she is the eclipse;

I am staring at the midnight moon, I am hearing its deep (enough) space moan, I am sensing what it is meaning and what it is needing, yes, yes the same stimuli as me, the moon, yes, she needs a challenge, she needs a shift in this mediocre and too predictible orbit, she is trying to wallow but still brings on the blood, she is trying to sing but never has the oxygen to reach a note, and even she, so cold and bright and so far above knows that 'she,' down here, embedded in an atmosphere of warmth akin to hell (to the shivering moon) is far too beautiful to shine upon, she is the reason, she is the emptiness of the light, she is where life goes when the sky's gone out and even the moon hides her scarred cheeks in shame;

One last cigarette, one last beer, one more layer of clothing as I shiver like my Mistress in her waxing way, and I, too, begin to shine, I, too, begin to wash my smile in the tide of menstrual blood, I, too, have become a false god wanting worship and warmth and the arms of the Mistress, but even I know, like the moon, that she is too beautiful for my simple human eyes to behold.

Saturday, 6 January 2001

I hate feeling like a cold is coming on, especially when I'm going to travel. It's a terrible feeling. I just want to take a handful of sleeping pills and guzzle a half-bottle of NyQuil, sleep for two days straight, and wake up bright and safe and healthy. Sometimes sleep just isn't deep enough; and I have always been a light sleeper as it is. I need to sleep more deeply.

Sunday, 7 January 2001

I am sitting. I am in work, three days behind on my missives to you. Been a hell of a week, after spilling my guts Saturday night at Thor's Quell, cowering into the slow heat of the Blue Lodge on Sunday, walking through billboards of fire and coming away scorched on Monday, then shaking in the tide beneath the full moon last night. I have not slept a full night in three days. I awake shaking in the sunrise. I see phantoms in the shadows of the sun. The difference now is that their vapor teeth do not scare me. While my heart has spent each of the last three days trying to explode from my chest, I've sat in the smokehouse with Death. We pow-wowed. We traded the pipe. We consulted the shaman (who turned out to be a phantom, to death and to me). We made a pinky-swear to return our daughter to the sea. We left together.

Death is my Hannibal, I am Death's Clarice. We have plans for this world.

Monday, 8 January 2001

pretty and slike and then she went and here he is a banana could dive it is certainly a swallow round the hump kiss on the shortest soft hairs of her skin the hump her mount a push alive he lives for this fruit squish juice and sweet in folds salt a bend prick a stick slike him in they went she came him in and then and then and then they rode a horse they rode the tide they rode like days over the wildfire hills

Tuesday, 9 January 2001

 

PLACE MISSING OR DELAYED TEXTICITY HERE. 

[END TEXTICITY]
[01.09.01]

Wednesday, 10 January 2001

Tonight it ended; tonight it begins.

With a joyous scream.

Thursday, 11 January 2001

I awoke from a dream in which I had spent the morning in a silk bathrobe on a beach at dawn throwing stones at the rising sun, and hitting it; then I went to a bookstore to get a new novel I just had to have, called Hunt the Horizon.

When I got to Barnes and Noble in downtown Boston and picked the book off the shelf, I saw the cover, a picture of a man standing on a beach in a silk bathrobe, throwing stones at the rising sun. The author's name on the book was Christopher Albanese.

Friday, 12 January 2001

I know the time is close, I'm 31. I've known this since I was 7 years old, that this year would be my test. I'm going to come face to face with that empty cowl, and I'm going to see if I reflect or not. I've abandoned fear, and it's given me strength. I will dance upon the side of a hungry volcano in my banana peel slippers, I will jitterbug. I will swirl, I will twist, I will scorch. I may survive. When I come down - if I come down - wipe the soot from my face, dust away my eyelashes, and give me a kiss. Please.

