Everything is so environmental these days in my life. I am cold even if it is summer outside. It’s summer now. I have been dictated to by film my entire life. Right now I am waiting for a sunrise to come up. I am thinking of my childhood. I am a stream-of-consciousness multi-dimensional type when it comes to my literary work tutored in the success of law and principle by my faith and I can’t focus. I can’t seem to concentrate because all I can think about is your sadness and your broken heart and your faith that carried you through all of that. It is your raw and unflinching honesty that moves me, that is my muse now and a desert. The psychological framework of a desert. I think of all of these narratives that you carry deep inside your heart as yours, as majestic, as promising. You’re magnificent in every way possible, you’re a man of honor and valor and excellence. Happy birthday for tomorrow. Always.
Another chapter in my life has come to an end.
What is this cool poetry that runs as deep as unchecked art? What are these times I am living for? I remember what it felt like as water tugged at the very essence of my soul in high school. Inside the amoebic depths of the local swimming pool I was mitochondria. I am alone in the stillness of the day turning into night. The dogs are giving me a tutorial in venting hunger and anger. I fed them eggs and rice last night in a cocoon of blackness. That was what the realization, the paranoia, the delusion was encased in. The universe was a duvet of starry filled blackness as I watched the three females eat. The man was never coming back and an agitation moved through me. I was chasing the sea again. Once I knew what swept off my feet romanticism was and even felt like. To see agency in a man. To be a woman and to have access to that energy. To have that invitation. I live for language and the performing arts now. For this kind of poetic transformation the world offers up to me now as captain as I write to reach that swept off my feet romanticism repeatedly just to feel alive in the moment again.
What poetry offers the soul in times of loneliness is solace at the end of a relationship and the beginning of closure. The silence and the hours are all around me. A vagrant has come to my door. He always comes and begs for something to eat but his manner has turned into advances a few times and I had begun to feel frightened and torn. Not safe on so many occasions. My mother did not stand up for me. My father was elderly. He knew this. That I was a flying solo bird and he was beginning to exploit me in the worst possible case scenario. I think of the man who is my muse now. The soldier on the battlefield carrying a gun and nothing but strategic thinking holding him up. The man taking care of his mother, taking her grocery shopping, taking her to the clinic. It has been a year. He is knocking. The vagrant. I ignore the rub of that persistent knocking. My mother is tired. She lies curled up like a child under a warm blanket on the sofa in the lounge drinking her coffee. I remember her lipstick mark on a mug from childhood. I am a novelist now. The book was released in August of this year in Australia and the districts of New Zealand. The book Letter To Petya Dubarova. It was a Pick Of The Week in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Brisbane Times and The Age just this year. Am I proud I wrote a book on my personal experience of mental illness and suicide in my family to another poet? I don’t know.
Then I am flashed on a screen on a weekday afternoon being interviewed about this book and I go there. Of all the places in this world I could go. I go there. I say, “I Googled suicide and depression” (like an expert on the subject matter). Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that because in the Q&A afterwards someone asks me hesitantly, tiredly, wine-tired (there had been a wine tasting before I zoomed into that room in a small town in the Karoo) about that. I answered as honestly as I could and with care. I gave it some thought beforehand and took it upon myself to answer sensitively. I only have the sinew of wit for company now and Netflix. The man is long gone into the shadows. Am I writing this to him or for him I don’t know. He told me he belonged to a club. An aviation club. He loved airplanes and flight. He had been in the air force before the army. He was an avid skateboarder as a youth and had even placed in competition. When I think about him I think of poetry and the girl I once was in high school that he had loved from afar. There had been others. Always others. In the last email I read from him he had written I have moved on. I had difficulty letting go. He is and was and always will be the love of my life. How Jane Austen.
The evening is pale. The silence is tender. The words are golden and in my hands they’re an emboldened tapestry with multi-layered threads. All I have are these words now to remember the shine of the afternoon as I waited barefoot for him in the sitting room of my parents house. He would pull up in the driveway in the wide expanse of his silver car. I would talk and he would listen. He would talk and I would listen. Now there is nothing but isolation hidden in the waves and vibrations of day, in the light, in the powerful blue of the sky. I am crying and I know why. We had goals, plans, dreams. Had I imagined them? They are more of an illusion now. Illusion withheld, illusion encountered, oh you bewildering illusion. The man is caught up in a novel era. I am distracted. I can’t fall asleep like clockwork. Not the way I used to. I’m still up in the middle of the night counting sheep. You see, I can still hear his voice inside my head and he’s still a vessel of pure light. It’s been years now. The hour takes me under. I am alert and the sound is psychological. He was a catalyst in unchartered territory where waters run deep. I carry his signature upon my heart. Always.
