The Irresolute Haunting of a Twilight Consciousness.
// Nabokov made a career of idealized first love, a fantasy-romp eliding predation’s lens for pliable diversion, deferred possession exacted by prose.
Doom me to any alternate eternity. I’ll take Tartarus. Am I to otherwise expend my life’s remainder getting over first love?
Night has gnawed me with recurrings from an undergrad dimension. Warped, and vivid as your forsaken touch, I gulp in my sleep and knit brow furrows, troubled by vestiges in daylight. The nightmares began in January, as I collected remnant will—MFA candidacy in summons for a future.
By infared glow cascading from pleated stitching, spilled across mirrored brass and crushed satin, to cast uncanny chiaroscuro my sleep-haggard face—screenlit, squinting for verbiage specificity.
You, the first bedmate whose opinion I actually cared about,
in contrast to that light-catching quality of lust objects, feeble allure to experience the spoils of oneself
Perhaps it was because it took until now to dawn that I hadn’t loved before you, and the ways I love now will never be replete with mad innocence.
My comrade lover, whom I loved (full-heartedly, self-reproachfully) instinctively before having ever known love. Time is an antidote to childhood poisons. What I do now is deprive and pedestalize affection; I cower from connection’s evitable outcomes.
What writer would trade the lover rendered on the exquisite page for the fleshly culpable reality?
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Thanks to immortal data, I can revisit the carnage of a previous identity anytime I strike the punishing mood.
It was a formative collision, and since, I haven’t been able to resist its comparison. Your character and my fixation for your form gave me the yardstick to wield against future paramours, in my insufferable, self-punishing impenetrability.
Failure-languishing vanity, I’d call it.
Pathological vacua, a latent inability to let go, an
unwilling grip for long-forsaken control.
Shut up, there are years
you go without thinking of him.
When things are well, when you are enraptured
in forward momentum, when
the world at hand is not
besieged by indefiniteness, you don’t cast a backsliding glance.
And when he was in the same room as you, you
extinguished flame for swallowed
rage and incinerated pride, you withheld
affection or even eye contact.
This hypocrisy is unforgiven.
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Navigate
forsaken ground
like a recoil
personified.
a guppy having
swallowed a lightning rod
Fibrous, as noxious
as venomous.
Candor merciless
allusions, foully colorful
a voice
a blade
shears through
night’s vacuum
the lens stays shut
in sanctum’s sake
salvage your
comforts elsewhere,
voyeur.
solace seeker,
larvate on some
other sap.
take Buñuel’s obscure object of desire - a preoccupation, a compulsion,
obsessive consumptive desire and
affinity for flesh and
another’s inimitable interiority
An unspoken madness and ecstatic magnitude limb-to-limb tearing.
And what of it
as it fizzles
for fulfillment?
Supplanted by void,
The unspeakable treachery of
weary heart’s vacuity
spawned by one’s founding, unmitigable intensity.
the punishing flee
Turn tail at unmet
unmeasuredness,
madness unreciprocated.
I know now why I will yet be the woman running, infulfullibly. Indefatigable compulsion to escape self-imprisonment by self-doom.
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Compulsion like a moth’s pull to the nearest false beacon, that lifelong search for parental validation, unhealthy boundary breaches, a toxic concoction of casualness, charisma, and dismissiveness propagating an inappropriate attachment style,
a formula for reserve, and always ends in ghosting,
as I cast fallow season’s shed
skin to the wind, in pursuit of my next chrysalides.
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I was so emotionally stunted, it’s taken me 5 years and a pandemic to apologize.
Moreover painfully immature, in desperate cling to pride, and above all in need of guidance—the father void, the vacuum-like quest, the infeasibility of a still moment to be yours. You, high all the time, and me, possessed with the firewater of nihilism. Still, you tolerated that I was crazed. How unfair, to be a sapling splitting in the wind, lashing out against any staying aid.
Death to the consumptive vacuity of the “chill” girl-who’s-one-of-the-guys persona. Death to poorly-informed nihilism. Death to ambivalence.
My pupation from drunken audacious to quietly judgmental, complete, there
still seethes a sub-surface volatility, a viper’s strike insecurity provoked at any anticipated slight.
I see now, there is no alternative to relinquishing granular minutiae of private experience to consumptive pry. The generation / free association of value in a voyeur-driven reality marketplace is through performed service, intimate sacrilege to attention economy tradeoffs
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Our lives are diminished, if not endangered.
Divert to Herman Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund a fanciful plague parable about the disparate arcs of the artist and the ascetic thinker, two fork tines in truth’s pursuit.
Divert to Bergman's Cries and Whispers.
Carnal love
wears quickly thin
a respect and
admiration that
weathers, as
aliveness putresces.
Troubling
sidelong, backsliding
glance.
To put words to, is to blaspheme detonation
in the consummation of platonic love deferred its romantic
attraction by otherwise extrications.
How I gazed at you with a fucked up Achillean admiration,
but i repeat this play with all my paramours and
I only fuck the characters I aspire to be.
living through that vague, vibrant-streaked spell of twenties,
Itinerant sent incinerant desire to rewrite themselves a new start,
as self-conscious, oblivious ingrates classically present.
The lure of un-pockmarked reality, fresh-faced freedom from bleakness of familiarity.
Then, up sneaks the suspicion that this
toil will lifelong be
an unkickable habit, rejection of the known
for unconquered entertainment.
immitigable concentrate, intensity sours any placatable prospect;
irresolute, a weakness of self-fancy
When she was not chasing for an Apollo or evading the wandering gaze of a Dionysius, clandestinely consumed in envy of those self-possessed writers who righteously knew no protagonist, ever and without question, but themselves.
What would she give in her weakest of half-unawoken moments, to be horizontal with him again?
That divine crushing pressure from his torso above, driving to fill her fully in excruciatingly languid pumps
How she inhabited with relish, the haplessness of a bug underfoot.
The lightest friction of two elbows sunk at her flanks, knuckle clamped over knuckle, guttural cries clutched in her throat. Sweat mingling, him dipping his forehead to rest against hers, a tenderly patronizing gesture. What could she do but expedite torture and fight back with writhe in her loins, working him until he had no ground to stand on, until hers was the earth for this fallen cypress. Her cunt gurgled and lapped in agreement. A lightning rod of dread rattled through her at the anticipation that he would have to slump off her, unsheathe himself of velvet. With backward reach, she gripped his buttocks with her frail excuse for desperate hands to keep him coupled in place; receiving his plugging nudges in response, she rippled.
A sensory oasis between sheets awaits, but its appeal wanes like the flicker out of candle flame. Carnality in brute satiation catharts in passing.
Whenever I have my period, my writing is uncomely ribaldry.
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I cannot languish my affections on someone who is only lukewarm about me.
Firmly, I have more to offer than that.
Where are we to put our thwarted sexual and peri-existential ennui?