the most necessary and unholy baptism has occurred

.


Today I spit out a first name that no longer matters to me. I ruined a mood and I kissed dry, chapped lips, licking plaque-covered teeth. Today I looked up--there were no clouds; I felt the sky, vast and unending as it is, consume my mind, starting with its insides. Today I was an exhibitionist. A sweaty exhibitionist. Today I was a creation. Today I pulled at something that didn't need any more tension and snapped a string, unraveling a machine and lapping the oil that seeped over the gears. Today I held back and did not say the things that would have freed me. Today I did not sigh when I needed to and felt the waiting breath ache within me. Today I laughed too much and smiled too little.

And tonight I watch my sisters play and listen for my mother's melodies as she coaxes our baby grand piano. Those songs bleed with me--I know neither their titles nor their purposes, but the melodies I know by rote, unwillingly, most of the time. Tonight I do not sleep and instead work for something unattainable, fighting advances that I wish would flee from me and move on to seek other victims--my heart, my lungs, my kidneys, but please, not my mind. Tonight I tame my stomach for the sake of experience, memorize a freeway system, dream while awake.

My day and my night are immersed in the air above a winding road--the road on which the ambulance and squad cars move; the road on which the drunken girls lucky enough to make it home unbroken stumble; the road on which the sun leaves its heat.
My day and my night are no more a part of me than the dusk. My days sink and escape; my nights beg incoherently of something unfamiliar and perverse. Sin and healing, deafness and tortous spirals laced with prayer.









You are the space in between days.
This leaves me with no time.
I love once and hard,
branching too far, then,
like a lesion,
I weep,
having been torn
like your philosophies--
your easily fallible philosophies

our
easily fallible philosophies
that I remember forming
with burns and tongues
back
when our sleep was rude
and the arch of the sun
was like a womb.