‘a wash of nature’
humans, above the animals we place ourselves, perhaps, but instinct, still an unseen force coursing through our being, and maybe, maybe that is what drew me outside, my own subconscious need to survive, or at least better my now
sometimes the days feel crushing, as if bricks are piling on and you have no choice but to take the tension, the tension of pushing back to not snap in half like a twig, and every minute seems to make the ground softer, the weight larger, until you are just a witch ditched under the corner of a house in a tale on some small CRT
so I venture outside, the banal but rewarding task of watering my bamboo plants, they don’t talk back, or at least not yet, they do not have names but certainly have faces I have come to recognize, and then I notice to the west, the breeze hits, the type of breeze that just might be carrying a parcel as a portent to some distant traveling storm, but the clouds they stay quaint, without a word the breeze speaks to me, washing over me, not like water, like only wind can, touching but not, invading but cordial, intimate but not intrusive, I stop – arms out just to bathe in this, a wash of nature, so I sit down on my concrete steps, trying to capture the breath in, watching the water drip from pots just wetted, the drops out-slowing with every moment of age, as all things, trying to bask in the last embers thrown of day, fading, not dying for I know the world is spin, just resting, just sleeping while I sleep
and I think of you, of all the lips have mine have touched none have been as yours, nerve endings are only the beginning, the vessel, a means, I remember peering and curling up in your eyes, so I could immerse myself in every inch of you, to be one, and now I am just one, I dream of you here, even now, all these years later, I still wish you to be here, quiet in this moment, together, what else is better? I’ve not known, I’ve not found a mere sustainable sliver since, a key, a door, no – just rambling wilderness guided by the faded scribblings of a once fierce cartographer, no more, a meandering nomad yearning for mirages to appear, something so intense even if pure hallucination might mend, at least for a moment, I wish you were here right now so I could tell you everything and nothing, just to feel your gentleness once more, just once more, I slide into what was, what could have been, but no, these silent moments in a comforting summer breeze relent, the soft tin-din of seasonal locusts in chorus, crickets chiming in as the light dims, in my mind I reach for your hand – to know it is gone, so I sit within the phrase-waves of this somber summer song, stripped away of all the world around, my focus has but only sound, I whisper in the most warming tone, as if lost in your sight-line, if only once more…
“I will always love you”

notes… stream of my consciousness, all rivers bleed into the sea, or at least they do… for me, sometimes.