Excerpt from "Entropy"

...

This became one of those harrowing nights wherein they behaved in almost exactly the way that they always had because neither could imagine an action between themselves that did not fit the proscription of their ritual everydayness—despite his betrayal. Lying together in the dark, he held her from behind with his arms around her slender ribs beside her bare breasts that slid toward the mattress like fleshy droplets of water. His breathing unconsciously fell into a rhythm with hers so that his belly pressed into the small of her back as her exhalation drew it minutely away. Only the gravity of shared years held this charade in its slow orbit.

“If the universe dies a cold death,” he began at length, speaking quietly into her dark mass of hair where practice told him that her ear would be found, “then let us be the last two little entangled particles.”

A derisive snort interrupted her steadied inhalations momentarily as she made a small effort to move away. Without stopping her, predicting her ultimate decision, he allowed her finally to press harder against him and simultaneously curl a little into herself. She began sobbing again as her brain labored to fit his words into their constellation of memory and emotion. Sharp sniffs peppered her crying spell so that the outstanding vertebrae of her fetally curved spine occasionally jabbed into his sternum and reverberated inside him with a pain that he recognized immediately as heartbreak. A certain resonance was struck up between them. At length she quieted, wetted her lips noisily, wiped the tears from her round, bronze cheeks, and cleared her throat. She had maneuvered the blankets by grades away from him with a defiant spirit of attrition, wrapped by then tightly around her lower body, and he shivered in the cold room unwilling to break the hours of pure feeling over bodily concerns.

“And if it is a heat death?” Her dry and unexpected response streaked suddenly out of an unknowable span of empty time.

He did not have an immediate reply and folded inward. Having failed at tact long ago to extract himself from the uncomfortable web of wrongdoing, white lies, and gentle-if-misplaced admonishments for the sake of misdirection, his shell of dust and ices melted away into semi-poetic reminiscences, vague half-promises, and fantastically romantic visions paired exactly to a future that they had consciously engaged in rejecting. On such a journey of discovery only incongruent memories and two coincidental one-sided loves managed to surface.

He had imagined that the way his skin sometimes stuck to hers as the passionate heat of formation radiated away proved the closeness and mutability of all things, but over the long life of the universe such pools of stuff must have grown irreparably disparate. He searched for what was lost there between them in the magic that had appeared on occasion: a star falling over the canopy of the ancient tree where they first kissed on a hot night under Virgo or floating together listlessly over a city in the shallows of a cerulean sea where the brilliant fish flitted by urchins like asteroids through a belt of black stars or a sun setting through the haze of sea foam and mist watched from the edge of a cliff in a green land of dreams, gazing ever West. His world was punctuated by a personal morality, mystic cosmologies, and a primordial metaphysics; to her it was only some dust burning up in the dark or a reef nestled in dirty cinderblocks threatening to tear them apart as the tide went out or another annoying stop delaying her voyage of self-actualization. She pursued the mundane with fanaticism.

Frustrated to the end by this difficult love, he wrested back with a jerk his share of the covers. He released her. Rolling away to face the wall, unseen for the darkness—another unknowable sky, another invisible horizon—he let their bodies touch at the butt and the pads of their feet as they had so many times before out of affection. This time though he resolved to let her know only his dirtiest parts.

“If it is a heat death,” he said evenly, “then I will hold myself apart and stand on the pandemonium brink as the sole bastion of life and dynamism, and fuck you for asking.”

...

I am the Cobra

Listlessly I wind through a featureless landscape, and the grains beneath me align to no direction. Have I wandered very far? Nothing seems familiar, but everything seems just the same. Lightless suns cast no shadow while I turn endlessly between the looking-glasses that extend this desert into an unconquerable endlessness. A pain pervades me like an indefinable heaviness as if my vertebrae were made of dread.

My fingers dial numbers that once they knew so well:

A: “Help me.”

B: “Again? Where are you?”

A: A some place in this no where, drowning in a puddle of entropy.

A: “A vast expanse of hollow darkness that can swallow the days. I'm lost.”

B: “Enough of the poetics. Look around you. What can you see?”

A: Black clouds are behind me. Was I there? The mirrors are fogged.

A: “There is nothing. Some trees. A line of ugly buildings, identical houses. Unhappy faces. I hurt in a vague way all the time.”

B: “You're being difficult. Tell me landmarks so I can find you.”

A: Nothing remarkable touches my eyes. There were summer days before that loved me and that I loved. Were they like this, or were they different? The air seemed to embrace me then, and I could let it into my bones. Now I feel not-warm; I feel not-cold. I hurt in a vague way all of the time. It seems sharper now. Was I like this all along, or was I different then?

A: “I don't know. Something is out there. Out of frame. Do you understand? It must be insurmountable; nothing comes in.”

B: “No, I don't understand. A mountain? An ocean? A person? An animal? Get it together. You're barely comprehensible.”

