Work Text:
Light clarity avocado salad in the morning
after all the terrible things I do how amazing it is
to find forgiveness and love, not even forgiveness
since what is done is done and forgiveness isn't love
and love is love nothing can ever go wrong
though things can get irritated boring and dispensable
(in the imagination) but not really for love
though a block away you feel distant the mere presence
changes everything like a chemical dropped on a paper
and all thoughts disappear in a strange quiet excitement
I am sure nothing but this, intensified by breathing.
"Poem," Frank O'Hara
Mike feels as if everything should be blankwhite like TV snow but nothing is ever blank nor truly white. It is the morning after he left the glass tower crumpled with the thick and strange and fuzzy aftermath packed between his ribs (an aftermath that should be capitalized and italicized, branded into his inner wrist right next to the Event). He wants stillness. He wants self-containment, simplicity but the sidewalks are always congested and the city does not understand the need for silence. Before, there was the cotton-mouthed escape and the too sweet smoke in stale auras around him. There was Trevor, too, and the densehot need to be close to someone, and he was warm the nights when Mike was strung out on need. Alone now in the swarm of laughter, stinging bits of bitten words, he wanted this. He wanted this aloneness so he could unzip his skin, unhinge his ribs, dislocate joints, and figure out how to reassemble each piece around the Aftermath so he could breathe again. Except, he cannot sleep at night. Instead, he smashes his Grandmother’s vase against baseboards and sends a text that says “I need to stop hating myself.” And the returned silence amplifies the metronomic pulse of not yet. Not yet. Not yet. It’s too soon. So he drinks and doesn’t think to speak of love. In the morning, he smiles sickness in the thick of clogged drains and hates himself a little more. Soon, he will forget about those daisies and dandelions still wilting in the tin can on the windowsill and wonder if this is what progress feels like.
There are windfacts about the undoing of piles and messages. In the weeks following the Event with the Aftermath stuck windsharp between the fifth and sixth rib, he comes to understand this undoing. It starts when trust became the dark purple edible fruit of the chilly and uncomfortable. Lost in the charm of tar and asphalt, he bit into it, the seeds bitter with sweat and saline – a liquid burn that licks down his esophagus and settles effervescent in the pit of his stomach. It is there, too, when he watches how easily Harvey discards, like trees that shake the remnants of fall leaves off skeletal limbs. Mike watches the man heave and tremble until he is skinless, scrubbed raw, and windchapped. For a moment, Harvey is all sagging scaffold and crumbling infrastructure but then he straightens, rebar spined, in a sturdy silence. And, in this silence, Harvey leaves. He doesn’t cry, not really. Mike leaks expectations, what should have beens, and any means of survival. He leaks words, too. Words that say he is the ruined, the imperfect, the reliant, and he is the reason there is silence. Those words remain inside lost in the fakeglimmer of light on glass and the loose stretch of neon. And in this silence, he realizes he does not want to be alone. Here is no longer home and this city is cold this time of year so he sleeps in the temporary warmth of comforters and wonders when the silence will be wrung out, a dried hum.
They learned each other (and themselves, too) at night when the shadows slowcrawled out of the corners and Mingus played on low. It was in the hard left tug of a tie coming undone and the greasedamp pizza box. They sipped scotch and bogwater with sleeves rolled up to elbows on four arms and two pairs of shoes discarded by the coffee table. Work spilled between their two heads and they found words, inconsequential sounds, that could wrap around and join their separate bodies. And they drank and were drunk and they desired. Sometimes, when the night moves through airwaves and neon shakes off split cement, they are above it all, glitterhumid in the press of bodies, weightless and grounded. Sated in bodies that could not contain the presence of another, they ate nutmeat until their bellies were full and they were drowsy in slickheat. And they were happy until the Event left them reeling in debris. There should be a word for no words, for this no music, in the aftermath of a thought.
Harvey never needed it. Never needed his voice, a low throb of need for need. Mike knows this. Knows that love is a fricative – forced air through a narrow channel after a lilting, breathless start. But he still swan-dived into the brackish water of Beauty down to where there were no fine linens, no tailored vests. There was seaweedsludge and grasping fingers digging into his hips. He forgot he needed to breathe. And when he washed ashore in tides of what has been left behind, he is drenched in the stench of sweat, used clothes, and oleander tea. Then the bell tones sound descending fifths into shallow graves. I. O. U. Sometimes Why. And E is found in need. Eager to be meager in his pressed suit, he walks barefoot over a minced glass until his feet were bloodied and he could wince no more. Circumambulate. His feet turn snow crunch into new green into dehydrated bracts and he doesn’t stop to consider the path he paces in the bottom of the trench. Soon he will pause, strung out, and watch Harvey behind a layer of glass. They are separate now. Sliced in half by misguided lightening and turned in opposite directions, they stay that way. Sometimes, Mike wishes he was still in the lovepool attempting to knit a life vest with the pieces of his broken ribs so he could stay afloat in the riptides and still feel the shiver of Harvey’s skin next to his. And sometimes he doesn’t miss the way sibilants slipped inside and gripped tight around his ribcage, voiceless. Maybe, they will find a way to stutterstart back towards each other, quivering in the face of an aftermath that is no longer an aftermath, and the bitter fruit will not be so bitter anymore.
If X is love and Y is the space between them, then the navel is the fold of how close they stood within each other. And the belly is where laughter forms. When they meet again in slush and snow it feels as if it has been thirtytwohundred years since they were struck apart full of seeds and debris. Flowers bloom from mended ribs. Maybe this street corner under the spectrum of neon lights is their bog and maybe they brought the thickest of wire to stitch a renewed seam. Now they will wake from a dream of paper birds and earthworms and speak of love once more.