Work Text:
(i)
Watching Your Words
It never made sense before,
when I said I loved word-watching.
"You mean watching your words,"
people would say, which I did not
but quickly learned to
anyway.
Watching my words is not word-watching.
Not the savouring of voices
making sounds making words making sense-
No.
It is the watching only of
people, listeners, receivers.
A tiptoe through eggshell tulips
as my own clumsy two lips
act as hateful watchmen
to make sure my words cause no stir.
Stirring sugar you do not realize you enjoy
into the mug of tea
you do not realize you drink to the dregs after saying you do not want any,
I return to word-watching,
which is watching your words,
which is, of course, watching-
you.
You confound me with your words.
In them I am at once both lost and found.
I watch you without needing to listen
as each one takes off in an effortless glide,
as you shape them into meaning.
Even as they soar on your breath, mid-flight,
I can still sense you lending each one your gravity.
I watch your words etching faint lines into your brow
and I butterfly perch on the edge;
Anger or Envy?
The hummingbird dart of your tongue every so often
keeps them coming
as steady as any stream,
their faint sheen still on your lips,
and again the fluttering on an unknown edge;
Anger or Envy?
The puzzle will not click, and
meanwhile you are briefly silent.
It is in those moments
when the faintest picture shimmers hopefully just beyond me,
into a place where
a thousand clumsy words
almost have space to breathe-
But then you clear your throat,
ready once more to speak,
and I make haste to fetch more tea,
all puzzles forgotten as another day passes:
just watching your words.
(ii)
Esse est Percipi
Maker of tea, you make of me,
drunk as I am on stolen fear,
long to put aside this chalice
of suffering that I may learn
to be kind to you.
I am he who watches, always,
always, I am he who is watched.
It is a habit that lends itself
more to the stillness
of steel, of iron,
of all that is gray, and cold;
unyielding, unmovable, unmoved-
(Ah you who perceive me!)
You are the last soft thing
in these echoing halls lined with unseen eyes,
these chilly, unwelcoming halls
of paper sharp nightmares and cutting, cruel corners.
A change has come upon me,
as sinister and silent
as the slow tendrils of a fog seeking
to fill a mansion with its shivering empty.
My appetites are grown fearsome and strange.
I find myself growing warped
as the strangling plant that leans
toward fresh, innocent saplings to drain dry.
Knowing all the bitter while
that my atrocities, my hungers,
are Beheld by cold and approving,
unfeeling Eye;
(Ah you who perceive me!)
In all this talk of watching,
it is in your trusting eyes
I root my humanity.
Starving, Beheld, yet
the only hunger that rings true
is that to be held by you.
To be is to be perceived;
‘esse est percipe’.
Rob me not of your
staring, your stuttering, your smiling, your endless tea-making.
I am only as you perceive me.
Ah you who perceive me!
Wrap me in the hold of your gaze.
Behold me.
Withhold not from me the softness of your Being.
Sweet perceiver, turn not deceiver.
Hide not from me the sight of your face.
Come back to me.
Come back.
(iii)
I See You
Oh. Hello. What are you? Do I know you?
Shape of box in hand, box of memories too looped and tangled, too foggy for my mind to grasp. Mine. Slant of milky not-light through window and
what is mine? Really?
Eyes squeezed shut. A love too shadowy to name. Imagining as an escape. Imagine an escape. One made for fire and fleeing, rusty and creaking;
I am thinking:
this is where we are safe though.
I think:
our fire escape, where we sit, still, my legs swinging easily and the only smoke comes
from your laughing mouth, curling to frame the softness of your eyes, the steadiness of
a spark we cradle between us.
Is that home? Is this? Home… I should know home.
Home of resentment. Home of hatred. Home of cobwebs and cold. Home of disbelief, old books, and spider. Home of shame. Homes no longer.
Home is a tunnel. A storage room. An archive.
Home is a cabin in Scotland with a kettle on and the world turned off.
My storyteller, statement-reader, seer, former of worlds out of words.
Home is where we can say anything we like and the only eyes we know are each other’s. There are records here, purely for dancing to. It is not for lack of fear. It is fear locked out while we try. Really try. Halting attempts to say:
W-welcome home. I’ve put some tea on. I saw a really good cow on my walk.
I think it was a baby. Come sit with me and be my love.
All the chairs are comfortable. Take a load off. Your hands are cold.
What shall we make for our dinner?
What will taste purely of love?
My fertile earth. My good-for-breathing air. My safe room never too big or too small. My lightkeeper, keeper of my name, warm, cosy, happy; my name is so safe in your mouth.
Oh. Hello there. Who are you then?
Blast from lonely past. Blast from scorched earth future. Again the fog. Again the not-light, the fuzz, the ache, the crackling, static cold. Chairs that resent seating me. The struggle to say:
This is my house. I know that. I know that.
You are welcome here. You know that.
You are friends, and welcome.
That brings us back to home and of course home is us together, a love I cannot remember whispering “come here, come here”. A rustle of worn fabric. The slow exhale of steady breath despite the encroaching chill. Steady arms while the walls shift in menace around us.
Something in the walls is singing for our blood. And now we have come back to red corridors and blood, and neither of us are heroes in this story, neither of us get to be saviours. The clocks keep ticking even as time runs ahead and away from us, flows through shaking hands, thrumming red-blood-hot in hummingbird chest. Again we have come back to blood.
A tired love is springing not from joy but in spite of every hungry, wretched thing seeking to devour it. The earth lies screaming and the flowers in every garden bloom corpse-fat white, pus yellow, knife-wound red. We tilt our heads back to curse the sky and it stares back.
