#moriah pearson

A yes, no, or maybe becomes perhaps too much to ask of a friend. One thinks of the poem like this. One thinks it is funny that on the day the invite hangs itself, I will be standing in the same music hall we first danced together in. Everything in the world might mean more to me than anyone else I know. And do I even really know anyone all that well? We've been asking the same question for years and come no closer to an answer.

Lately, I have ideas for poems. In defense of small things the world finds a nuisance, like pigeons and plastic. And you might wonder what someone could ever admire about plastic, that great invention by which we are fed, our one undying creation so unlike ourselves. Persistent in its existence. Or even the comedic, almost slapstick chivalry of a man who steals a glass I liked at the pub to give to me later. In a haze, in the middle of the night, I meet and speak with an Englishman from London who lights my cigarette for me and says that it's only polite and a South African who loves the States and hates the rain but now finds himself unable to accommodate the heat of where he is from.

I don't write the poems I have ideas for. Not yet. Not now. I tuck them into the pocket of my mind for later, for when it might matter, for when I can make it so. Still, I scribble the best sentences that come onto torn sheets of A5, ignoring the blue lines, afraid I could forget them and lose them to the rest of my thoughts, my endless suppositions.

In the ugliest story I know, we were never friends to begin with. I was a body to touch, and I was touched and so lost all my uses. When I sit in the bath among the bubbles, wasting time, I can almost believe it until I remember everything. Everything assaultive in its tenderness. Still, you don't want to disappoint and you are afraid, so you fall into your life's clutter, the furniture of every demand, stubbing your toes and bruising your shins.

It's better this way, I imagine you tell yourself. To not choose, to let it fade out slowly in ambiguity. The narcotization of your own desires. How in a year you may still have the same wish to change your style, your life, and begun nothing of anything, like the year before when you first told me, allowing everyone and everything else to pick the way for you as you repeat, quietly, your dreams that dry out on the vine of distraction.

And I'm trying to be a good person about it, too. Disappearing myself in gentleness. Still, I wonder how often I must become another apparition in the light of fog. The shame of avoidable loss if I'd only been able to see the now before the now, to extricate our palms from one another no matter the comfort or need that was present in the gifts we once embodied. How above all, I wanted a friend. And was kissed. And left.

The sparrow of the soul flies

with the ten million stars of the world

lighting its back.

We are all trying to return

to the original nest.

Our floating feathers

left behind in our wake

to dust the ground in memory

of our yellows, the blues

and the browns,

all that sinks slowly

toward earth

as the proof of our journey.

The beating of our wings echoes

beyond our own lives. The sound.

The carrion of greater meaning.

To wonder for how long

it will be considered

a kindness

to watch the bird

wordless in collision

against the closed window

of another heart.

I sing a song that few recognize.

A terrible + gripping fear to write, to do anything beyond the bare minimum of survival + living. Even to read. I start + stop or fail to start at all. Surrounded with piles of books. My eyes casting themselves at the waiting words I'm unable to care for. Instead, waiting, always for the next crisis in a world which seems a series of such things.

I cry a little, at random, looking at the trees moving with the wind in the gray expanse outside the window. This fragile universe, my own frail body within it. The agent of everything I am too small to control. A time, once more, where I am caught between the past + the future without the energy for the present. Functioning as a spectre, floating room to room to do this or do that as I think of my friends both dead + alive.

The week has been nothing. I wake. I do my minor tasks, closing loops + opening others. I think + feel too much. + then I try to do either thing a little less as if that was ever the answer.

In the evening one night, I phone my partner who informs me I need to process what has happened. I do not process anything.

It is almost too crude. Or it is too crude. The trauma + my treatment of it. My shirt + jacket still on as my body is acted upon by another. I wrote the details down. This attempt, in my mind, to expel the shame others may take on when the same happens to them, but then I doubt it + myself.