Saturday, 13 January 2001

Reykjavik, Iceland. Swirling through jet-lag in a place that re-defines temporal static cling. The sun is rising at 11:00 AM, setting before 4:00 PM...when you're already 5 hours off, that plays chopsticks on yer brain, man. I'm sitting here awaiting a bus that will take this party to a waterfall about 38 meters high, cascading down a volcanic cone...did I mention it is 8 in the morning? 3 internally, to me? And the sun is a far cry from rolling over beneath its moon-silk comforter.

Okay, out into the wind, which blows here like every gust that's ever scoured Winthrop-by-the-Sea magnified through the distance I know I am from home.

Saturday, 13 January 2001, later...

Iceland is gorgeous, treacherous, and smells like farts. A typical romp through the outback involves having the breath in your lungs pillaged by 100 kph Viking winds, while the scent of hell - great leaping walls of sulfuric steam - rams into you like Thors own fist. And the showers smell like fart-water. The hotter your shower, the more prevalent the scent of sulfur. Today, here, in the tiny sunrise across from our apartment on Grenssvegi, I smell like Satans balls, sure, but when we head North later this evening to watch the Aurora Borealis from the belly of a volcanic cone (the Blue Lagoon - a naturally heated swinning pool and spa where the water is never below 90 degrees), I will know that the Earth spit me up just as it did this tiny island that is still tossing and turning in its teething geologic sleep, and my skin is as soft as a silkworms dream. I have to go take my fart-shower now.

Sunday, 14 January 2001

2:45 PM, GMT.

At least after I return home to my chemically pristine U.S. waters, and my nose has re-adjusted to the home-grown scents of smog, exhaust, and a dirty litter-box, every time I smell rotten eggs I will have fond olfactory memories of staring at Heaven from the hot belly of a volcano.

Monday, 15 January 2001

AM, Reykjavik, Iceland

My breath tastes like sulfur and my piss smells like it. They do not mention this will happen in the brochures for Reykjavik. "High mineral content" that is "incredibly good for the skin," appears on the pages as often as their unique letters, and obviously sounds better to foreign ears than "showers smell like fart-water." The high mineral content that they're so proud of is composed in great part by sulfur, and it is so prevalent that after three days of eating, drinking, and bathing in Iceland I began to smell like Satan's upper lip. A connection: there are almost no eggs served in this country; must be for health reasons - you would never be able to tell if you cooked up a bad one.

Tuesday, 16 January 2001

1/15/01, Reykjavik to Boston, Final Iceland Notes

3:45 PM GMT, Keflavik Airport.

Just finished getting mildly raped by Keflavik Airport Security; because of my steel-toed boots. When I left Boston, the security guard at Logan Airport who wanded me through to the gate commented on my choice in brand and style as compared to his own reinforced jackboots. Here in Keflavik, they made me remove my shoes so they could see what I might be carrying inside them. I couldn't even hope they stank as security poked and prodded them, since the entire culture is used to smelling the constant miasma of egg-farts.

4:35 PM GMT.

Sipping my Pernod before boarding; oddly poetic, this drink (Pernod), this place (Iceland), this person (me), here. I can't imagine pouring the small glass of glittering green-yellow anise-flavored fluid over a glass of rocks at the bar in Terminal C in Boston, the replica from the television show Cheers; until recently, the bar had two statues of the show's drunks, Cliff and Norm, sitting on two of the barstools, but people complained that they took up too much space. Though, if I had poured out this quirky drink at the bar on the show, with Cliff and Norm swilling by my side, I am sure I would have acquired a pure Warholian vindication by at least one or two bursts of pre-canned laughter.

4:55 PM GMT.

The smell of sulfur, the burn of it in my blood and pores, the wink of sun through a roiling, newborn sky, the open hand of night, large, large, closing over us all....

5:45 PM GMT, in flight.

First fight with new girlfriend, brought her to tears. Took less than two weeks together, less than four days in my constant presence. The same mistakes like to repeat, unless you're the mistake yourself, then it is only you, constant, malevolent, bringing others to tears. Must think of a greater good.

5:05 PM, EST, in flight.

("Do you love your guns? god? government??" fuck yeah!)

