running

Catharsis was the line & story I was going to sell to the pretty thing.

I met a stranger last night, from the northern country. The rain fell, and as her husband took a leak in the restroom, we talked marathons, which we agreed, takes a certain sort of soul to like, with all the dull discipline and rigid routine required to hone a body for brutal, boring, paced running.

"I love running, though," she said, "I love just opening my front door, and going, and I don't know where I'm going, but I just go."

"I love that." She meant the stuff of long drives, aimless evening wanders, & meaningless sex with strangers you briefly think you vaguely understand, but never will truly know.

Her husband returned.

"Do you love that, darling? Running takes me away from you, do you love that I run?"
"Of course I love that you run. Look at that body that comes back."

And they kiss.

I bid them goodnight, and close shop.


-- 


Wandering the streets, towards a way home, I think about Catherine who fell asleep waiting in bed, at home. 

I think about all the Catherines, and all the souls that didn't crave going home to them. Catherine with her pretty face and her slowly shaping body, which is lovely because she has been trying. She deprives herself of daily simple joys, and pushes her vessel, so that one day, a man will come, and sweep her up into his strong arms, and take care of this little grown princess, and she won't have to worry about a thing at all, and simply play, with the children, and make food, and wait all day.

I think about Catherine who wakes for a sliver of a moment from her sleep, warm in the security of bodied company, and her sleepy happiness which brings my mind no ease.

I think about crawling into bed and fucking Catherine, and donning the movements of this man that she craves, and truth be told, she doesn't care if you're pretending, as long as it looks just like the real thing in her dirty romance novels and she never has to catch on, like she thinks she is some trophy you'd go through the effort of courting and lying to, in order to fuck, as if pretty girls weren't everywhere, as if there weren't genuinely kind, pretty girls in the world, who were capable of real love, who you wanted to make love to.

Love, and I think of other souls as I am slipping in quietly through my door.

I drop the things. I unbutton my shirt, slip from my clothes, & I am naked in the dark hours of the morning. All the stars are out and stark-bright, post-rain. I think of wet pavement under streetlight.

I find an old t-shirt and pull it slow over my head, and close, onto my body, and it is cool and smooth, and soft as tenderness. I don't think of bitter things, but of the way the loveliest souls smile, as they give in to the happiness that sweeps them. I roll the legs of my sweats up, and finish dressing. The world is asleep, so I slip out again.

The silence of houses and the moon. 
Catharsis, and I am not chasing it.

I go, and the feeling overtakes me.

Sometimes, the moods sweep me; dating sites are a copout, a mixture of desperation and lazy efficiency of acquiring a partner, merely to fulfill the need for having a partner.

There are no partners. There are no people, no right ones, just strangers and friends, all who are potentially enjoyable to an extent. Romance is the things of films and novels. I don't care for the I-told-you-so-ers or the drifts.

What is the drift? / Who are the drifters?

I drift a little, to an extent. I keep my hair long for safety. It's a psychological curtain, and I am hiding, breathing with my back to the wall around the corner, out of sight before I've got to go running again. I am always running.

Where am I running to? / Wrong question.

There is no destination. There is no journey either, just the pure lung-harshness and leg-muscle euphoria of being nothing-in-motion. Blur, blur, blur, which is a feeling of speed & air & sweat in the two messes of temperatures, which is aliveness.

Life is not narrative, nor sense. We frame life, yes, in systems, in art, in meaning and all that jazz. We say-- revolution, heroes, money, math, a drink, lovers, a tale, this god, that city, birth, the womb-- we sing in all our pretty words in all our stylized ways, in all our pretty clothes or sculptured-in-progress-bodies, but at the very end of the day, whether in bed, or in some scenic scape of a cafe or a beach, in the afternoons, or evenings, or the mornings, where we are most alone from the other things, we are just living bodies, muscle pumping blood & vital oxygen.

The body sustains its needs; it finds air and pulls it into its chambers. It finds food. It finds warmth. We are evolutionary creatures of cells & cells, all dying and being reborn in the warm, flooded remains of other cells. The body lives to live. It dies when it cannot be sustained. What is meaning, or god? It is existentialism in the absence of direction. 

There is no direction. Why language, why emotion?

It's just our brains. Response & memory. Beauty fills the spaces of evolution, of which there is so much in us. Our function is the stars, and we are the growing spaces.

One man, many men, many women, they weep because of the void, because it hurts to be alone, to know personal aloneness. 

Myself, I do not weep, but dance, in my step, in the shower, on salted floors, in imperfect sunshine.

when the fence didn't snag my dress

just jumped,
and i'm leanin'
against the fence, breathless
on the other side.

o, how my heart
is a thud thud thud
with the rush
of flight & the deathfear of the leap

but the firm,
dark, ground catches me,
my sidewalking boots
impressing two grateful kisses.

the dusky morning breeze flickers,
cool fire through my chopped hair,
& i throw one last glance

over the young gleaming grass.
the sun's coming up, like sweetness,
like apples, over my summer hills and haunts,
and i turn,
and i run.
the day will never catch me.