I consider if, through the reckoning, I only make a theatre of pain to be consumed in the same way I was consumed. I call it a lesser event, because, in my experience, it is. + I almost want to laugh at that, the same way I cackled on the street as he told me he wasn't going to walk me to the station after. My mouth moving before my mind as I said, "I wouldn't expect you to."

It all narrows anyway. The left side of my mother's heart weakening + me all these miles away until July unless I'm needed sooner. + I want to roar at that as well, this helplessness, inhabiting my friend's own words; his life to be narrowed in aftermaths, or perhaps it was just a kindness to spare me the uglier reality of my meaning having been some elaborate construction, a hallucination of a closeness, of friendship. I do not think I am beyond such possibilities. I do not think I am immune to the disease of a single hand gilding an absence. But I do pin myself down, like butterfly wings under a microscope, to interrogate the illusions of hope.

There's a room somewhere in my memory where you pluck your hair from my stomach like a monkey grooming another monkey. There's a room in my memory where it all meant exactly what it meant without that meaning needing to dismantle the structures of our lives to exist. The thing I wanted. The thing I never did.

How I did not wish to colonize you, + yet to be a tourist, transient + replaceable, was equally regrettable. + maybe I am too foolish, too romantic in my beliefs around the enduring quality of philia. Amor platonicus. How we could make it whatever it must be. Or the thoughts of Levinas. The self through the other. The other through the self. Or Buber's I + Thou. I + thou. + the respect for the agency in what removes itself from me. So it doesn't matter in the end, does it -- the truth inside our farewells. So farewell. Farewell. Farewell. Farewell.

I was in a rather more poetic mood yesterday, having read some Charles Wright, + the paragraphs I wrote were leagues better + yet too much to imagine finishing now. I think another day. I always think another day. + yet all around me is dying + always has been + I am reduced to waiting.

One day, I wanted to write the history of death that is like a dark path lit with the lanterns of those long gone others. But, in this very hour, I lack the largeness of imagination necessary. I am all plain language. The lives I've saved, + the lives I failed to tear from the void before it took over. The void that breathes in + exhales the human soul as the body goes still. How this teaches one a contradiction of their own power, leaving me, after all the years of grief, as equally as delusional as I am disillusioned.

Feeling myself getting sleepy, I shake my head as if I were a wet dog. It helps very little. All these theories slipping into fragments to fit together another time. Recently, I've been exchanging letters with a moral psychologist on the ethics of ostracization + who we imagine ourselves to be when we assess the rightness + wrongness of any one act.

The day before the assault, the ex-lover tracked me down. Love. Love. The grand romantic love. A changed man or claims of such. The apology. The beauty. The temptation of a better story than the one we'd written. + yet the lover scatters his luck elsewhere, leaving rusty relics for the past, for the woman whose skin he'd dressed me in, who he'd punished me for ever resembling in any shallow manner. Of course she can be so large + mythic with those years of distance between them. + of course, he flattens me into a caricature of jealousy, unwilling or incapable to understand the wound pattern. Her face transposing itself over my own again. + yet I am only full of sorrow for it.

That instinctual explicable tendency to sabotage the field before he's barely taken one step fully upon it, littering the landscape with contempt + suspicion -- a secret patch of scorched grass unto himself as he fantasizes about wildflowers sprouting up from the ash I taste as it lands violent + acrid on my tongue. Himself who pre-authors tragedy, where we must love within a sweeping hall of distorted mirrors. + I know the psychology of such an eros too well to deceive myself.

But oh how I wish to deceive myself. All his short-lived pink-tintedness. The way I am destroyed so thoroughly with its every vanishing. The desire to be loved + seen + the scene in which I am, what, the understudy to his true wanting. Positioning his face in the light of her anticipated regret + improbable return, preened + noble as the lover who understood + could never let go of her whole herness. That I must suffer for her + because of her again + again in my disappointing humanity compared to the trick of recollection.

