dream deep

Like broken guitars, everything we say sounds wrong. We sound like languages we used to speak but cannot now remember or languages we remove ourselves from slightly on purpose, broken and sore. We’d start out with words like water, and those would come easily enough, all fluid and laughing and full, Dionysian and easy. Hello, how was your day, come see this incredible thing I found, wouldn’t you like it if we were to go see the stars? We played racquetball with our words, tossing them over the marble tabletop and catching them in our mouths as perfectly and as happily as fish in water.

There were gardens, all beautiful and rose-wrought, adorably walled and strung. We made our words fine, like coffee and cigarettes after dinner, and how you wish now that you had the foresight to predict what we said but didn’t say, don’t you? Must you always be like this? No, I don’t really know what love is. Really now, was that what you said? And we loved each other through our words, fierce and unwilling to withdraw. It was something incomprehensible, like madness or a sort of terrible possession, mindless and beautiful. It was a perfect thing, wild and raw, like the scream of an animal. We never could understand why we did it, but I think it was simply because it was.

Let us come to mutual agreement. I stand for the freedom of not-speech, of the unsaying of things, same as you do. We shall cry and whistle like birds over the dinner table, and scream like gazelles at the cars passing by. I will be a hummingbird and you will be a lyre and we will make these things true, for sundry longings such as these will never fully pass away. I am bird, I am bird, I am bird. You are bird, you are bird, you are bird. I wish I could capture in full knowing the tilt of your head and the clarity of these heavy eyes, yours and mine, black and knowing and other; also the slope of your spine and the fine hold of your shoulders, and the weight of your soul on mine. And then I think we will have won something worth having, perhaps. Until then all we are is white noise on the radio, wrong frequency at the wrong time, two simple people shouting simple things at each other.