Those of Us Who Think We Know

Stephen Dunn

Those of us who think we know
the same secrets
are silent together most of the time,
for us there is eloquence
in desire, and for a while
when in love and exhausted
it’s enough to nod like shy horses
and come together in a quiet ceremony of tongues.

 

It’s in disappointment we look for words
to convince us
the spaces between the stars are nothing
to worry about,
it’s when those secrets burst
in that emptiness between our hearts
and the lumps in our throats.
And the words we find
are always insufficient, like love,
though they are often lovely
and all we have.

 

.

Hello,

and I’m glad I’ve met you?

 

People know I like the Great Gatsby, it fits my porcelain head like one luminous yellow fish. I want a little energy to read swimmingly but reading is a lonely activity and I’m happy for company in strangers.

 

“It was dark now, and as we dipped under a little bridge I put my arm around Jordan’s golden shoulder and drew her toward me and asked her to dinner. Suddenly I wasn’t thinking of Daisy and Gatsby any more, but of this clean, hard, limited person, who dealt in universal scepticism, and who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm. A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.”

The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald

 

I don’t want these categories. I want to keep spilling from one best scenario to another. I’ve explained myself so many times it must be true, and I’ll have it true, even if the versions of this are as numerate as dying ideas.

 

Every link I send you is another frame added to the memory, so keep clicking, couple more updates in this truncated log. Two eventualities: this is it, no one else but you; or, this is over, there are other stories to tell. I wonder if you have the time to make it clear to me.

i wake up with the thunder of your typewriter

I am easily duped by

vegans,

Adam West Batman episodes,

gurkhas,

mixtapes.

 

Funny how your world fills out with tiny clicks and whirrs, how busy evenings fit a beer or two.

 

Stolen Moments

Kim Addonizio

What happened, happened once. So now it’s best
in memory—an orange he sliced: the skin
unbroken, then the knife, the chilled wedge
lifted to my mouth, his mouth, the thin
membrane between us, the exquisite orange,
tongue, orange, my nakedness and his,
the way he pushed me up against the fridge—
Now I get to feel his hands again, the kiss
that didn’t last, but sent some neural twin
flashing wildly through the cortex. Love’s
merciless, the way it travels in 
and keeps emitting light. Beside the stove
we ate an orange. And there were purple flowers
on the table. And we still had hours.

in the morning you will have faded, little more than a wrinkle in my sheets

In the last hours of 08, I realize I have come a distance further than ever. As I’m falling asleep tumbling through the door, suddenly exhausted, I don’t regret or need anything else: it was a beautiful, beautiful year. So perfectly formed in its choice of flaws and flourishes that I can’t put together a list of best-ofs or summaries. The memories are overwhelming– James opening his instant sol nong tang outside Family Mart, Julienne’s mascara-ed green eyes, the sweet hot smell of the tarred road and rhythmic Bangladeshis in neon vests– but I can’t develop them from my mind.

 

If I didn’t get what I wanted, I got what I needed. To the best of my knowledge, I gave whenever you asked, ask more, more often, I don’t know how else to say it but friends and lovers I am yours. 

 

In less than an hour and a half 09 will push out, changeling without a face. I’m excited and lonely and satisfied and afraid to expect anything in clean lines. But looking at this year’s swerves and soars and the rush it’s left me with, I say hit me with another one.

 

A toast to the absent, this is how I feel right now:

Babel Fish

‘Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this:

 

“I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”

 

“But,” says Man, “the fish is a dead giveaway isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. Q.E.D.”

 

“Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

 

“Oh, that was easy,” says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

 

Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo’s kidneys, but that didn’t stop Oolon Colluphid from making a fortune with his book Well That About Wraps It Up For God.’

 

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

 

(You didn’t need me to tell you that, did you).

oracle of the playlist

As siphoned off Jithra–

 

Put your MP3 player on shuffle, and write down the first line of the first twenty songs. Post the poem that results. The first line of the twenty-first is the title.

