genuine. i would be content knowing it was authentic. but things from the past – they crawl in the night when consciousness stumbles around in slumber. these things invade and infect, devouring what is still good: the pure, that which is still just alive, the beautiful and the virtuous – the true.
my history is unwholesome, swollen with death and mistrust, bitter to the taste. in this space he smiles, pure as an icy mountain stream, the sky in it – blue and endless. here in this moment he keeps nothing to himself, receiving all – demanding nothing, greatful entirely in a moment beyond the horizon of expectation. suspended or moving like light, almost outside existence – a thought fragmented by the ripples of a touch.
its entirety is unbearable, like looking at the sun, like loving through pain, fear and incredulity, like wanting to fly well aware it is a daydream – yet jumping off the cliff nonetheless, to death. just to know the illusion of flight for a moment, holding hands with Bertha. crashing, emptied of regret, light with joy and relief for having awoken the fugitive hero.
not all of the creatures in the nocturnal bestiary are evil. it is not a ravenous pack, wicked, volatile or lethal. some are blissful furies raging joyously. in their delirious dance and chants they claw, scratch and deafen. my lips are cracked and crusted from the savage singalongs, a vicious wail clotted in the throat…unknowable in silence collapsing into history.
limbs torturously contort into raw primal shapes – until the body becomes a current of feeling, swelling to overwhelm all thought, all that is human and all that is escape, swallowing flesh and bone back into the beginning.
perhaps the beginning is the touch, that is genuine, without precedent or predecessors – no forethought and suspicion, no ›before‹ – alone with everyone and everything.