sadoeuphemist

Murmur

Wed, 18 Sep 2019 06:08:36 GMT

At times he could feel a woman, her legs delicately fluttering, in his ventricles.

Of course, it might not have been a woman. He had no way of knowing for sure save for being put under, having a team of expert doctors pry open his chest, crack his ribs, incise a slit into that tender pulp of the heart so that she might be revealed bathing in the blood-red coves of his heartbeat, a deep-sea creature for the first time exposed to surface air and light. Otherwise, the faint flutters he felt in his chest might have very well been a writhing eel, a worm, a shrimp, some parasite; or just another man swimming in measured strokes, with a flutter in his heart as well, made miniature; or a loose filament of cardiac muscle tickling at the inside of his heart, portending the unraveling of all the rest.

But he was certain it was a woman, for in the gray sameness of his days, when he sat alone at breakfasts drinking bitter coffee and looking at the faded wallpaper, he would feel a brief kick in his heart, a playful flutter, as if to remind him she was still there; a caress. The touch of her, her fingertips brushing up against the striated muscle of his heart with every stroke, was so tender that it could be nothing but a woman, and he had come to depend on those moments of her touch as a dear and necessary warmth.

At nights, when he lay awake in the darkness, she would stroke him, soothe him to sleep. She eased his days with the promise that she would be there; and that loneliness was a temporary thing; and that in his heart he was a fruitful, tender person capable of loving and being loved, who only needed the kindness of a human touch to nurture him, a gentle hand to help him bloom.

Except.

At times he would wake up from a nightmare, sweating, his heart pounding as if to beat out of his chest, having glimpsed some awful truth just beneath the surface. In his calmer waking moments he dismissed it as night terrors, irrationality, and tried not to think about it; and mostly succeeded. But the notion would resurface, periodically, like a murky presence just beneath the waters, its pale skin bobbing up at the receding of the tides.

He had killed her. His heart, near full to bursting with desire, had beat indecently, vulgarly, battered her with waves against the walls of his heart until she had strangled on his blood and fallen unconscious and stopped swimming. She had been trapped in him for years, decades, forced through the chambers of his heart without respite or air or sunshine or place to rest. Her body floated listlessly, sightlessly, eyes swollen shut, drowned limbs moving with the currents. It was, and had always been, only his own self-gratifying heart within him, beating, pulling, clenching, stirring up spurts and eddies, puppeting her pale compliant body to brush against him, arousing him with each flutter and caress.

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Re: Translations

Tue, 25 Sep 2018 07:12:30 GMT

appropriated from Elisa Chavez

The Siren and the Fisherman

The siren was lifted from the seas
to find her place on dry land.
By the beach, the fisherman came upon her,
a beautiful unnetted catch.
Her tail, still wet and glistening; scales
running down her breast, her arms, her face,
a veil of waves that followed in her wake.

The fisherman took that trailing tail,
shortened it, divided it in two.
"Now," he told her, "these legs are your own.
Will you not walk with me?"

The siren began her song, telling the ocean
that she had found aid, all trace of blood transformed
into rainbows amidst the shore and sand.

She sang to the fisherman, "I forgive you,
I forgive you, I forgive you."

Perfection

A woman built a house
on nothing.
It lacked all human comforts, but was beautiful.
She tried to grow a pear tree, always
left the door hanging open should her
darlings wander in. The windows stretched high
and the sun glared through. The roof leaked
in torrents after a storm,
and she was trying to repair it.

The man, who had not laid
a brick of its foundations, saw the house and
exclaimed, "How can you live like this! The windows
crooked! The lamps
burning dim. We need to
burn this house down and build again."

The woman looked around and knew
that he was right, this man
who'd had no hand in its construction:
in none of it had she found perfection.

She humbly said, "You're right, sir.
But where would I live come morning?"

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*

Thu, 25 Jan 2018 11:46:01 GMT

“We’re all immortal,” says Shen. “The universe begins when we’re born and ends when we die. Anything beyond that is just speculation.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” I say. “My parents, for example, are proof of a history before me.”

“It’s true if you don’t believe in any other people.”

*****

Space is curved. It curves around my mass, cradles me, imbues me with that subtle pull we call gravitation. That yearning for each other. All the vastness is shot through with cosmic radiation, the light from a billion stars come traveling over impossible distances, painting for me a map of nebulae, galaxies, faraway solar systems. If I had the means, I could analyze their spectrum and calculate the atmospheres they passed through, look to the stars and envision worlds waiting on the other side. Space is not cold. I'm bathing in light, with nothing here to steal my heat. Just the photons, ions, electromagnetic waves, the emissions of the stars unencumbered by molecules of air, and me, at the center of the universe.

All the universe is reaching out to me.

Why am I so alone?