In more straightforward terms, the avoidant's phantom ex which possesses the present + excuses them of ever fully participating in the demands + risks of a current love. Some devotional taxidermy one can kneel before in the name of depth to evade the living body in front of them. How I will always be at a disadvantage against a ghost that requires nothing as I require something more like the horror show of a relentless courage while his hidden longing habituates itself in corners of the internet for her to find. Even my feelings, raw + gentle in their response, are narrated as uncouth + unmanageable.

It isn't for me however. To change. To do anything about. So little ever is in this parade of being as two lonely days now draw themselves to a close. + I wishing for something. A peace. A pause.

In the bar, a man tells me

he makes the best eggs.

He is drunk and he has worked

for 10 hours: three jobs,

two restaurants.

If I come on Thursday, he will be the cook.

And as he talks, slurring the words,

I consider the structure of a yolk,

what must be cracked to be consumed,

the purpose of such a sudden destruction.

On the train, another man

is coming home. His children run

to greet him on the platform,

piling into him for their hugs,

his lips gracing the top of each head,

a briefcase at his side.

His wife, old and unremarkable,

stands apart,

holding a small chihuahua

the color of sand

as she waits for her kiss.

I watch only to wonder what it must feel like

to be such an absence in so few hours,

to be missed and shown that you are missed.

The minor god of their specific joy.

After, I walk alone in the dark.

The trees all over, monsters of twilight

reminding me of my size.

My little import.

In the news, another victim of Bundy's

is confirmed.

She was only 17.

But all I can think about is my lover

who was meant to love me and didn't.

The heart that punishes itself

by being wrong, by believing

I want to cut off my nose in front of God

I want to recite 12 poems to you from the heart

I want a plastic aeroplane, a plastic body, an even more plastic mind

I want orange juice dripping down my forearms

I want you to lick the orange juice that drips down my forearms; although, when I last told you about the arms and the oranges, your face and mouth both said you didn't like it

Still, I want to get sticky with you

I want to become a common clothes moth

I want to know if you've ever seen one

How beautiful and gold they are in the light

How destructive

I hate these times. The precipice of decisions. In youth, perhaps it all felt urgent; + although it still feels urgent, it feels less pertinent. Yes, one must take responsibility for their own life, but what of the nihilism that creeps around the edges of everything? I've seen too much. I've seen not enough.

Lines of poetry come to me. Still, I don't assemble them into anything. I once saw it as this burning bush + now I often fail to see it at all. Maybe it is just that the fire is everywhere. Maybe I just can't discern from what direction the smoke is travelling in + so cannot follow it. Briefly, I wrote poems for a friend, wanting to in that context for whatever reason. Or if it was not only the explanation of my own desire, then it was a compulsion of sorts or a newfound ease just as easily lost when that connection was. The stimulation of an intellectual intimacy + how one day it all sputtered + stopped like an overused engine.

Am I really so reliant on it? + if I am, does it say more about me than the modern times, or is it rather the very inverse question that one should muse upon.

Decades ago, it would have been quite a usual thing. Thinkers + feelers of all domains would find each other + send letters. A landing pad or test site for ideas. Who knows. I try to give it to myself, but I find the interior conversation can only take one so far before it begins to twist itself into rotten roots + stagnation. The other propels me forward. I'd prefer if this were not a truth.

What I am trying to do is to dignify a condition that self-sufficiency culture treats as weakness: that thought needs a witness, an interlocutor. Solitary contemplation, when pursued too long, turns orchard of fruit into swamp you disappear within. The fact being that consciousness sharpens itself against consciousness. + the self as an instrument only able to strike the right chords of full resonance through friction with another. I want to tell someone to pluck my strings.

+ what is it that I grapple with? What choices am I to make? Ones that are simple, ones that are not so much. The society I live in supplies some, such as what to do with my life, these minutes + these days. Do I call the recruiter back? Or do I finally commit to my plan of cultivating a path that will utilize the gifts of my mind, my minor talents? Do I allow room for both realities? Could they coexist or only collide? Beyond this lie all the other problems. Should I be making friends, casting that net out locally to others who might be similarly inclined to art + language? Say that, yes, this is where I am + will be + so I can allow a universe to build out from within that acceptance of one's geolocation as identified by satellites?

