| There is so much distance between us.
Every time, each moment I arrive no closer than before.
{Last night}
I could hear the hollow miles of space from you to me. It was the din of cicades and my red boots clicking.
Six years since I'd seen you and I found myself so eager to do this-
be at your table, in your bed, with the city's sweat and sulfur and with you in my skin...
But once again- after coming back through vast regions from nowhere- I am with you alone, equidistant from my destination just as everyone else is in their own aloneness
...having sex, building houses, drinking tea...
I thought I could hear him breathing- in bed I felt his eye, his hair, the skin of his knee.
I woke up over and over in the night feeling naked, searching for the sheet that kept disappearing.
There is so much distance between us.
{One year ago}
She asked me to sit with her through the night-
to sit across from her over uneaten dinner
the ominous creaks of the wood furniture... the booming clanks of her lapis colored plates...
listening to the echoes in the span from her to me.
Her father's body was sitting in the morgue 20 miles away.
I tried not to be too silent, tried not to be too fixed on the quiet white iris pattern of the tablecloth, and reassure her that she was not alone when she was alone and that if she screamed,
it wouldn't be lost in the gulf that night.
There is so much distance between us, spanning over all this rabble and grit.
But before groaning into our rest of dust we must spend part of our life trying to measure it. We do this
until we notice it's not the same as the distance between a jumper and his base;
{ see meters, stories, deadly}
that it is not measurable.
Until you see a massacre at twilight in El Jadida,
or hear the deafening sound people make
every time they drug themselves numb,
spit at a person they don't understand
or rub their skin purple in an orgy...
Until you strain at the edge hard enough to see too far over it,
you will not stop.
{Last week}
It's another Tuesday trip to the laundramat. I sit in my corner twisting my hair band through my fingers and over my wrist
bored, changeless,
eight quarters stolen but not thinking anything of it.
Look at all this we grab from each other and how little we get.
{Today}
I sit in traffic as a jumper looks down from a gray city bridge. It's so aggravating-
the work to get the truth/meat/God/back
staring at how much we've built and seeing how slowly we traverse through it.
Another one of us too much in this world wanting to end it, but he's keeping the city from getting everywhere it wants to get.
Jump it. Just fucking do it. Everyone screams it.
Crossing that distance from disquiet to dust won't get rid of any rabble or grit.
It won't shorten the measure that is measureless.
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