They inspect our boots, but not our laptops?!? They stripped us of our boots while in line at customs, degrading us with cool blue eyes and thin, pale smiles. Their irony, their flaccid power: walk America across the volcano, barefoot. My friend's laptop was powerful enough to have easily contained every byte of financial detail of that country, and they never even made him turn it on.

Why?

Because the terrorists use plastic and they're completely invisible to security. In the midst of hundreds of country-carving New Yorkers in boiler suits, rich Orlando tan-heads soaring their retired wads of cash back to Florida, and Southerners and Northerners who were simply better dressed and better shorn than my friend and I, stopping us and stripping us (of boots and dignity) made every other person about to climb onto that airplane feel safer, more SECURE. Security did their job and did it well, keeping our steel-toed boots off our feet and under their watchful eyes while the crazed and religious, those deranged from 20 hours of night in every 24 and the radicals with a lingering millennium bug who simply felt NYC should not stand anymore traipsed onto the plane with their plastic watches, plastic Thor dolls, plastic toothbrushes and all-too-metal radios, heading to glory on the American shores of their future, boots firmly on their feet.

Random note found in margin:

Our next plague will be martyrdom, as our drug-of-choice in this early 21st century becomes Violence.

Unknown time, in flight, Greenland below.

Everything is at a standstill outside these tiny pressurized portholes that do keep me alive at 24,000 feet. The temperature outside is unfathomably cold (a virtual vacuum, the temp of the few molecules up here coming close to being measured in Kelvin) not even counting a 600-MPH wind chill, and inside here, as the sky surrounding us maintains its stain of clinical blue, nothing changes: we reach for drinks, we dry tears, we laugh at a British comedy, we wonder about a fiery death, we annoy the other 188 passengers around us, we read magazines (Madonna: really GAY??), we try to read books that just will not sit on the high-altitude sizzle of our minds, we try to listen to music, we try to listen to other music, we try to nap, we try to talk to each other about anything but airplane facts, we comment on how many fat women can fit comfortably in a tiny three-seat coach row (answer: none), we read other magazines, we listen to foreign accents and feel a bit envious, we try to nap and begin to sleep and have vivid, lurid dreams we would rather forget, we read the names of colleges and cities and sports-team affiliations on the sweat-shirts beneath the frightened faces that walk by on their way to the bathroom that is inexplicably soaring through the thin air, 24,000 feet up, 600 miles an hour, in this thin, cold January air, and we smile and smile and we try not to cry at the glory and beauty of being up here, above the birds, time-hopping from one country to the next as if truly citizens of one great world and that brings the tears for that is how we feel, we, the ones, the humans past just blood and bone, the poets from heart on out through sulfur-soaked skin -- that is how we feel, like we belong atop the volcanoes and beaches and deserts and dancing through these metropolises of the world, we are here to be on, and of, this planet.

Final Note:

The volcanoes are still hungry.

Wednesday, 17 January 2001

I think it will be tricky to make out a will. It seems simple - but you begin to remember lots of things in the conceptualization of it, and through the passing of mementos, you try to tell the people you loved what they meant to you - damn, that's heavy. I mean, my cats would be simple - I'd put them in the charge of my best friend who has plenty of his own (even if one did run away); if other friends wanted them, he'd know whom to give them to without splitting them up. As for my millions of CDs and books? Jesus. Everyone would just have to shop them out to each other - they can all co-found a mini-library or something. Though Tom Robbins' "Still Life with Woodpecker" would have to remain with the person who happens to be reading it right now - and she knows why. My musical equipment? To my roommate, of course - he's the musician in the group. He'd enjoy it most, until he shorts it all out with his magneto-fingers. (And what could I possible leave to the hellish mouse who would carry me through the transition, should I ever succumb to the infinite void? Hell, knowing her, she'd just see me on the other side for coffee once a day. She, of course, gets Dolores. I'll explain more about stuffed purple platypuses later...interesting fetish, eh?)