+ do I leave my newest partner? This one as the most frayed thread among the many, particularly when I do not want to find myself diminished or diminishing for love. + I do not feel adored moreso than an eroticized object, increasingly divorced from the human within. I deal too often with withdrawals that seem to follow any instance where I fail to perform, as if I were woman on demand. The inconsistency rendering me toward a state of disillusionment, the unfulfilled wish or fantasy. Yet I wonder which aspects of lack are true issues of capacity + thus unrecoverable + which may only need time to stabilize. The room around us only seems to shrink. I bang on the walls, but I don't think anyone really hears it.

If I were one more insecure or younger even, I'd convince myself that all was well + that my expectations are unreasonable. I know too much however. Six months or more of that closeness from before, how it sustained me with what some may have thought was so little but was of a profound quality in the only estimation of importance (my own) + provided me all things required to shape in an act of freedom around him + not for him. Another as a psychic accelerant.

I try to replicate it. I extend my hand, my heart, my sentiments + my mind, but the fish I set myself on catching slips from the hook as it flounders on downstream, flapping its fins in escape. It's a lazy metaphor. The very crude issue is that to experience lust or passion, to fuck, the pinkest imagination must be continually fed by the other's presence of beingness, one that is separate + distinct from my own + yet calls back to it in reference. To put that in terms even more plain, I must love + believe that love to be something co-authored between myself + another.

However voracious I may become + remain when feelings run freely as horses in the field, all ceases, with a certain immediacy, to be sexual if the heart is not engaged. But I broadcasted the warning. I rang bells. I pressed red buttons to sound the alarm. I note little movement. + so I consider if I should instead swear myself off of passion entirely, or if I am only considering this because I am holding more than I am receiving. + what might I still be yet to receive if I remain at least partly open to the possibility that I could be satisfied once more + find again the sight of romantic tones all around me.

For the first month, I thought he would meet me where I lived. For the second + through the third, I am grasping for reasons that might absolve my staying, that might sanction it, + make my doing so more than a misplaced self-hatred. Do not misread me, I think. As it is not that I do not aim, with all that I am, to love him or to be loved in return. It is that I do not wish to do it at cost or in any manner unequal. The beloved needed instead as an acting co-conspirator, not prop or function or passive force that seeks nothing beyond absorption + containment.

But I'm running again. Running away or at my life as well as in the literal sense. Truthfully, I'm making changes all of the time + wanting always to make even more. I have this terrible need to recognize nothing while simultaneously yearning for the familiar. I want to write to you constantly. + I suppose I am even here where you do not read. I keep some form of correspondence alive in this illusory manner, well aware that it is in reality more alike babbling to the self than ever is it likely to reach you. No matter really, as you live inside my head as a hazy glow. + all that filters through the light of you there is somehow beautiful, somehow better.

Still I know, even in the saddest moment where I most want to be saved, I am to blame for how my life has turned out or will in the years preceding my death, as are you for yours, as we all are always. So I won't say I've constructed you into something you are not, instead I will say what Eileen wrote in "Peanut Butter", "It’s more / like a playground / where I play / with my reflection / of you until / you come back / and into the / real you I / get to sink / my teeth."

See, it is exactly like that but perhaps with a little less of the fang + blood. + I do not think it is a bad thing to do, but I do not know really what feelings you may hold against or for this particular strategy developed to integrate a sudden absence. You are neither wholly real in that way nor wholly fantasy, but a site of joy, grief-work, continuation, + preservation. A reflective surface that still ripples when the stone of memory is tossed in.

