If I Had Words

i

if i had words

i would linger over a particular vowel, the name of a lover or just a loved one. and across the consonants like each vertebrate on the spine i would drag my fingers across –

skin

in the saltiness of sweat, of sea breeze, the skin stretches out, immaculate as silence, the perfect sound canvas.

ii

je fume/i smoke. the unfiltered Gauloises tears thru my voice with the violence of a sudden memory. i cough and am reminded of a few winters ago seventeen years old and entirely intoxicated. looking for covering, somewhere to hide and/or to be. my companions were either blind, wounded, or moving too fast for me. some couldn’t make it. others settled for shelter, for the comfort of company. and soon i was walking alone in the forest, awake, lurking. i found refuge under a veteran tree and i emptied my pockets.

save matches and cigarettes im carrying a feather, a ring, and an old envelope. i spread the pages out on the ground and place my hands on them to feel in the ink

the movement of

the hand

the one who writes

iii

it is in breathing that we reveal ourselves the most. i want another smoke. i want sleep. but i have this stirring urge to speak because the word perforates and paints. the unseeing eye/i, like time, consists of a swirl of swarming scenes. the intercourse of vowels and vision is intense like foreign tongue kiss. the breath is electric and sharable. it is the corporeal body of a wish. the pigments of a kaleidoscopic dream and intensely hallucinatory. im having a Pollock moment. longing for movement. speed. the obscuring of things –

the image of one overlapping the images of others.

a series of imageries like petals in sinister bloom.

there are tears but the tears are not mine. someone else is crying. i merely whispered rain as it rained and lingered on the sound. a smooth droplet. i caught it on my lash.

iv

i think of the red and tuscan sun.

italy is where i’ll go next. i will tan my skin w/the rouge blush of wine. i will walk down the halls of the villa stepping on the shifting light casted upon wooden stairs. as if descending from destiny. from a place in time which leads into another place. in another time.

i am a move, a motive. intact and careless, from one crowd into another, i was going so fast that from afar i must’ve looked like a moving thread of light.

v

if i had words

i would find a way to tell you that now when i have a smoke it is no longer gauloises. that much i’ve been able to leave behind.