this is just to say: Homeless, homeward

02 July 2009

Homeless, homeward

Turns out my SF life didn't fit into 6 large boxes. There's many boxes, varying in sizes and weights, all waiting for an address.

I'm homeless. Shifting between E's bed & Genevieve's living room. I feel more at ease in Genevieve's apartment, but I sleep better on E's bed. Incomplete parentheses. It amounts to half of perfect sleep plus dreams which Genevieve describes as "insurmountable."

Once, I would have said I'm inconsolable, or that things seem insurmountable. But this isn't the case. I'm homeless, yes, and I am hungry, yes.

I could say that things are roughly the same before and after Greece in SF. The relationships are the same, the patterns--

But I'm not the same; there is no melancholy, only strange detached moments of clarity where I am certain that I do not want ____, or that I want _____. Before, I was unhappy & blind.

But I don't want to feel detached; to waver away and arrive back without having really come back. I never did return from abroad. It was different, what came back.

I wanted the direction to pull & push both ways; I owe it to myself. I am not insatiable; I want what I deserve. & no, it never stops, how could it now? For it to stop means that I am not alive.

It not that I'm insatiable as you jokingly or not-so-jokingly describe me. It's that you don't give me what I know should be mine. I keep trying, in hopes that the next time, it'll be there with me. Instead, I have neglectful nights where I'm second.

You're not a villain, not a jerk. I just want what I give. If that is insatiable, then I never want to stop being hungry in my lifetime.

I voraciously want to consume everything that is possible to feel & know. Perhaps this is my insurmountable dream. Self-disappointment & bittersweet exercise in futility.

I can't really admit this aloud, because it embarrasses me: I don't really want to go to Hawaii.

I'm going, though, and no one will have to drag me. It will be beautiful and the air and water will feel smooth against my body. It's not even the anxiety of a family that isn't mine, but the fear that I'll feel the same there as I feel here--apart? Detached? Homeless?

Rather than it being a freeing feeling, much how Kythera was for me, Hawaii will not be an island of liberation. There are always obligations, the people, the feelings which aren't mine.

I want it, I really do, but I don't want it if I feel empty at the end of the day. I fear this, because I can taste it already.

I hope that my pessimism is unfounded. Bury that bitch beneath the sand, not myself.

I continue to resent the city, all cities, and ties. And being homeless means that I'm more beholden than before. I no longer have the sanctuary of my nest.

I'm tired and my hands have long since grown used to clasping myself together. One and one and one.

from "Euphoria," by Sina Queyras

1

Dear Regret, my leaning this morning, my leather foot, want of stone, my age
Old, burnished and bruised, my hair lingering, my hand caked, spongy as
November my dear Relentless, my dear Aging, your voice tinny, dissonant
As Stein shot through decades of war and Fortrel, cocktails on the hour,
Zeppelins over Piccadilly, bombing blindly in the fog. Dear Skin, dear Tobacco
Mouth my refusal, my merely geographic, my fibrous strings for you: your
Abundant wit, your lack of shadow and still joy nosing the air. Each moment
Stretches toward you, your dry feet: I carried them, pumiced and peppery
Laid them where regret is a biscuit thing to lean upon and sweeten,
My hour of you, my cursive thoughts, a pulpit beating under these ribs.

2

Dear Time, you swallowed us whole, swallowed us lovely, sharp as bones
Crimping sadly under foot my benign, my flotsam and crabs thin as leaves
Your smoothing, your sinking in. Mornings or mooring, or wallowing
Jericho: tapioca air indolent. I am still there, supple and driftwood, you lovely,
You loved me, your memory dark and west, thoughts like tugboats stitching
The horizon, you pulling me, my pudding, my thin crustacean, sideways
In the late afternoon, your gaze, having so soon forgotten the sharpness
Of mornings, the bite of your look serrating the hour: my treasures, all
Of them, for the pleasure of that slice once more, of our dangling,
You and me, the lot of us in some car, driving some hour, mapless.

3

Under a spiderweb, a tire, slouched: flat, sad-lipped, I think of Newton
Of the original apple, all of these clones since, all of these scentless
Descents. I shake my glass, shake again, melted suffixes tinkling; observe
All things natural: foliage unfurling like old bills, wryly betraying
Your habits, like the dog who digs and rubs, the dog who whines, who
Paws and circles, you trace. Why is pain so much better than nothing? Or
The mark of it more understandable? Why is saying nothing so much better?
Your one-liner like blossoms, uplifting, your currents strap me to air, yes
I guess there is a little texture up here, and oxygen pure as baby’s toes
Which if I recall, are sweet as kernels of corn, if I recall so long ago.

4

To arrive is practice, conversation or conversion, a story over a field
My Sweet, of concrete or whispering, furrows of a path no longer, not
Sure, was there, and snow combed in curlicues and dog ears a zigzag
Through January. Sure you are witty, but are you any less romantic?
In my remembering, I have undone all my beliefs, it is a luxury to lay
Unencumbered here, or there, the bones flexed with tendons, the
Spine like a seahorse, the heart far from a cliche unless beating is
Innocent, though innocence is not as supple as you think, nor as flexible,
Nor as perfumed, nor convenient, or even clean: between things regret
Gathers force. I remember that day: it was cold and the coffee tepid.

5

The small red balloons like thumbprints, waves green as the brush of
Cedar, the wind lapping your hoodie, blind strings tap the air, camera
Bobbing like a dog’s tail. Such lightness, the dog heading off, all
The dogs of English Bay angling off-leash. I would follow backward,
Lay old maps on your white sheets, so sincere, I am in earnest for you:
We won’t regret having not yet knit our acrid puns and jaded barbs, nor
Having the wind slip in under our belt loops, though I gently refuse
Gor-Tex, and you bet I will not concede the game. Those small red
Balloons like tulips in your eyes specs of amber, an amulet, an avatar,
My thoughts of you fully indexed, ready to step into.

02 July 2009

Homeless, homeward

(underbed stor)age