Hallucination

Mediating the world, ourselves. How can intentions expressed as words, as images, create the reality we are living?

Within the film of my life I create the story I am living.

That story also shapes outer events. The world coheres to my version of it.

Do you understand that
the world
is a mass hallucination?

That we have agreed
to hallucinate it this way
and we teach our children.

Weight

Weight of words, Monsieur.

Referring to what is just out of reach. Emotion, idea, situation, description, always approximating, never fully expressing what they create and shape. We are not feral. Culture moves through us, syncopates its rhythms in us, punctuates us.

veils of words and images drifting over the world

Fever

Was it that she'd always had a raging fever?

Does rage have a temperature, and had it now peaked, and was broken?

Tempest

She crawled along the key and decided not to give in.

When the winds subsided they stabilized her with intravenous fluids, medication. They checked her blood, ran a CAT scan, an MRI. In her stupour, she relented.

I could feel the tension of resistance dissipate and she became like a boxing glove gone limp. The stuffing disappeared. She could no longer hit; the psychic force of her anger gone.

Her black dress lay on the floor, salty and ragged. She looked strangely newborn in her hospital green gown. Unlike herself.

Only her fingernails were glaring red.

Would it build again, the tempest?

Perhaps.

Perhaps not.

Capture

I am most comfortable if you are lovingly diffident, sweet but often absent; yet I desperately need your ardour.

If you discard me, or appear to, for you never actually do, I am comfortable; if you don't, I panic, sending dozens of invisible arrows to scare you off, so you will shy away. My mixed messages, subliminal. No, I do not always do this knowingly. I'd like to stop, if only I knew how.

For me to be still, and not flee in every other thought, and be your woman is most difficult, even if I am perhaps your woman.

Capture terrifes me.

Like conventional relationships.

Love that is richly fantasized, and remains. Approaching but never arriving. Hidden in each other's lives. Intimacy, this dance of closeness. Which can't settle.

Can we roam through each other's hearts
like oceanic tides?

Fear

Monsieur, my fears?

It is the ancient fear of entrapment.

Sea-Break

The sea wall, broached. The heaving ocean swells over it. Water flying in howling wind collapses the brick and mortar and concrete stays like pins. There is no barrior.

What is to keep her from sweeping out to sea, her black dress like a murder of crows flying about her?

Her eyes are lit with terror as the water rises, foaming.

She shrieks at the turbulent sky; her voice joins the screaming winds.

She is thin and flaps like a scarecrow.

She stands on an outcrop. The water swirls around her feet, but doesn’t wash her away. The rock holds her safe.

Her face a venom of fury
when she sees me.

What is it she desires?