Stuff and stuff and stuff. That's why suicides give everything away; it's an odd courtesy, but after they're gone the suicide wants to leave as little for those remaining alive to clean up. Humans are a funny bunch: "Hey friends, I'm going to kill myself now and leave a raw gaping hole in your life, but I changed the litterbox first and you can have my Pearl Jam CDs."

You never want to leave the entire job of cleaning up your physical, mall-bought remains to one person, because most people have already had to go through it - and it's not a fun task, picking apart the papers and plastics and metals of what was once a skin and breath and warmth part of the reason you live your own life. (For me it would be easiest, of course, to get a permit for a bonfire and just fry up all my detrius on Point Shirley and let the ashes carry out to sea. Use my own books as kindling, folks. They'll burn well.)

If I had a choice in form of exeunt-stage-left, it would be a heart attack, collapsing gently into the arms of the woman I love the most. Death cleanses the spirit as the spirit leaves the body's impurities behind, and your last words are always your most honest. I want my last words to be "I love you" and I want to be able to really mean it, from the bottom of my tachycardic, failing heart.

I always thought I'd be clever and flip with my last words: "Houdini got locked in his head; that's why he never knocked." "Nietsche's been turned into a cockroach!" "Eat me - with mayonnaise." "Ah, the perfect taco..." But really, I just want to be looking into the eyes floating beneath that great mane of heaven's red lightning and say the most important words of my life, "I love you."

The Japanese believe true immortality, the revelation of the soul (one's raison d'etre), lies in how close you can get to death without succumbing. Treat death as you would a pet scorpion on a leash. Treat death as a slippery curve high up a mountain, and you on roller skates with a shaky wheel. Treat death as a friend. Just don't tell him it's his turn to wash the dishes.

Thursday, 18 January 2001

what's in the meaning of a dozen roses:

Red hair; and it's couriers of passion.
Love, in it's purest form - red, alive, and blooming.
Romance, and lots of it.
Courting - the old fashioned way of a man getting to know a woman and proving himself grown and marriage-worthy.
Red hair, again (c'mon, look at that stuff!); and it's couriers of lust.
Tom Robbins - and the pyramids, what is really inside a pack of camel cigarettes, and at least one more princess.
The sun, for its warmth and light, brightening spirit and earth, and for giving us the ability to see.
Blood - for its life, for its energy, and for its fecundity, as within one drop is the stuff of the child.
Kinship - the dozen together as family, a union made greater (and more beautiful) by their individual parts in the collective.
Life itself, beautiful, even in immutably pending death.
All that is female, delicate, and precious.
The moon - the mistress of love's mystery. Hold a blooming rose up to the full moon and she may whisper to you some secrets...

Friday, 19 January 2001

This little piggy went to London, and got a bit blotted at the pub is Leicester Square before picking up a relatively young American chap who made l.p.#1 quite happy before the morning came; this little piggy stayed home, but l.p.#2 still had to listen to l.p.#1 as she squealed and made animal noises in the next room with her American suitor all night; this little piggy had roast beef, because around 3 a.m., l.p.#3 couldn't take the sounds coming from l.p.#1's room anymore and went out for something to gnosh on; this little piggy had none, because l.p.#4 had taken many sleeping pills before laying her troubled head down to sleep that night; and this little piggy, #5, cried we wee wee all the way home because she really needed to take a mad slash and did not want to crouch in public so soon after getting her clitoral hood pierced. You never know what you might catch out there.

Saturday, 20 January 2001

I lit up a cold fire, I'm in love with you. I'm learning to touch my fingertips to my toes. I know there's more to you than your hair, remember there's more to me than my heart. I fell fast and hard, but I always land softly - land with me, land with me, I promise you the softest pillow.