*****

“What's the alternative?" says Shen. "You live and the world dies around you? The sun swallows up the Earth, and you persist. The sun belches you out, hurls you into space, collapses in on itself and dies, and you persist. You're left floating in the void, the stars winking out one by one, watching the universe die, and you persist, and you persist, and you persist." Shen laughs.

"How will you know unless you try? Maybe we’re immortal right now. Maybe we’ll cut ourselves open and nothing will bleed out. It’s easy to say we’ll kill ourselves if things get bad enough. But what if this is it, this endless tedious persistence? What if it never gets any better, never gets any worse, and this state of being continues until the end of time? Could you slit your wrists here, right now, in front of me; could you tear apart the skin, rip open the veins, do you have the fucking guts to do it?

“What makes you think you’ll be able to work up to it it a hundred years’ time, in a thousand years’ time? What if this is the way things are going to be forever?”

*****

There’s something wrong. There’s something missing.

There used to be a world here. Lights, radio waves, an electromagnetic spectrum of existence. Space is uniform, between the stars; empty except for all the things in it. But there’s a radiant hollow here still giving off waves, a thing marked out by its absence. An empty space in the universe.

A black sun.

All I can see are the stars. Even now, my own two hands, are just starlight reflected off me, starlight picking out a tiny shape in the cosmos. All I’ve ever seen is the sun, once removed. Nothing in the universe has changed. Space is uniform, constant, the same vacuum we’ve been spinning through since the universe began. Every molecule of me is how it has always been, the same physical structure, unchanging. Except now the universe is illuminated by a black sun. The excrescence of a star carving out the image of my hands, illuminating every molecule in existence.

Nothing’s changed. The universe is as how it has always been.

*****

“The solar anus,” I say. “It’s from Bataille, I think, originally. I’m not smart enough to be reading Bataille. I picked it up secondhand from this guy I followed on the internet. He wrote about things like that. Clever things. Obscene things. The solar anus. The black sun that shits its light onto the world and reveals it to be dead. All the air stagnating.”

The streetlights fade the night back into dusk. Plaster storefronts. Pale purple shadows painted over streets. All the stars washed out of the sky. None of this is real. “He was writing about his depression.”

“Give me a name,”says Shen. “Maybe I’ll look him up.”

“There’s no point, he hasn’t posted a thing in ages.”

“Gone? Dead? Mysteriously offline, the contents of his archives the only thing to remember him by? A reminder that so many the people we invest ourselves in can evaporate at a whim, leaving nothing behind but their dusty old posts and the outline of their absence?”

“Yes? No? Maybe. Either or neither. Whichever. He was outed by the MeToo movement. So he’s dead, as far as I’m concerned. Good riddance.”

Shen laughs appreciatively.

“A woman he went on a date with. Maybe not even a date, technically. He was handsy from the start. She tried to placate him, put him off nicely. Said she wasn’t into PDAs. So he wrenched her neck around and forced his tongue down her throat. Tried to bully her into getting drunk, et cetera. She managed to get away safely at the end of the date. Pushed him off her bus.”

I pause.

“This is the funny thing: a few weeks before this happened, I was thinking idly to myself: Of all the people I followed. The well-known ones. If any of them were outed as abusers, would I be surprised? And I thought his name, and thought, no, that wouldn’t surprise me.

“And this isn’t to say that people should have known, that I knew all along, because I didn’t. I had no idea. But.”

Neither of us finish the thought.

*****

I’m recreating the world from memory, every street and sidewalk, the power lines strung between the poles, the subways, the turnstiles, the houses that I’ve lived in, all the empty rooms, the trees, the rocks and uneven soil, the paths worn between them, the glass-faced booths, the insides of cars suspended in the half-light, the lights that drowned out the stars, the lights snaking home from above, the lights that metastasize like cancer, the steps I walked, the railings I leaned over, the windows that looked out onto crowded streets, every vending machine and ATM and computer screen, every empty city, every human-concrete interface, every light and sound in the world.

All of it, everything but the people.

They are dead, and I am ever-living. Preserved in formaldehyde. Vacuum-sealed. Unchanging. There were people out there once, there must have been, detailed in their entirety, with loves and hopes and so on so forth, capable of things called compassion and mutual understanding.

There's a tug from way out there, a pull, a gravitational inevitability. The light from some dead star. And the light is real, the light is a message cast out into the universe, carrying with it the sight and texture of everything it's reflected off or refracted through, the light is the sum total of my understanding of the universe. The light is a promise I'm not alone.

It's all a lie, of course: the light, the gravity. Billions dead in the time it took their message to reach me, planets playing out their dance, self-absorbed, bleeding all these inadvertent consequences into the ether.

I've been talking to myself.

There’s never been anyone here.

*****

I will recreate the universe.

