GHOSTS

Just like the tormented dead who cannot pass into the realms of rest will stalk and haunt the living, so do the tormented living haunt the living — I’d rather not be this to you — would rather slide down the mudbanks of your memory and be rolled, doused in bleach, softened by haze — not that I’m all sharp turns, but some days I am corners — some days I am a house with a hundred rooms for which you only have the key to one — the haze that lazily hung ‘round the shore today painted a sweet romance of the formidable island and the freezing sea — I threw off my old gown and galloped into her waters, splashing and whooping gleefully — oh, malleable mind! — and didn’t a dog follow me, a golden lab who thought I was drowning or suicidal, waiting sentinel by the shore with his embarrassed owner shouting his name in vain, averting her eyes from my naked shamelessness — I felt your spirit in him; watchful, kind, full of care, and with him (and you in him) there, I managed to wade further, dunk myself, even swim a few lines of breaststroke, and enjoy the feeling of being submerged to my ears with the island as my morning lover, over there, far away as you are some swims — I always write of mornings, don’t I? As though they’re steeped in meaning, but to me they are! — my favourite time of day apart from the other (night) — hard for me not to love the growing and fading light a thousand times more than the dull expectation of full light — hard for me to miss their mystical messages — so I wade wistfully through the hours, slow, intentional as a character in myth — with no sense of leaving or arriving — wishing somedays that there was a way to place you in my experience so you could feel how my soul is ever-enchanted, and my human ever-tormented — why do I need you to know? I don’t. There’s nothing to it; it’s just so — for many — some days, the spirit so severed from the flesh that one is haunting oneself — I cannot help but see a sea of fleshy ghosts and love them all, want to hear their tales of woe and death — I hear them whisper, do do you see me? See through me? Feel me from the inside out? — to my lovers I deliver this impossible task, a Sphynxian riddle of hieroglyphic bewilderment — I want to be known, to be seen, but mine is a haunted home with a hundred rooms, to only one of which, each day, I may give you a key — bow down, tell me who I am, pray for us before I leave —