last night i dreamed my first love was my last love
and i didn’t feel the way it felt at 19
with the bitter used up emotions and the public stairs at 7 am
maybe there was something purposeful in our hands and mouths then
or the way we moved down the stairs and talked in a hollow way about the past
i bowed my head into your arm and talked about an empty sketch of my life and you did the same and your skin looked sallow in the grey sky
and you were rubbing sleep from our eyes
when we were in a parking lot after i fell asleep last night i didn’t feel anything but some weird rush of holding someone’s hand that wasn’t just somebody
it was visceral in some dusk kinda way i climbed back inside
i forgot the feeling til i climbed inside
there is this grabbing at the water kind of thing going on
any moment you’re not inside, you are grabbing at water for the recollection
i wanted to stay comatose in that conditionally obtainable youth
’cause i was covered in it
’cause i was covered in the ‘you’
i was given this; i gave it to myself
i’m not talking about love; i’m talking about this:
i was shrouded by the haze with vague thoughts of an intense transcendence of preservation
making out was like when it meant something, more than anything else
like that song about stopping the world and melting with you
like, the simplicity of just lips and hands
like how it almost meant something in my basement last year
like how it didn’t really
like how you can’t really discern the meaning that lurks weakly in things
people say things about being in love with the idea of a person
but there’s this layer of subconscious i consider
there’s this firing off of random particles that somehow pertains to something i’ve already got
like exact blueprints
we have everything in our heads of everything we know in an arsenal for uncontrollable use and i would rather not assign importance
i will abstract the abstract
i am not talking about love
back in there i was something like forever
and forever isn’t really anything but an encapsulated feeling with unreachable proximity to the other side of the veil
lots of things can be personified as death
like the unobtainable past
like our brains waking out of the expanse of surreal solitary projections – human voices and visions, trajectories – obliterated into dim broad assumptions
like how they’re generally not recyclable blueprints
like how we aren’t either
like how when i think about your personality i think of an insecure hollowed out shadow
and how there are spaces of dusk and warmth and things i crawled back into
and how there is that person and i am this person
and it’s all just something i’ve been given; i gave it to myself
in the parking lot
there is something about dusk and holding someone’s hand that’s just somebody
just somebody
at the close i saw an old man with his green eyes and arched eyebrows; he was sitting on a swing hanging from a willow tree older than him
his body sagged and he was ugly the way all old men are when you’re still beautiful and you think about young faces when you think of love and you think about young limbs when you think of sex
i recognized him in almost immediacy
which didn’t feel like enough
i walked up to him with my wrinkled hands that i placed around his body
it didn’t feel ugly; nothing felt ugly anymore
i woke up feeling imperceptible amounts of naive and wise obliterated by something much larger and more imperceptible