Hello? W-what- oh.
Again the rustle of fabric. Warmth. A mouth in which my name is safe, mine. As comfortable as a stretched out shirt stolen from your drawer. A mouth that is familiar. You alone do not devour.
Please don’t go to sleep. Not yet. Please. I need to remember your eyes. Eyes for seeing, for seeing past, forgiving, for giving comfort for the past.
Let’s leave. I’ve already packed everything and tea besides.
Come on then. We can leave, now. Together.
Are you so surprised? This small heart expanding, look, I will be the only house that asks nothing of you which you do not wish to give. Do you still not understand what it is you see?
See me. I see you.
Do you understand yet? Do you remember saying once that you would mind if you could not find me? Well then. You are mine.
Does that help you make sense of what I am saying yet?
That I will call you out of every grave you dig yourself into?
That I will cup your tired face like art, like wine, like home?
H-hello? Who’s there?
Wait, no, don’t- please hear me. Can you hear me?
Come back. Where did you go again?
I need you. I need you, please, can you understand that?
I will be your looped tape evidence that you will always have my heart to come home to, a walking statement of proof that can still be love in the ruins of a wasteland.
We know that part too well, don’t we? We know this story.
The beasts triumphant, birthed from the sky, the sea, the shore. Monsters in our trail and prowling ahead. The bones of too many bodies we will never touch again unburied in unholy dirt. Beloved names rusted with disuse cutting our lips for every time we dare to remember the speaking of them. Friends lost to fog and worse.
They’ve changed the music, love. It isn’t ours anymore. You already know that.
The show keeps going, the carnie calls, a thousand discarded faces fresh and ripe for the picking, spread out like treasure before our feet.
And what happens if we choose them, love? What if the fog gets too cold, and the guilt gets too heavy? What if we each offer the other a new face as impossible as a blank slate, a second choice? What happens then? It will not happen of course. We would still be ourselves and unforgiven. What if though? Do we join the races? The chase? The theatre? The dance? Is that something you might want?
Hello you.
Of course I still know you. Tired eyes and fragile smile.
Mine. Yours. Hello again. Always hello now.
My beautiful, weary watcher. You are too hallowed to me for any more goodbyes.
So of course you have a question, the real one, in spite of the hundreds and thousands of variations it has taken through the course of history, a question old as time:
Why me? Why this?
The answer is as colourful and sweet as sprinkles on ice cream,
as delightful as a cake on a birthday assumed forgotten. A single, tiny star, braving the darkness at the end of the world.
The way I fit against you, the shape of you holding the shape of me, and do you hear that? Heartbeats. Calm. Steady. Alive. That’s us. Together.
Not you, not me, us.
It’s okay. I know what it means when the moment breaks and your eyes slide away from me. How hungry the nightmares must be, that they no longer wait for sleep. Your hands are cold in mine and you see it all, every hideous atrocity finding the wound in our world rotted and ripe, and just right for slipping through. Every blasphemous birth of fresh horror. Your eyes burn for hours afterwards and almost, I could imagine what it must feel like to fear you.
Do I want to know your visions? Asphodel blooms at Delphi and almost do I scent them on your breath. We loved words once, didn’t we? In our own ways. Oh love, I see how their very service fails you now.
‘It is like facing the ocean with a straw’, you say.
‘It is staring into the sun at last, only to find it glaring back’, you say.
‘It is pleasure in guilty cupfuls onboard a boat sinking in pain,’ you say.
Explaining is a map drawn only in spirals.
‘Hello you,’ you say, ‘I thought you were behind me’.
I was gone, I think.
You know, you say. Your voice is sad.
I was very cold. I remember that, as I watch your arms tremble. There was a mansion there too, full of empty. Should I give you a statement for the record? I am not sure how much of it I can remember though. Everything feels foggy somehow.
You close your eyes against me, and I hate that, until I spy the escaping tears.
‘No, no statements. A poem’, you say, ‘Give me a poem’.
This poem takes place at home. Of course. We are together, so we are home.
All the noise here is familiar. Laughter, teasing, breathing friends, a purring cat.
A kettle almost at the singing point. The mooing of a good cow from the yard,
and fresh milk for tea.
Every chair fits us both with ease.
We are home and every grave is a flower bed now. The ground rumbles only because
our friends have no respect for us or our furniture. They are drunk and merry,
and want us to dance. The music is as safe as our heartbeat and every swaying step
brings you further into me.
Hello you, I giggle, only hello. I kiss each one into scars long healed on the tapestry of
your skin.
Hello, hello, hello! I twirl and am laughing them now
So of course you pull me near and drink the words from my lips,
our private communion, our secret wine.
‘It’s a good poem’, you say, and I press your fingers to my lips. I think it might be holy. You deserve it all the more for that.
Something howls behind us, and shadows twist amidst the flames ahead.
I was just in a mansion you know. Your eyes beg me to ask you a question that will not hurt, so I push back the mess of your hair and lean in. When we are brow to brow, I ask you to tell me what you want. With every sobbing breath, you say ‘hold me’.
So I hold you.
I am not lost, you are not in pain. I am here now. I will never be far behind.
We are kissing and all around us the world is Sodom, Gomorrah, Rome.
But I am yours and you are mine.
Everything we know is dead or wishes to be. Everything we knew is over.
But we are here and I am holding you.
A great Perhaps looms forebodingly beyond the fire and the blood, peering at the nerve of us both.
You smile at last and this time I taste it.
Onwards then, best beloved.
Your hand finds mine and we do not look back.