It hasn’t rained for three months. The trees are prospecting underground, sending reserves of roots into the dry ground, roots like razors to open any artery water-fat.
The grapes have withered on the vine. What should be plump and firm, resisting the touch to give itself in the mouth, is spongy and blistered. Not this year the pleasure of rolling blue grapes between finger and thumb juicing my palm with musk. Even the wasps avoid the thin brown dribble. Even the wasps this year. It was not always so.

You said, “I love you.” Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? “I love you” is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them.

I did worship them once, but now I am alone on a rock hewn out of my own body.  

Here’s a game called perspective: stand alone in a large field.  Walk as far as you can.  Imagine where you were.  From there, you are part of the horizon.

A moment came when the oak tree in the backyard was not enough for her.  It was a long moment, a slow realization shuttered through the years of spiny adolescence, but at some point she realized that the tree was no longer enough.  The weight of her body had somehow eclipsed its way out of the shadow of the branches.  Her world was a constant spin of new sensations- not necessarily transformative or exciting, but constantly revolving.  The sense of slowly absorbing a single sight, of coming back to it every day to notice small changes, to taste the revolving door of days/months/seasons as a tangible timeline- these things had left her.  

She realized this fully one night while sitting in a restaurant.  “How,” the shadowy man across the table asked, “how was your childhood? Were you happy?” This phrase somehow contained an incantation.  Her feet, flat against the linoleum, tingled they way they did when they dangled ten feet above the ground.  Her senses were flooded with fall- memory reigned.

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”Arundhati Roy

“Charismatic” is an umbrella term used to describe the belief that the gifts of the Holy Spirit as described in the Christian New Testament are available to contemporary Christians through the filling with or baptism in the Holy Spirit, with-or-without the laying on of hands. These spiritual gifts are believed to be manifest in the form of signs, miracles, and wonders, including, but not limited to, glossolalia, interpretation of tongues, prophecy, healing, and discernment of spirits.

The luminescence exists, always. 

I imagine that yes is the only living thing.

-e e cummings

“There is a difference between being sexy and seeking pleasure.  One involves a static state, the other a constant state of discovery.  When faced with this sexual cross-roads, perhaps we should consider the one that includes the wild; the unexpected and titillating option of expanding our options for experiencing pleasure into the great unknown.”

RAIN
by Don Paterson

I love all films that start with rain:
rain, braiding a windowpane
or darkening a hung-out dress
or streaming down her upturned face;

one long thundering downpour
right through the empty script and score
before the act, before the blame,
before the lens pulls through the frame

to where the woman sits alone
beside a silent telephone
or the dress lies ruined on the grass
or the girl walks off the overpass,

and all things flow out from that source
along their fatal watercourse.
However bad or overlong
such a film can do no wrong,

so when his native twang shows through
or when the boom dips into view
or when her speech starts to betray
its adaptation from the play,

I think to when we opened cold
on a rain-dark gutter, running gold
with the neon of a drugstore sign,
and I’d read into its blazing line:

forget the ink, the milk, the blood—
all was washed clean with the flood
we rose up from the falling waters
the fallen rain’s own sons and daughters

and none of this, none of this matters.

We do not create our own

realities

which is

to say
                the cat has eaten nine leaves off the last plant
i am trying to keep alive
on a windowsill pressing east.

we do not create our own reality
the boy who lives upstairs
erected a plywood target in the back yard
the size of a postage stamp,
the yard, that is
not the target
which


but all i can remember is a vague sense
of rising green
things expanding up and down
a natural architecture
the deepest sense of longing

We do not create our own realities
by which I mean
I am tired
and you are pressing
inward,
always.

“Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but materialists have always known it depends entirely on whether they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek.” -Tom Robbins