Strain of Consciousness

We are always running out of time. When we are born, it is as if we know this already, with the first reaching and clenching of tiny fists. An attempt to take hold of it, to still the moment long enough that we may understand it. And it is there, as we refuse to succumb to slumber, as the day wanes, as parents and child care workers insist it is time to close our eyes and lose awareness of the way it sweeps by. It is there, in the excited waking from each nap and each night, a return to […]

I want to stretch, extend, and multiply those moments when our laughter forms its own polyphony, as the stolen breaths between and the rolling crescendos they punctuate, combine and keep tempo with the beat of our hearts, as they echo into each other, the way, in a different state of existence, what we were then, merged together enveloping us, so that no matter how many lifetimes between then and now, it is this echo, this merging we return to, the way each cloud returns to the ocean, the way celestial bodies remain in their orbit, the way we heal when […]

I hold you close, my skin against yours or our skin against the fabric of clothes pressed between us, collapsing space; as I do, I wish we could collapse time, reach back the way only memory can, dust off and revise those moments long past when possibility remain unmitigated by time, when our paths should have first crossed. I hold you close, now, in stolen moments, as the days progress, as the narratives, those we set in motion in that space between here and those long past breaths of childhood, continue unfolding their present path; I hold you close because […]

…had I known to hold, had I had arms and hands, I would have used all their strength, my strength, to hold on to you, that we could have entered this world together, albeit from separate wombs, that we would know then what we know now, that there is no one else for you or me, there is no other essence which can resonate with our soul, the way that yours and mine have found, that we would’ve known to search from the first moment we learned what it is to search… …had I known, perhaps even with my first […]

If I could change everything: the way water falls from the heavens, through the remains of time and space, through argon and memories, disintegrating what we were before breath; the way the tilt of the earth at certain hours causes the sun’s light to fracture, exposing the possibilities that were once available but now are only ether, here; the way the physical laws of this dimension dictate the earth’s gyrations, refusing ever to reverse the direction of time, or allow for the recovery of any moment before this one; the way that prayers offered up to heaven, sometimes, become lost […]

If I could retrace every step I’ve taken, every footfall falling after the materialization of consciousness from that state of abstract impressions and swirls of color into the consciousness which aches now, knowing that time swept past us, leaving behind its sediment occluding the possibility of this moment existing before so much debris and heartache. If pulse and breath conspired to sway the winds and sweep the sands within the hourglass, to cause the frame to shatter, loosening the moments, freeing the past and its predications on the present, allowing the story to be rewritten into the story we should […]

You wake in the cradle of night as the moonlight pools around us, our bed a sanctuary in the dim light, its own universe in these still hours, as the world at its edges fades away, you and I remain, and I wake with you, feeling your warmth pulse in my embrace. You pull away in the soft breath of night stretching forward and into that pose, the one with which you attempt to ease back into the peace of slumber, when it is mitigated by what has accumulated, all the years of searching manifesting in the insomnia which disrupts […]

It’s like this dull soft pain. Really, it’s not a pain at all, it’s more like the sensation on your tongue after an extremely hot beverage leaves its trace across it. It doesn’t hurt, not after the initial burn anyway, but you know

There are spaces between moments, ephemeral and unnoticed, the catalyst of every thought, every dream. Between sleep and waking I find you, the thought of you and my breath stills as the day awakens.