Skin

So often I am overcome by the older thoughts about illness and my peace is then broken piecemeal again, stolen; the quietness another type of well known madness, more powerful than illness, than body and word, than soul and world, in the constant flow of the innermost tides that inundate the joys of earlier days and the imagined faces of beloved men, with poisonous unrest, in a swift and constant flight, they all begin to vanish, recede with the waters in tenfold pulsations of fingertips and for a moment the lips become dreamy, the flesh less bruised, the limbs covered with sawdust, twilights as words, cityscapes overflowing with darker shades of colour folding up into the most primary greys of morning moonshine. They begin to loosen their bodies, losing shapes and turning into lines, jotted down at haphazard into the risky night, vertical endeavours reaching up to the most distant slies of heaven and the power of contentment limited to possible dreams alone.

Just as often I miss the mornings, time after time, inebriated from the fogs in the night outside, raining upwards into the streetlights, bathing the fickle warmth of the yellow hearbeats in the glass; it becomes impossible to face the days as they break into hours of noises, demands and constraints, into unfamiliar old bearings in this language so distant, so unloving and often so silent to the inner desire of yearning eyes, searching for blue and grey, also for weaker greens, cerulean and emerald, a merit land of oceans passed unter water, falling from a canvas, breaking ranks at last, like a sanderling, traveling through strands of the most foreign skins, so utterly changed by this slow movement of the arms. Precarious minutes, like odes, navigation plans for a boat anchored inland. The simplest pleasure denied at the expense of a stanza, looking into the void, performing for a last time the lines that could keep these ghosts afloat for yet a day more, even if only for the peak of the hour when a word is needed to unwind.

Eyes wide open into the pitchdark, fueled by the anaesthetic spitefulness of silence, drowning in the leaves as they fall from the books and the windows, unimagining the trees and other elements of the universe outside, refusing to engage with the smells and the fruits of their hands; the day sleeps away into endless vacuous time, hours of shipwreck into the exile of calm, death yet so far, the world so alive, rustling and joyful, nothing is changed, no decree is revoked, no indictment passed. There are chairs, floortiles, long threads of hanging clothes, invisible rooves, mosquitos as rowers and the taste of snow in leftovers from food, maps of foreign lands, the smooth sounds of hair, nothing is bloodied, everything at rest, it is so wonderful, this beauty, destructive, stale, untouched by motion, by decay, by the most fickle and superficial moment of love, it contains everything, like the morning, except the writer, the instructions, the beloved man and the light.

You can´t be sure anymore whether this is illness or absence, what overpowers you, it is a metaphor of images, a puzzle without riddles that you might not want to complete, least you discover callousness in the other end of the line. Failing to reckon, to acknowledge, it is a lot easier, makes you less guilty, your thoughts unhampered, you´re free to choose, friend or foe, for yourself. Anything can be written, anyone destroyed, wiped from the vessel of fragile impossible future thoughts, cleaned as dust, replaced, painted over again, without colours other than grain. Reading becomes impossible, asfixiating, you only want to hold tightly, to give in, to reach abovewards, oh set the time aright! Prayer is to no avail, the only refuge is without, in the open, beneath the flux of earth and rain, of bodies with olden flesh, new memories, reckless nails, bruised chins, cuts in the lips, a bitter flavor in the arm. You feel grace in the illness, it keeps you from the dream.