#meus-posts

i don't know the answer. i have always felt safe to discuss anything. feelings, death, sex, past relationships, trauma. anything, especially comedy, which is something we both love and consume constantly, but maybe he’s right. maybe i am embarrassed. maybe i’ve been unconsciously keeping those details about myself and the things that i’m drawn to out of shame. so he gets the huge taschen’s saturday night live book from our shelf, opens it on the performers' page and plays a little game with me where he says a random year and i name a performer from that era. he asks me questions and my opinion on this and that and lets me talk and talk about how the jean doumanian era sucked, about the blues brothers and phil hartman and gilda radner and roseanne roseannadanna and mary katherine gallagher and stefon and the digital shorts. we discuss it for hours until midnight. it does not scare him, it does not make him cringe, it does not intimidate him. i can see how invested he is by my knowledge. it’s not awkward nor too much. if anything, it is too little - he wants more. he asks questions. he is truly interested.

Beating on the grave. On the border of language, they are beating on the grave. Who’s there? I asked. I said who’s there. And how much more of this intrusion of the external into the internal, or of the less internal into the internal, that weaves like a burlap cloak over my unspeakable poverty. It wasn’t the dream, it wasn’t the vigil, it wasn’t the crime or the birth: it was only the heavy blow like a knife blow on the grave of a friend. And the absurdity of my right side, the absurdity of a willow tree leaning on its right side over the river, my right arm, my right shoulder, my right ear, my right leg, my right possession and dispossession. To turn aside toward my left girl—blue stains, mysterious blue stains on my left palm—a space of virgin silence, a place of rest where I wait for myself. No, she’s still too unknown, I still can’t recognize these new sounds that begin as a song of protest that is different from my own, which is a song of burning, the song of a girl lost in a silent ruined city.

   And how many centuries has it been since I’ve been dead and loved you?    I hear my voices, the chorus of the dead. Trapped between the boulders, recessed in the cleft of a rock. I am not the one who speaks. It is the wind, which makes me flail my arms, which makes me think that the chorus of chance, shaped by this flailing, are words that come from myself.

   And this was when I began to die, when they struck the foundations and I remembered myself.

   The trumpets of death are blaring. A procession of dolls with mirror hearts that all stare back with my blue-green eyes. You mimic the old hand-me-down gestures. The ladies of antiquity went to the wall of lepers and sang among them and listened to the trumpets, and watched—they, the imagined ones—an imaginary procession of dolls whose mirror hearts reflected my eyes, the eyes of a gold-paper bird assailed by the winds. This little imaginary bird thinks it is singing when it can barely warble. It is like a willow tree bending over a river.

   The little paper doll: I cut her out of green and red and sky-blue paper, and she lay flat on the floor, extreme in her lack of volume or dimension. They set you in the middle of the road, little wanderer, and you are in the middle of a road where no one can identify you. Even when you scream, there is no distinction between yourself and the ground, since there are, after all, so many things on the road that could scream. Why would anyone stop to consider the meaning of such a green and red and sky-blue blemish?

às vezes, os pés dos edifícios nos chamam como as sereias encantavam os pescadores nas antigas histórias. elas estão lá, sádicas, sentadas em cada ponta arredondada de bala, ao final de cada arranha-céu dessa cidade desbotada. penteiam vaidosamente seus cabelos, à espera da explosão dos corpos dos desesperados contra o solo ou na pressão do fundo do oceano.

para nos atraírem aos buracos, elas cantam. dores têm vozes de soprano. o canto da dor é etéreo, hipnótico. as notas reverberam. fica difícil conseguir ouvir outra coisa. ela não vai embora, não adianta desviar o olhar. sua cauda envolve tudo o que a gente consegue ver.

a única solução é cantar alto, até que a garganta doa, pra ver se sente a voz da sereia de concreto ficar distante até que ela volte a ser lenda.

então canta, meu amor, pra ouvir a dor se dissipar. canta que eu faço coro pro teu refrão. por um dia, um mês, um quarto de século, até onde der.

de dia, enquanto você canta, batucando na madeira podre do nosso bote, eu te acompanho e remo com força. à noite, eu embalo as tuas remadas com a minha voz, repousando os meus braços. e assim a gente se reveza, cada vez mais próximos da praia, até ver de novo o píer, as crianças jogando bola, as jangadas repousando. é a nossa praia. é a nossa casa.

e agora que a gente se cala, eu consigo ouvir o dueto de nossos corações através dos nossos buracos. consigo sentir a brisa dessa praia que agora molha calmamente os nossos pés. e eu posso sentir cada célula do meu corpo vibrar de um jeito familiar no encontro dos nossos espíritos. é estar em casa novamente.