Yes, I know, you're gone. + yes, I'm likely wrong about everything. I don't expect you're coming back. + I promise when I say that it is fine. I won't be angry. I don't need anything from you -- will not sit on your chest + demand a raw truth be ever uttered. I just miss you + want to keep you + that is all + this is the only way I know that might allow me to do so while still respecting the want you said you wanted. I'm not typically one to let go with such a grace, so it is the mark that leaves it apparent how I did love you truly + in the right way. I used to write about that so often when it was happening, when I was mid-denial of the veracity of my affections + terrified of tenderness, begging the page to let me do it right for once. So thank you for letting me do it right for once.

The only tragedy is in the reinforcement of the knowledge that doing it right often means getting the very opposite of what you'd ever hoped for instead. I will admit before the world how virtue does not grant reward in the classical meaning of the word, how the universe is never obligated to pay in kind. But it wasn't the point with you: the payoff, the result. Instead, the mattering thing was to, for however long, experience you honestly + watch myself expand in response. + I did. + I regret no moment of that doing. After everything, after the end of the rope once held taut before it was loosened in your panicked distrust of what you could maintain -- you so unwilling to mishandle that you'd rather not handle it at all -- I hold neither sentimentality nor contempt.

Anyway, it is all really enough of that. That being only one part of the full picture of a life even if it is the funnest to draft sentences from. I wake up. I watch some video essay about an idea in a book that leads me quickly down a path of my own research in order to outline a script dismantling the claims. The academic in me never knowing how to shut up. I have an annoying appointment. I write. I remember the novel I started last night with its rather awful purple prose yet interesting enough plot to keep me reading: some dark romance fantasy narrative that I thought would be a good thing to turn my brain off to (but of course I realize like I realize every time that this doesn't occur + I just enter the mode of editor despite it being a published thing + not a project I'm being paid for).

The best free advice I have is to use less adjectives in fiction. It's not very original advice, but no one really wants to be told the man is menacing more than they want to be made to feel afraid of him through what you choose to show + how.

I want to smoke more cigarettes today than I did yesterday, likely because one part of me wants to leave my new secondary partner while the other part tells me to wait, to have something like patience or an understanding + to see what happens when I give it a chance to still happen, which is likely the only fair thing, but I'm not always motivated by what is fair if somehow it becomes an unfairness toward the self to make it that way for the other. I'm also just generally an impatient woman. I want to nudge the story along.

I think he reduces me. I think it makes it easier for him. I think if I am complacent in my reduction, I am complicit in my reduction. + I'm not sure I can live with that consequence. But I'm supposed to have moved on to other present tasks. I'm not supposed to be weighing this still. I suppose however that it illustrates my level of discomfort, illustrates what I may be incapable of withstanding now. Whatever it reveals, I don't want to confront it just yet.

A dark day. A heavy day. One of those where it feels like your soul has just given out. The bad knees of your heart wobbling as a foal-like creature. I nearly cry out, yet for what? Relief that only I can give myself. + this all in spite of what I most wish for in these moments. Rescue. The answers of the world that I know I wouldn't even take. But I want it sometimes. A shortcut to my own meaning.

There's too much within today. There's too much inside me. For a week, my intercostals have spasmed on + off. A byproduct of December's illness. I am not certain if the rawness in my throat is an emotion held back or just another symptom I can blame on that now historic virus.

I flit between thinking of all I've lost to life + death. Myself. My father. Myself. The many animals. The family. The friends. My grandmother serving as the last limb of one ancestral tree only to be chopped off in October + left to rot on the forest bed of memory. I break my heart on my father's unfulfilled dreams, on my mother's loneliness. The justice of our societies an illusion, an ineffective antidote for wrongs done. I think so much about what we numb ourselves on, how often it's what we might even call love. I think so much on the body used. The bodies deemed dispensable. Luck becoming your name, your place of birth, your ability to look away.

An hour was spent looking at job boards as if another attempt at assimilation would cure me of whatever feeling it is I've felt. In the end, I was left colder. Disillusioned. Reminded once again I have no choice but to take responsibility for my own life. The sobering knowing that I must do what I came here to do. How terrible, how wonderful, that is.

