Chapter One
My day begins between Maria's legs. I imagined this room. It's dark, while the air remains a hint of cool, we are a furnace. The bed would be on the floor. She is the source. Her moans are rhythmic reminders of life, that we are alive, rhythm, we have this gentle clawing rhythm. Her hair is black, spreads itself out like a moonlit cave atop a rocky outcropping of ragged pillows. Trying not to disturb the other occupants of the house, I cover her mouth with my hand, then use my lips. What's being made, it leaps and dashes across space color. The door is closed. I rise up to view her through blurry eyes. This must have happened. Her breath is spiraling along my ear, down my throat, impressing my active lungs, expanding what's known by inspiring shapes of unknown. This is a place only two people can visit together. How could I be making this up? This is all a dream. But I tangle our legs, and wrap her slender torso into my uncompromising arms written forever, and really forever, even with the world in disagreement about forever. It's saying no to forever. I'm still writing on top of the red marker. I can hear laughter, and the savage rush of morning, loud, street noise calling intolerably, surrounding this dark room. The whistling of a passing train yells through town and brings the volume to a final cry. I am still here with her. We are breathing relieved and deeply in unison. I am kissing her like it's the first. Stop checking your cell phone. I am communicating with her heart in a language we are inventing. It is green stone, this table, with wood-lining. I am far away in another place wondering about the existence of these moments. I almost smell her, or maybe want to so bad that it happens.
be back tonight?
yes. with moon.
mmm. good. you two have fun.
...we will.
I am flung away. When it's this warm, everything threatens to melt, begins, even. And there is also the silence, don't believe the hubbub of noise, we live within the gaps of silence.
I stumble out of my woman's blue dark loving room and into the circumstances of living. Human sweat and change, thick inside this crowded bungalow of a house. I am not really here. I was never invented. While somewhere distant, a helicopter churns blue butter in the sky. Inside, scattered about, are remnants of the people who belong to this home; aunt and uncle, cousins, grandmother, ghosts, skeletons, ashes, good old-fashioned people gone already to work or still asleep. There is scattered lint, clothing, shoes, articles of evidence left recently behind. They belong to people, thank God for people, because for no understandable reason they've taken care of me like I'm one of their own. Even if I am not, even if I I am no one, someone, everyone. I am sitting in my father's house. At his table. The green one I mentioned. We are going to the doctor today. I don't know which version of reality to entertain.
her blood-heavy lips impart one final smack of immortality on my lactic corpse and then I break away, rise and sway to the humbling mechanisms of bipedal locomotion in the twenty-first century. I am disappearing from her fast. I am being sucked out of the door, holding on by its frame, gaining one track to and away from her eyes.
be back tonight?
yes. with moon.
mmm. good. you two have fun.
...we will.