Sunday, 21 January 2001

Finally got my gun on Saturday. Silver. A revolver. Bought 50 bullets, threw 49 in the sewer on the way home. Placed the last one in a smooth, clean chamber. Have the revolver in my pocket. Warmed by my hand. I will walk to the beach soon. I will sit on the rocks. I will wear my walkman, because the wind is cold and hurts my ears. I do not know what I will be listening to, but it will be loud. I will not hear the wind. I will not hear the chambers spinning. I will not hear the cock of the trigger, and the feeling of it clicking into place in my hands will be muted by my thin gloves. The wind will gust into my mouth as I open it. I know the metal will be cold, but I won't hear a thing.

Monday, 22 January 2001

manic depressive, back and forth it's churning "red wire = right temple, black wire = left temple," this is a dismemberment plan, all of this surrounding you inside the air, towers slowly tumbling but not fast enough to cause anything interesting workers we are instead of humans no one remembers where they left their smiles, oh, it must have been in that old suit i threw away when i remembered i forgot my youth, this is the end of many beautiful things, most notably the desire to care, but at least that attitude doesn't require need, and it will deliver you and me and us to death more easily.

Tuesday, 23 January 2001

Uh oh seems a bad turn is coming...but it's the new moon. heh. maybe it's time to shake death's claws from my cheek, spit that bastard right out on the floor and stomp 'im one. I've written my will. I've faced the volcano and spat honey. spitting, dying, crying out, this is my life right now.

Wake me up, I need paradise. I have realized something more frightening than anything I have known before:

Love is not an illusion.

Wednesday, 24 January 2001

So, I found out that life, love, and happiness indeed exist. But - life, love, happiness can and will end so quickly. I thought I had found the reason for the first, based on the second, and finally, in glowing religious epiphany, the true path to the third.

I did. I discovered, it glorious tears of true joy, that love exists. Yeah. Love exists all right. It is angry, hungry, scared, hurt, wailing, and refuses to be channeled or tamed. It bites. It fights dirty. This time, for the first time, I fought back, I wrestled it like three alligators. It got its teeth into me, it shone on me in the sunlight of countries with bright red hair glowing, it got its claws deep in me, it ripped at my cheeks with teeth and tears, it was here, in my arms, it was here, I did not imagine it, I know, because I am more than scarred, I am torn, battered, concussed, it was here, and it was more clever than me. It relaxed in my bleeding embrace, it made me believe I had conquered it and it was ready to be a part of my life, tamed and equal to me. But just as I relaxed, just as I leaned in to share our mutual kiss, it leaped forth like a hungry beast in waiting and slashed right through my chest, tearing out my heart.

It has left me here for dead; after feeding.

I am not sure if what is left of me is worth any bother.

Thursday, 25 January 2001

"We're nothing without our obsessions," he said. I sipped my coffee. I had gotten almond flavoring put in it, I'm not sure why, except that the smell reminds me of cyanide. Comforting. "And our obsessions are nothing without us."

"What would our obsessions rather be?" I asked, sipped.

"Gods, of course." He didn't drink coffee. He sipped his tea instead. It was steaming hot.

Outside the caf, the night was inevitably going to end.

Friday, 26 January 2001

I lay next to him at the beach where he was stretched on the sand smiling at the vortex-eating sky. The air was warm, the sky pink, the tide just beginning to play with our bare toes. I smiled too. The air was warm, the sky was pink, and the tide was playing with our toes, just beginning to cool our calves. He pointed at a jet taking off into the atmosphere, and I watched as it slipped through a vortex. Vortex 1, Jet 0. But then the sky ate that vortex. Sky 1, Vortex 0. Now there were no more up there but the air was still warm, the sky was magenta, vortexes were easy to come by, and the tide was a whispering blanket salting our thighs, promising to be a glittering table for tomorrow's sunrise.

- for Brett Holinbeck

Saturday, 27 January 2001

These coals are hot. I have been scorched. Apparently, though liquids elude me and my cells are crackling in this heat, I have been left with enough salt to survive.

Maybe I shall turn away from love, now. I am, perhaps, not yet strong enough to ride its back, to hold its tail, nor even to shoot a thin bolt from this fragile crossbow through its raging heart.

