9.6.20
DATURA
You’re an expert navigator. Robin Hood’s moral compass was engraved in your pigeon magnetic poles when you were born.
I get lost easy. Really. I only know one way home – and even then my tendencies lead me astray. This combined with a surplus of curiosity makes me a sailor’s worst nightmare. Even if we are all made of star-stuff.
Of course curiosity kills the fox. And even if satisfaction supposedly brought it back to life, there’s still those times I deep dive into my mess-person. As I’ve discovered, there are reams and reams of it. Endless snarls of words, sometimes twisting into meaning, sometimes into nothing at all, frequently breaking apart, always branching off into other pieces I come across later–on old napkins, the tattered edges of an envelope, once even on the thought of saffron; everything and anything but empty; each fragment completely covered with the creep of years and years of ink pronouncements; layered, crossed out, amended; handwritten, typed; legible, illegible; impenetrable, lucid; torn, stained, scotch taped; some bits crisp and clean, others faded, burnt or folded and refolded so many times the creases have obliterated whole passages of god knows what–sense? truth? deceit? a legacy of prophecy or lunacy or nothing of the kind?, and in the end achieving, designating, describing, recreating– find your own words; I have no more; or plenty more but why? and all to tell–what?
See what I mean? Lost in the meaning of so many dangerous sentences.
Of course I only have my own immeasurable stupidity for winding up here. I was a fool to disregard the person-map. Or is it the reverse? Do I secretly enjoy these alter-spaces? At least we can both agree I should have some fucking inkling of what I’m doing here.
And I do. At least sometimes I do. I’m fickle. My head and my heart change gears as often as most people change underwear, and of course you know… None of this is out of malintent; but what’s real and what’s not real doesn’t matter here. The consequences are the same. The mirror still bears the beast’ fangs at me. That promiscuous behavior marking my teen years never went away, it only became more discrete. That may be the worst decision I ever made, but fuck it, it’s mine.
Datura, here is how I lost my lovers; I was, and sometimes still am, a cold shower. As you well know, finding out there’s no warm water is a particularly unpleasant discovery, simply because it’s not something you figure out immediately. You have to let the water run awhile and even though it rains icy, part of you still refuses to believe it won’t change, especially if you wait a little longer or open up the valve a little more. So you wait, but no matter how many minutes run by, you still see no steam, you still feel no heat.
I’ve warmed in my years. Grown more transparent, but you can imagine the re-imaging necessary to pull a person so far out their gravity scope. These pushes and pulls frighten me. I confuse arms for cages. Comfort for placation. Wounds for daggers. That incertitude made a habit of running away from tenderness. from you. In those moments, I need your compass, your direction, your questions: “where are you?”, “what does it look like?”, the things that give structure to these thought buildings and feeling streets. I will get lost again Datura, when I do, I’ll need you. That map of yours saying “you are here, and so am I.”