After makeup + hair, after becoming beautiful for no reason than to please + anchor the self in its façade, I retreat to what Woolf wrote down as a room of one's own + consider the choices made over years to achieve this existence. + it is an achievement, for I was born a body dispensable -- bathed in well water poisoned by pesticides + the runoff from coal mines. My lungs wrapped around polluted air. Cheap land brings the giants of industry + with that the money brings our deaths. We go young + weathered. We go.

Sometimes I wish I could inhabit something of the natural world. To become, like Harrison wrote of, a simple crow. Instead, I spend too much time researching the cost of this machine, the internet. Instead, I spend too much time researching the failings of every iteration of the Land Registration Act in the UK. Instead, instead, instead. Instead, I read poetry, hold that Oblivion Banjo to my sternum as if it may heal what's sick inside me, as if I could absorb the words into my bones + feel, as a result, less weak, less destitute of spirit.

At times, I feel in a fistfight with fate. When I was small, I was convinced of what I was put on the earth for. + if there is any such thing, I've spent part of a life trying to snuff out that wild flame for ease. It's a shameless impulse. A waste I struggle to forgive myself in the indulgence of.

But that's the point of this year, to reckon with myself + become again myself. The other morning, I reflected on how even love can be used to divert us from our paths. In this I mean, how many of us can say we have been made better by love. Rather, how many of us can say it has not become a noose around the neck. We amend our lives around another life + become smaller, distracted by their needs, distracted by their rule + law, their feeling. I want to ask who invented this version of affection, this acceptance only through our own compliance. Time to ourselves becomes selfish, becomes impossible, becomes something that arouses guilt. Must we trade our own existence for safety? Is it truly the only way?

Of course, in my own life, in my own relationships, I'm rebelling. Anything that may threaten autonomy or agency under siege. I shoot my cannons. I disassemble the bombs of entitlement, expectation. Unload those weapons of control. Perhaps, though, it is the errand of a fool to believe what I believe. To resist the bonds that would only be a warm fog to disappear into. To believe that through love my edges may instead become clearer, my thinking braver. To refuse to allow my hunger softened, my voice blunted, my curiosity smothered. To refuse absorption, management, completions by any other + resist the external + internal manipulations taught to us or the performance of any frail fragility, that acceptably yearning feminine, to trade at any moment independence for regard. To believe instead that bonds can be a wellspring that bears only more creation. Separate minds in mutual orbit. Flint to rock. The sharing of sparks.

Even so, I can veer too far with my compassion, my fierce defense of freedom, but suppose it serves its purposes. Balm + wound. What heals + what defeats. These are ways to avoid telling the truth, to avoid confronting the reality of my needs. I give the benefit of the doubt + receive little but lecture myself out of the transactional. Yet, through this, do I accept neglect? Outright deny obvious abandonments? Have I, in my insistence toward requited guardianships, somehow sidelined my very desires? My values of expansion? Have I, in being so forgiving, so open, betrayed myself in another way? + is there an answer? Am I sure it even matters?

There are examples. Of course there are examples. When I reach out a hand + touch nothing but air. + perhaps this year is where I put down my arms, my hopes, my ceaseless understanding, my means to meet them where they are when where they are is never close to me, where I turn these friendships + loves into paper boats I release to the estuary of the past. It is just that the circle of my heart is so small, so difficult to get into. Once there, I will keep putting out food even when no one is showing up for dinner. + I don't like saying this, to admit my need. I don't like that I, at my core, can be so small as to find nothing but all this forgottenness. How, perhaps all the same, it is easier than being loved or loving -- than truly becoming what I believe to be ideal. How perhaps to be left is all I've known, all I've come to expect. Or how it is the self itself which may be the true body of fault + blame -- standing defiant + alone at the helm of this orchestra with the horns + the violins + every crescendo being played knowing already that it will be ignored as I listen for an echo, for the return of sound, that I have driven the crowd away + barred the theatre door.