Someone took my head apart. Someone took my head apart and showed it to me. Showed me where it hurt and where it bent. “All these nooks and crannies see” he says to me “They not natural. Not at all. You see why you’re her now, don’t ye?”
And something about the walls, about how high they are from us, or for us. Something about walling us away.
If I hadn’t soon gotten the impression that I was a lump of disembodied parts, then surely I would’ve thought that I was dreaming of you. In bed no less, in a ratty motel south of Chelsea.
The way things stand now are difficult. There are so few things to say with so many words to say them in. Sentences become difficult a notion as well as reading this apart.
I can’t. What do you expect me to do from here? Where do you want me to go? We’ve been in so many places together, seen so many chapels. But it had always been the stone firmament that you left in my mouth that brought us about.
The thing about writing this, is the letting go. I know how difficult this must be for you, considering who you are, or were, and what you have been through. Speaking isn’t much easier than writing, so I can imagine the difficulties of this, for so long.
And when I tell her that I’m dead, this little smile comes across her face, “What’s the meaning of this John?”
I am trembling right now. I can’t open myself up especially like this. I hate to look over my shoulder, leaving, again as then as now, forever walking away from me, from the Arc de Triomphe, oh so many years ago.
We had a time, hadn’t we? We made a show of things, with or without my head, my sense of things, with or without the act. We hadn’t much done it then, it was so new to us, so nasty and sweet and something like curry: something that you were bound to be stuck with, or have taste for, eventually, if all things.
After I’d been thoroughly convinced that I was holding my head in my hands, cracked open and fissured, someone comes along and tells me that it’s been my neck that’s been lopped off, “look here now boy, you’re bleeding all over the floor.”
It might have been America, it has the penchant for it, or South Africa, it’s hard to tell the difference. Only London and Paris stand out in my mind. Perhaps because they were so close that you could tell the difference, that you could tell it in two languages within three hours of each other.