I question perhaps extra space.

Well, you can keep it. Keep the silence? Keep the silence silent? Keep my (as in

“your”
voice? A little unclear on the desire here....

(I like the ambiguity,
but I
thought I’d
point it out)


let it blow unfettered like love letters I like the the, love letters, this

is sort

born of a hand and typewriter— of an unfettered love

For a little archaic
snags maybe ‘drags’? still keeps with
the unfettering?
lull or empty? I like it though...

the ‘letter’ part will be cut, but stays for the sake of I,

not sure about it, mostly because of

It is wonderments lost cause: the lone wrestling with shadows, with the play of light on the edge of dreams and unwelcome consciousness, with the distraught song of far off sirens. We shuddered together. We bled the unknown salts of withheld words. I wouldn’t think of her if she weren’t near. I wouldn’t think of her if she were near. Today the sound of bells clashes against the cold like the light reflecting off the snow. Today the sound of the crowd holds the static and keeps time in the conversations where words just don’t do what they should. The looks of other people. The passing glances and wondering of who will think of you later, who will remember a word or a movement and wonder what you are doing now, you the stranger, you the conversationalist, you the interpreted.

When I think of Jude I wonder if she is singing to herself as she drives. I wonder if she is doing any number of things, each amazing in its own mundane way. At dinner M---- and JY asked how it is that deep loneliness is bearable. I had no answer. When I imagine the strangers I pass in their daily life I can only see the making of tea in a poorly lit kitchen, the stress of years as one sits at a butcher block counter and wonders the what ifs. The struggle to get from here to there without giving in to the cravings for another cup of coffee because that means talking to someone for a brief second, a transaction and interaction that holds so many possibilities that never develop. Everyone is particular and awkward, but we think of them as blasé, as tedious examples of that which we don’t want to be. But those we know live in a wonderful place. Even in making tea and pouring over a book of poems in my thoughts , Jude exists in a crystal chalice.

Stability and tedium have never been part of my strength. Up has been a place where I am, not where I go. This has left me alone. The inability to hold some microcosm of an unvaried existence, a day to day that has only minor ebbs and flows, is a problem for many, for me while I try to avoid the incapacities that solitude yields. This, I have come to realize only just now, randomness of existence is what people fear most: the unexplained, the phenomenon that is pervasive yet we try to interrupt, the dissonance of movement.

As a point of capacity for the unknown, how is one to negotiate the tide? A journal for stability, the admittance of error and correction, the wayward thought that pure honesty resolves the majority of daily conflict? It has all been conflated. I have a desire to rescue banality, to invade the people in my life with consistency if only it would mean a relative communion of two minds that remains affective, effective, and does not disrupt. If there were more action, more physical movement, paradoxically, this may not be such a problem.

This is the issue artists face; why artists have a reputation for being irrational and problematic. For the movement of distance and silence requires a certain stasis for prolonged periods; effectively leading to madness, the inability to maintain a level field of emotional responsibility, and deep excavations into the minute and brief realms of passion and desire. But what comes when the desire, the passion, subsides and the emotion does not? Breton, Aragon, and Soupault all felt the effects of Vache's madness, set out in search of an unconditional reality, only to come to terms with the reality that is never 'real'. The acceptance of this proposition is the plight of humankind; but more pertinent, it is the plight of the lover. On what basic foundation does one begin to trust emotions, specifically something as (foundational here is a Western concept, perhaps, but it extends throughout all cultures, as can be found in the literary and/or oral history extended even as far as the moon) non-filial love? At what point is projection projection, and when or where is it actually a reading that becomes inverted projection? And what if it is neither? What if it is 'real'? Were do we extend ourselves from there?

It is anti-logic. I should not be pained; I can do no other, I cannot manipulate or otherwise alter a certain set of conditions that have been laid out by the motherless moon or tides of silence that invade our daily lives. Yet I am pained. I should not long for something more than what I have when what I have feeds me, allows for the experience of desire to be quashed on an irregular basis (but fulfilled in one way that does not encapsulate the full form of what is desired, but enough to diminish the pure and constant fear that distants will grow and silence will be filled as it is cut away and grows deeper, stronger, less willing to divulge itself to the outside that brings words), but I find myself wanting more and more and more of it.

I need to stop occurring to myself everyday new. I have written letters to Jude that extend beyond the expanse of one simple room, one simple universal extent of madness and honesty. Letters I cannot send. Words that are known only in their silence, only in their honesty and admittance of crimes against emotion. Words that involve the pain of one reality that I can no longer recognize.