A: An ocean of mountain. A lie made of truths. I am a reptilian thing clawing at the porcelain cliffs of an iron tub that crouches like a sphinx: I work patiently at first, but I grow desperate as the hollow darkness of a being forgotten swallows up hours, days, selfs, others, years, memories, youth. Despondent, I cross that featureless desert to the opposite wall again and again wondering as I do if my world has always played at such cruel games. Unhappy faces peer through the mirror from the gray world beyond the misty glass, gazing down to the cool and unmoving floor that hypnotizes with the illusion of a constancy and presses itself deep inside of me.

A: “What can I do but apologize? I dissolved into this.”

B: “Don't apologize. Speak clearly. Fuck, what am I supposed to do?”

A: Could I be the phosphorescence of a candle burned down in the lightless infinity between two mirrors, hurting in the vague way that salt must feel when it dissolves into water? Like the ocean shore on a moonless night, something vast and terrifying seems all around me. It is not-bad, and it is not-good.

A: “No, no, no. Don't get angry. I'm trying.”

B: “You have to try harder! I can't help you when you whisper like this and I can barely hear you. I have told you over and over that I don't want to play your little game anymore.”

A: I was angry before, out of control, driven thoughtless with a sense of betrayal at the pernicious selfishness of this Darwinian individuality. But I am burned out now. Did a great teacher say that a candle should be extinguished? And if it burns too long, rails against the earth, the cloudless sky, or even the sun that seemed to shine sometimes only for its own good? And if it makes everything mundane until nothing contains an ounce of the sacred? Until it contains only meaningless units of nothing? 'An imploded transcendence, you have built a contrapositive nirvana,' that teacher would have said.

A: “I can't try harder. There is a breakage inside, and I hurt in a vague way that is sharp sometimes. I touch the world, and the world feels dull.”

B: “God, don't you want to get better? You're impossible. I've done everything I can for you.”

A: The world became dull some time, and it will not touch me. I beg it sometimes with sobs. On cue, though, a mechanical voice comes from my throat with canned responses and a laughter that sounds tinny in my own head like a cassette copy of a copy of a cassette I played too many times when summer days could still reach me. I turn around every 'Open :)' sign hanging in my windows so that the 'Closed :(' side glares toward me as if the world would not touch me. And I wait inside facing out because a terrifying something not in frame that is not-bad and not-good waits outside facing in for my every misstep. But I have stopped pawing at impossibilities. I lie down on the cool, inert constancy, and it enters me. I struggle to reach behind and grope around in the not-seeing of this lightless place between two mirrors for the automaton string that I must pull harder by exponential factors each time for the phonograph copy canned response.

A: “Don't hang up. Don't hang up. Don't hang up. Don't hang up. Don't hang up.”

B: “You're muttering again! Listen, I'm hanging up. I told you I don't have time for this anymore. Good bye.”

I blink without resolution into the mirror where unhappy faces blink back unfocused from a line of ugly houses and trees that look hungry. Far into the depths of glassy images a factory makes a long line of days that roll along conveyors in absurd and complicated processions. They shatter sometimes, unnoticed and packed too closely together in those windowless acres. A broken thing slithers home.

The closed sign I watch dangling in the window through the colorless reflection works slowly to hem me into this silent inertia. It is the snake charmer, and I am the cobra.

 I obey.

From "Letters Addressed, Letters Never Sent" Vol. I

"______,

"'But the special quality of this place
for the man who arrives there on a
September evening… is that he feels
envy toward those who now believe
they have once before lived an evening
identical to this and who think they
were happy, that time'  --I. Calvino

"I keep poring over our exchange again and again as if it were some Hermetic text with secret and labyrinthine meanings.  Feelings of disconnect from the destinations I imagined and the places we have landed disorient me constantly, and I fear that to a large extent my lucid sense of self has dissolved in this morass of silences and miscommunications.  Often in our life together and in our subsequent correspondences you have called me a dreamer--a term that I have always struggled to hear without resentment and to interpret any way other than as dismissive or willfully offensive.  My dreams and fantasies (I call them merely goals) have been the only things that get me moving every day, that ignite the spark of motivation to continue working in the face of crippling self-doubt, a paralyzing ethics, insurmountable debt, and the endless march of days almost uniformly faceless in their identical eventlessness.
…
"I have shared so much of myself with you that I have begun to forget that our hearts do not beat in time, yet there is so much of me that you still do not know.  That I have taken so long to open up completely and only for so brief a time is my greatest regret in all of this, but it was an era that I needed to break down the walls I have built of so many perceived failures in order to guard myself from the banal superficialities of extroversion that can cut so deeply for one as sincere as I strive to be.  I still have so much to share.  You say that you have grown so much knowing me and in our time together, and your words there are an elation that erases almost entirely my apprehensions of shortcoming in our history.  But looking to the future from such a height how can I convey the crushing feeling that I would now, I guess from your actions, only stifle you completely?
…
"Following these months of solitary reflection, I discovered no alchemy to our exchanges--no science to love.  There is no hidden meaning or algorithm to our conversation.  I understand now that periodically and without apparent reason or hesitation even the poles of the Earth reverse direction, and so too sometimes do those of our hearts.

"All of my love regardless,
_______"