#dearspace

The woman I love has gone to bed early so I can be alone in the living room, alone in the manic universe of August, just me arranging and rearranging the books like someone packing and repacking their parachute only I'm not jumping, only maybe the books are not what's saving me anymore. Maybe now it's reruns of The Donna Reed Show or the Marx Brothers or movies about people who are funny all the time. I keep watching the same rap video on YouTube about the stacks of money and what's going to happen. Outside it has just begun to cool down so I can take a walk if I want, see if there's a moon somewhere above the movie theater, some summer stars up there, some planet to go with the grass I'll lie on next to the school, a big field where someone is asleep  or passed out, where a dog overcomes a dead bird, just half a bird now but real in the cool dark green, motionless at the foot of the chain-link fence. If I were to go out and find that bird I would want to sit down next to it and give it a name. I would want to gather up some sticks and make a house for it to live in while it's being dead. I would want to sit there all night, and that's why I'm only going to open a window, open all my windows, so if it wants to it can come here and fall asleep in my lap. I'm sitting in the middle of the room with a blanket over my head and some letter I would like to write. Dear love. Dear motherfucker. Dear heart. Dear space, I want to write – Dear space, I can't seem to live the way i should, without loneliness, without passing out, I keep wishing I knew more about supernovas, that I had some of your dark energy, your dark matter, I wonder if you're expanding or cooling or what it will look like when you turn back toward your own beginning, what fire, what ice, what will you invent out there that Hollywood hasn't already encoded onto a disk, already built in a garage off Sunset. But space will never write back. Neither will love or real motherfuckers. So I should just stand up, grab my shoes, walk to the field and sit down in the grass. I wouldn't be alone. A small breeze making her wings life, some starlight through a pine tree making her shimmer.