Today, Lisa and I went to the bookstore. I love the way people stare at us on the streets when we go out- love the juxtaposition of light and dark, crystal-like and tawny, wide eyed and deep lashed, her clear mirror eyes and mine the ones he said he once fell into and never came back.
And I got books.
So many books.
I know...I'm such a geek; but what can you do? At least I'm the good kind.
Lisa got George Orwell's 1984 and we both found the rare prized Looking For Alaska(!) and I have Jack Kerouac's On The Road and came away, too, with an impulse buy- Patti Smith's Auguries of Innocence. Gravitated towards it while my eyes were fingering the shelves and I found it and picked it up and leafed through it .
And then I knew I couldn't leave it behind. Because the pages whispered and the words throbbing, knowing, waiting in them were sacrilege and darkly sacred all at once and they were murmuring my name in devilsbells and I couldn't leave them behind.
oh, this word madness. oh, this catharsis of ink and story and bone.
I have scorpions on my ears and I will sting you for every lie you whisper.
I will lift cool, clear walls and maroon you, you with your impeccable ideals and your right compass and your debatable arrow; like a one-man Atlantis/
will hear you as you sink, the thousand voices of the thousand people we could have been rising in dreadful cacophony as the water rises over your godhead and i will laugh/
I will lose myself in the words of poets and beatboys and the Madman Who Saw God.
will lie on tawny shores and let the waves wash over every line of my body and into my lungs until when I sing it will be seawater and when I speak they will hear the voice of Poseidon in a great and rushing roar of pain.
I will swallow the great terrible darkness
but sing wild and dreadful hallelujahs to a God who killed me over an altar, whispering "die to yourself"
and when I finally learn to listen I shall rise from the cinders of Abraham, of Isaac ringing with all the fear and all the light and all the understanding of Tomorrow--
he will call me phoenixchild:
i, laughing, will rocket skywards with waxen wings ablaze.