Maybe I will turn to the sea. Maybe I will turn to the sun. Maybe I will turn to the cooling darkness of caverns underground. Maybe I will turn to drugs, and float away into dispassionate space.

Or, just maybe I will cross this country and this world, offering my heart to all - since she doesn't want it. Maybe, just once, the bible read me right: "I will wail and howl, I will go stripped and naked: I will make a wailing like the dragons." (Micah 1:8). Maybe this fire she put me through was meant to ignite me.

Sunday, 28 January 2001

Kissing lips sweet and deadly as clove cigarettes, I never noticed she never blinked until the day she finally did and those lashes fell upon me like great torn oaks, I was crushed beneath their massive weight, and as I lay shattered bruised and dying I could see her eyes unclosed, a sliver where the blue leaked through and the black of the iris upon which I floated, she could still see me where I lay discarded, her lashes raised from the broken place where I lay and her eyes rose too, looking away, never to look my way again.

Monday, 29 January 2001

Ooh...there it went...but it was definitely there....I think....yes...a tingle.......

Tuesday, 30 January 2001

Okay, once again, I'm taking a shaky swing at this shadow of mine. I've had some fuel. I'm climbing up out of the cooling clay. I hear your hammers, morse code clanging through the gray stone. I think I might be okay (how's that for vague). I'm finally falling away from her red, red fire. Slowly. Sensitively. Sure. Breathe. Okay.

Last night the pain hurt more than ever - but for a shorter length of time. I was almost cured by a glass of red wine; a big glass, yes, pressed as a perpetual nipple to my lips. I'm beginning to remove the memories from my mind: No more drinks at her Celtic pub. We never had drinks there. No more hands held in the cold air of the car. We never held hands. No more secret kisses ripe with pending passion. We never kissed, I never kissed her incredible lips. No more hands squishing my face in the most intense statement of love for me I have ever felt. She never did that. No roses were sent, no shoulders were slept upon, no sex was had, no promises were kept because no promises had ever been made. I have not written 50 pages of poetry and stories pouring my heart out to her; not to her, I haven't.

I now remember floating in a volcano alone. I remember the quiet steam rising above me into the deepest, darkest night I had ever seen, steam as real as anything around me. Phantoms, spirits, shadows of mine; steam. I remember its purity, I remember thinking how clean it was as it engulfed me in 150 degrees of liquid white fire. The condensation on my body was a blanket that opened my pores, pushed my heart into a rush, filled my head with speeding blood, made my usual muddle of thoughts come clear, clear as the body of that tangible black sky's embrace, where the steam billowed and blew. I was suffused with love. I am still suffused with love. For steam. For Purity. For clean.

A shame she ran from me - my heart was a pillow, waiting to deliver her dreams. Ah, yes; no 'she' did run. It was only steam, drifting away as steam does, clouds climbing from Earth's maw to the paws of Heaven; a Clean Phoenix Rising. A 'she' did not run. Just steam. A white fire phantom that left no impression of scarlet hair on this pillow of mine.

No head has lain here; none slept to dream.

In here is just me. I am pristine.

A clean phoenix rising.

Clean.

Wednesday, 31 January 2001

Farewell, January.

Just before the swing of midnight this eve, I will take my shaken soul; and my heart, beaten but beating; and my mind in its ravaged swirl, and tread these part of me to the sea.

There I will open my arms to the girth of the tide and I will cast alms to the gilding moon as she opens her slow eye upon me.

There I will pray.

I will pray;
with words I will take from my fondest memories,
with words I will sieve from my most rapier dreams,
with words I will collect from the spells of love's sorcery,
with the power of the words that I said to 'she' (though they meant more than just words to me),

I will pray to Luna's opening eye,
I will inhale Imbolc's first millennium breath,
I will keep myself safe from the seductive bed of death;
I will climb upon the waves to kiss the bright moon's cheek;
and as her eye holds me like Venus suspended
above the ebony sea,

I will let love flow back in

I will let love flow back into this space in me.

Farewell, January.

Love (and I mean it, now,
since I've learned
what it means),
Me.