This is a star:

This is an asshole:

This is the universe, going on forever:

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Unpacking

Sun, 21 May 2017 11:50:21 GMT

Hold this, she said, and I gathered up
a fist of her hair, undoing her frame from behind,
unbuttoning the knobs of her spine,
unlacing the tendons in her neck and shoulders
to the musical twang of her ribs popping free

Her lungs escaped her like a sob,
unfolding, spilling out like a rumpled dress
that I arranged atop the tiles,
one hand smoothing out the wrinkles,
gliding across her skin until she sighed,
divested,
exposing her pale back to me in its entirety

It's amazing how much there is to a woman:
silk and bone and a thousand scribbled notes inked onto her innards,
unwritten love letters, angry scrawls,
knots of twine and rawhide that I fished out
and laid delicately against the tiles like a diagram,
careful to memorize their places

Her heart, sluggish and warm and tough as leather,
and indistinguishable from
all her other organs,
years of padding and upholstery unseamed until
the bathroom floor resembled a butcher's palette,
and she hung loose and slumping, dozing gently,
with so much of her to still unpack

There's room for happiness in there, I think,
there's so much else in her

There's room for everything I lack

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The Truth

Tue, 02 May 2017 12:44:28 GMT

The truth, to get to the heart of the matter, is boring. Saying what I think and feel is the dullest thing in the world, it's a reiteration of my own circumstances, as if I'm in my head staring out of my eyeballs and dutifully taking note of what is going on around me. In order to communicate - in order to produce anything, even marginalia that goes unseen by anyone - I need a hook. I need the structure of artifice.

For example: I dreamed about M again last night. Her mouth on my mouth, the curve of it sympathetic, the cushioned contact between our bodies. But what would be the point of returning to it, of describing it to anyone, even if just to myself? I could lay out events in sequence, I could chronologue our history. I could give that all-important context. But there's no context to be had. I reread some of my old diary entries again the other day, and the self that wrote those entries is a foreign entity, another person, who couldn't have predicted that years and years from then they'd wake up, dreaming. I hadn't thought of her in years, honestly. I just dreamt about her again last night, that's all.

Even back then there was the distinction between what I did when I was with her, and what I wanted to do, the distinction between reality and fantasy. What we did was utterly mundane, the sort of stuff you've surely experienced yourself and promptly forgotten about, because your brain needed the room to store more important memories. "I met her at the mall." How fascinating. I could dig up old chat logs and shudder at the inanity.

Meanwhile, there was the impulse I could extrapolate outwards, the recurring themes I'd retread and wear thin. The push and pull of the tides, their regularity and inevitability. That clockwork structure of desire that was made to seem like it was counting down to something but would just go 'round and 'round forever. The distinction between everything that was going on inside my head, and everything we did together. You appreciate the difference, right? The fantasy was fine, albeit repetitive. The reality was the dullest thing on earth.

Even now, to speak of her in dreams, I could psychoanalyze, I could slot her into an archetype. I could say, I dreamed of happiness, or, I dreamed of comfort, or, I dreamed of being loved, as if that's all she was and that's all she represented. As if I was happy, or comforted, or loved back then, and this is all a throwback to a world that once existed. I could say I'm miserable, or frustrated, or alone, as if there's a solid justification for my dreams and desires, as if she's part of my story, genuinely, and this all comes together by the end.

That's the artifice in it, you know? She was a real person, but you wouldn't know it by me talking about her.

I could say I fantasized about killing her. That's not true, I never did, but wouldn't that be interesting? Wouldn't that be the big reveal that finally sheds light on the whole situation? Just a single lie, and suddenly we're hinting at meaning, as if everything that happened last night and all those years ago somehow makes sense.

I dreamt about M again last night, and I woke up and didn't feel anything. That's the gist of the story. That's the truth of it.

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ad lib (at one's pleasure)

Tue, 04 Apr 2017 11:42:25 GMT

All I want is
All you want is
All I want is
To live without restriction.

Let's pretend we're improvising,
Say, "Yes, and" to everything:

Yes I love you and
Yes I need you and
Yes we'll be here for each other
And Yes and Yes and Yes and Yes and -
Until we're overflowing.

No scripts to follow, roles to play,
Generations' worth
Of learned behaviors.
No more hesitation, waiting
For a prompt, a cue, anything
To tell us it's okay to act
Or what to be afraid of.

Just Yes your hands and Yes my hands
And Yes all hands reaching out to us
And Yes your lips and Yes your thighs and Yes teeth Yes throat Yes tongue and
Your voice my lips and Yes each other -

Let's pretend we can't say "No"
As if that's the only thing between us;
As if all I want is
All you want is
All I want is
You.

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Wed, 15 Mar 2017 05:28:44 GMT

Little girls are made of
Sugar AND SPICE
(or so they say)
But you are a little
TOO spicy today!

Being ugly AND
not listening
are not nice,
maybe next time you'll think twice
because a little girl who
THROWS A FIT
will be a little girl who
has to SIT!

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