My name is Jack. I deny all forms of emotional integrity. I am in love with a woman. I do not know how to resolve this paradox.

"...and the threads will pass through the needles
of wind my dreams that need to be changed like bandages..."

It is her and the rushing water, those sounds of loss that enter my nightly self-estrangement. Again I am desperate lonely, only at times, and when I speak to Jude there is the temporariness. There was a time when I was involved with my neighbor, a woman I felt I could perhaps erase Jude with, but things fall apart. The giving I had was only momentary and never full, but always I faded with the inconsequentials, with her name always on my breath. On days as now, when I can hear through the wall the laugh of the woman who was not quite and a new lover, I feel again the longing, the emptiness, the desire to recover from her something I don't really want, for reasons I will never be clear on.

Perhaps because Jude will, for now, maybe for the length of this unknown narrative, her story and my life, always be distance. I may always be in a lock of want, stuck underneath the pins of some irrelevant god, with a singular desire that will always be on the other side of the gyre. So I sing of stipulations, lack, revolving shadows.

Jude is a breathing poem. My muse. It is hard to describe the moments of my mind that bring her near me, that provide the comforts of distanceless. She once demonstrated the proper way to peel an orange to an empty room, so the dust could learn of technique and patience. She did not tell me of this, but I can admire the silence.

I have locked myself into absence. I will sit near the snow of days and wonder. Believe in elegance.

A recognition. Yes. I saw her today at work. Collapsible hearts, straight ness's own design, the hair, the jeans, the shoes. Every thing but the eyes. I believe the distance is part her, part of her nowness. Of course it wasn't Jude in the store, but her aura, yes, an aura that profounds and follows my minds. She once uttered words to me that I couldn't here, and would not repeat, leaving me always wondering. Only part of that sentence is true. Anyhow, this woman that is not Jude asked me something I did not understand, and, as I have with Jude, I responded poorly. I couldn't see her eyes.

It's a forward looking that I try for. Five years. I will be here for five more years. I say this now, but really, who is available for emotional discretions for five years. Who can see that movement? I repress the movement as a forged symbol of evenessence. It was faulty. Is. I may return to an emotional past, momentarily, briefly, just to remember what that certain comfort is. I remember it exists, I remember the voice that comes through the phone and turns the cold into the blue late at night, speaking of fears and poetry, keeping company and close enough to touch, but always with a guard, always with a sense that the desire must only remain desire, to go further would be to create another subset of difficulties only one of us was prepared for.

To her aura I say goodnight, and ask her to stay close enough for the contained silence to remove the dissonance of my never wants. I don't know what I ask, what language I am speaking in. Sleep will come as will movement.

This is the light that by any other name would be known as sunrise. The refraction attends to my bedroom wall just before 7 a.m., a time when dreams are peeled back across the distances of whatever future may be involved and regurgitated into the semi-awareness of now. The bedroom window faces west, the sunrise should not been seen from here, but this mist of light booms across my eyes and into my existence to become nothing more than ordinary. Here, in front of me, is the only clue that days are not made strictly of hours and memories.

I have not heard from Jude for days. Maybe weeks. The cold sweeps through the riverish depression of the freeway and into the broken pane of the double-paned window, inviting itself in to the alterier as a casual acquaintance. Once, after waking in each others arms in the middle of the night, Jude told me of her fears. I was one of them. We didn't speak for months after that, but kept one another close by way of moving through the same localities to catch a glimpse. to make sure the other was still alive. It was the cold months then too, as again now.

She had eyes, then, that read the magnificent complacency of lips too-strong purses; she would call out the fickle-minded for their displaced ironic sentiment. As for maneuverability, that came with the walking downwards, because up always meant a look back, the silent ghosting that comes when two face desire and growth simultaneously and refuse the social morays.

Against the morning I drew a thought back to sing, but the stones would not stop, and I was wrecked by outsiders forcing into my world. Startled I rose and fetched out the moment; it was a day not to recall her too often, to admonish myself for the incapacity of movement, the forsaking of all things green, just for one day.

The light should never have reached my eyes, but it has.