 

Pen*s p*nic Singapore

Pppp what? Pens panic? Pen is picnic? Before you raise the alarm that a porn bot has usurped my blog– or my mind in general– relax. 

 

I’ve just found another quirk to this little island I’ve grown up in. It doesn’t concern gum, caning, fines, littering or spitting. We were once afflicted with penis panic and it wasn’t even to do with the roses of Singapore writhing in the gutters of Bugis Street. Though I did research that four weeks ago and all the bawdy colour it did delight me with!

 

“In October 1967, rumours that local pork was impregnated with female hormones led to at least 446 men (and 23 women) turning up at hospitals insisting that their genitals had shrunk. One hospital had 97 patients on a single day and saw several men who had clamped their private parts with various objects so as to halt the perceived shrinkage; others arrived with friends and neighbours hanging onto them.”

 

From the Fortean Times, emphasis mine.

answers

“… And I, who claim to know so much more, isn’t it possible that even I have missed the very spring within the spring? 

Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.”

Thorton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

 

Does it matter? Between polar possibilities, individual truths lie on a continuum. 

 

Resting my head on your body, I dream of the pulse beneath your muscles and imperceptible cities beneath your pulse. Beyond the bushes orange beams swerve urgently, motors berate, the highway is too busy to notice the little road slumbering. It is hard to see and be seen in this something darker some place dark, but all the attention I need is your hand grasping mine unconsciously.

 

If I didn’t understand before, all the clarity I need is a scent between your hairline and ear. Sense rounds out into satisfaction. It’s a sudden flurry of peace, waking up one morning to find you are mad happy after two weeks of burden.

 

The lights are snuffed in the playground but I don’t need them to find you as you’re sleepily trudging to the car. My arms trap you, you keep walking, but where I would have assumed indifference in past weeks today I find an indulgent acceptance of me in all my erratic, silly, hungry ways.

 

“You’re eating this at home?”

“You look very sad. Ok we’ll go somewhere.”

:) “Ok I shall steal your fries.”

 

I had been hoping for itineraries, headlines. They are irrelevant, too dictative. And so too that because there is no stated beginning, I’m not going to state an end. 

 

In front of other people, we don’t hold hands, I thought maybe this was a sign of incompleteness. No, simply that we are not each other’s leashes. 

 

I had been looking for myself in your behaviour, the answer to the question, are you as fond of me as I am of you?  I didn’t realise you had answered me already. “Look,” you pointed out an extra hand in the photo, a detail I hadn’t noticed. It released the composition from banal symmetry, replaced the trite with a wry and gentle humour, caught the moment wholly unaware and stuck on it a wordless glory. 

 

The other dilemma? It’s resolved too. :3

so that’s what it is

Tomas came to this conclusion: making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite.  Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera, via Kex.

 

That’s where the danger is for me. Less the uninhibited selves wordlessly swapping pleasure, more the accidental seepage of hidden selves when we’re here dreaming together. I can never decide if it’s wiser to turn on my side as soon as possible, or to blink and blink till your breath slows into the seasons of sleep. 

 

That’s how you caught me, little porcupine, when I woke up in the 8pm dark, I imagined I knew you for you. A wonder I didn’t realise it before. Not a sacrifice of habits or beliefs, just the gifting of a plot of internal landscape you never knew you received. That’s why I still ask you for dinners, movies, purring words. Without realising, I’ve been asking for a title deed, a cottage to sup in and warm my frosty words. Why can’t I leave it be? I’ve been meaning to keep roving, live out a luggage full of future.

 

Actually, he had always preferred the unreal to the real.  Just as he felt better at demonstrations (which, as I have pointed out, are all play-acting and dreams) than in a lecture hall full of students, so he was happier with Sabina the invisible goddess than the Sabina who had accompanied him throughout the world, and whose love he constantly feared losing.

 

Just become a shade, furniture, why don’t you. I want to be my own measure of happiness or else to leave it to God.