jared — Love and Limerence

i

It May Be Important to Kill My Best Friend.

I will dismantle this block in my heart against depicting you as you were Incorrigible, dismissive, a steely betrayer with a silver stare, a menace To all that I had worked to hear over the loudspeaker, a line we waited in Only to find the ferry had already gone. I with two days hatred to mold

Will make them hear how you forced me to let go by disappearing All I was holding on to, all that we had made between us to enjoy What was enjoyable in a way that somehow makes the disappearing Worse, more colorful and sordid. (Your word.) The life I loved, I lived

In his pocket, in his dreams, in an apartment he’d still not shown His friends, a hilltop cathedral never inspected, an “Imitation of Life” Only ever intimated, fruit so succulent hovering over the pit where I rise and fall in a pathetic show against exhaustion, just trying

To see over the edge of a wall I know is receding as I stretch, Like the javelin, the clear thinking that wishes to pierce the unknown outside Yet finds itself fallen just so, short of the stone’s rise, short of the discovery Of something which is so plainly there, so inexorably real as simple

That outside, that meadow in the golden naught, that russet table, set.

ii

You Know I’m In That Circle

The word is still the world and yet the world has lost its words Without him, I mean. Significantly less of my time spent with this

His senseless crop of apples in the sun, a favorite means to tout A new ethic or idea of symbolic value and social implication, lost trust.

He spins me around and what he says is truly reflected: Not a very flattering mirror In the house the film and media. My vision for his face a kind of cartoon, a study

For a future work. Tattoos on his wrists and elbows, tattoos down his back I say I don’t quite understand how his arms are meant to relate to his neck

But the proportions are the stuff of dreams, moments at the edge Of consciousness, a hulking effervescent shape cast in olive branches and wigs.

We dial it back a bit, circle the waters of terrible delight, propose and counter Propose. But it doesn’t matter. I feel the pull of the light around the gallery

A living room supposedly, which is decorated like a Texas oil mansion: Pastel and paisley, steel and glass. I’m just around the corner, and I’ll see you soon.

iii

Where Have Your Laws Gone?

In the future, as it is still this world, I find myself asking him again to See me. Oh fierce apologists to eventual dust, oh bodies untamed

By the wounds of knowing, spare not the terror of eventual decline The wonder of present pleasures, “his hand on my knee.” Don’t you See the myriad activities of consciousness gathering to a point

In lust; the terror of the moments just before what cannot be Returns from inside, a sword hanging high above all mirrored entrapment?

And every afternoon the wind would move the water distinctly From one wall toward another, every day the clouds sufficient, distant Underwhelming, would find themselves broken into cartoonish fluff

Backlit by the seared and searing sun. At “Heart’s Desire Beach” I burn my entire back and chest, extract truth from silence in the form

Of love, and the other truly intrusive individuals all of whom call Your world their home. All we share in suffering is disproportion.

iv

Your Hands Are Full of Blood

I close the loop through conversation with this menace to my desire For peace, for stable relation, for real things. And whatever it was

It will not have been real, not in the way that birds or islands Are real, or war, the bodies and bodies and bodies. Can I really be

So easily mistaken? Could it be the world does not in facts extend Significantly beyond my own immaculately composed interiors?

I turn on the silence in images of death and destruction filtering out Through the screen of guilt and commerce—that glutted gilt of having

Problems so small in a world so terrorized keeps me up at night, or else I am rattled awake by an earthquake. I am thinking not of safety but of you.

Still unconvinced here it matters much what I think or feel, save deep within The meadow I am permitted to open in the middle of the city, where finally I

Retreats into control, into value, and thus back into life. I have said this all before Moving on is just adding slowly to the pile, pyre for my impossible privilege

To heap and heap and heap. Still snagged on that cold nagging question: What has my commitment to openness offered me if not infinite opportunity

For incredible loss? I do not know just solutions. To want and to need Or to recede? What is the risk of knowing manipulation–and what is

The real risk of knowing?