It was a sort of moment. Fleeting or, rather, skipping in on the act of inging. So much I want always to say, though it is very much unnecessary: already understood. Stairs depict the problem of inequity. One is always above, and then the thoughts are as well. Is heading down to street level an act of depletion in some metaphysical sense? Is the oxygen thinner here and that is why I find myself so tired and wondering back to times when I wondered, asking myself how? C— had a picture in mind, something elemental, but the explanation was wildly premised in grey, which brings me to her eyes. I continually forget that this is not my story. Is separation like cleaving? A disjoined but conjoined sense of oneself, not unmiserable in the divided state but still yearning for the original? Can the original be understood, returned to, acted upon? Or is it always fresh, an act of refreshing? The answers seem unmitigatedly ambiguous.

It is rather stunning, Jude’s sudden honesty, though rather unexplainable (the statement, not the act). From the fourth floor to the ground I receive several interpretations from whatever it is outside of myself she calls forth. I see the answers in every breath on these cold mornings; each one of us lacks the true conviction to not change our minds with every exhale (do I speak for the universal? I do, I must, or I speak only for us, whoever we collectively assume to be). Her ubiquitous gaze denies my ability for secrecy and I return to my senses of misassumption, my leniency to my own protean mind, her protean desires.
In a book she left behind a note was left that, when removed from context and put next to one another, every third word formed a poem:

“We talked of unconventional conversion.
It was late, the fastidious time
when to talk of talking is to remove
yourself from words.

Yes, Jude;
No, Jack.

The words come off the tongue like cuts.
“Somebody has died here,
or will,” you say, not quite as glibly

as I’d like. It’s the removal
that adds the weight, the taking away
is not any sort of replacement.

The collected works,
the s’s and l’s left open for argument,
the distich a failure of metaphor

(neither of us really likes
anything, it’s all either felt …)

I let the cold night in through a cracked glass
room, and begin to think again of you.
The aura is cut away. Words drop
in some unimaginable weightlessness.”

For what it’s worth, silence is the resistance to walking down the steps, to falling again for a one that can, but is dubious of the intention of her desire.

Not tonight. A waning motion is a closing in. I spend the day thinking of Jude. The intensity of interaction, the way some couples mingle with each other as if they are strangers the surprise you with a telling glance. How much I crave the broken windowpane I see each day make itself whole again.

On any given thought I am walking down the street, Jude. I would hope that the warmth people share is not a tearing apart. For winter, I have thought, is only a shadow of her hair, flagrantly lost to fingers. Asher sent a note, a poem really, that focuses on the blue of iambs. We should talk more frequently about the colors of sound. The mysterious way we each bleed differently.

Fateful Returns...Grimacing Outlet

After the direction was over, I came again to the suddenness of now. How I've lost the narrative I'll never admit, but it quite rightly was abandoned. Jude is out there somewhere, again with and without, our thoughts prove too...murderous and desirous for lack of hesitation. I have fallen, and out of this fall I have reformed the triumphant earth, her spires like windowbeams cracked against the everyday glass of other people's shores that bear the prints of other people's feet for the fleeting moments between ebb and flow. I suppose it's the drought that brings out this sense of noise. And again the noiselessness of sense. Perhaps I have grown deaf to the incoming visions of halfnights, dreamlands in which the voice of gods touches future memories, incorporating them into the stillness of a word seen but never heard, never fully understood.

The days are distichs, always two sunrises and sets for every one count, then a refurbishing of the collective transgression into "soul-suffering" or whatever stock phrase one must insert to move to the next one. The pain comes not from the inability to relate, but begins there and moves forward into the inability to be heard as one is, as one extends themselves into the ever growing chasm of instability and the essence of 'to be' listened to without primary self-interested goals. How is one a priori? How much of one is? When I reach out to the other selves and am flung into the night, how is it I gather the moment in a receding hairline, a timeglass of the effervescent everpresence that surrounds momentous occasions. It all glows slightly backwards.

The answer comes in the plain and simple fact that a Jude exists. Not she, not the specific (though the specific is inevitable; necessary); but as a general concept. It would have been better had we met in a market's produce aisle, pronouncing the superiority of rambutans over lychee nuts, and introducing ourselves to the nectar of night. It stands as a situation both mundane and romantic, nearly theatrical, but theatrics is not simply a way of seeing, it is the way we move: lines are premeditated and dispersed, agony of desire is displayed in the way we fail at eye contact but look back as we hope we're being looked back at, smiles are placed in exactly the right spot.

No, her existence, though silent now, is the very thing that makes capability a sensation not unlike waking up in the morning to find it is the middle of the night. Breathing is much like this. Feeling a sudden, unprovoked rush of adrenaline. Yes. That is how she exists within me. Nothing is arbitrary except everything else. Then there is a shadow released into the desire to be whole again.