03.29.01 - 12:44 a.m.

how fragile is the heart?

io moths, lunas, all the moths of the silkworm family eat only as caterpillars. those flocks of seeking things that fling themselves into the light as if they were seeking a door between worlds - they're starving to death, mute and desperate and dying for a mate. can you imagine all that soundless sex - all that mute and hungry urgency - to reproduce even as every motion, every calorie of energy expended in the hunt consumes them from within.

oh, it was one of those nights again. one of those damnably transporting twilights. and all i want. all i wanted. all i could ever fucking need in that moment is to drown in the impossibly dark and brilliant blue. there are no words for such color, there is no description for such a sky.

it simply settles over the vault of space, in the borderlands between night and day, and i want to devour it - to suck that color in, leech it from the sky and feel it crawling beneath my skin with perfect, painful clarity. i want to feel the infection of light so filling and insistent i begin to perforate around the edges of bleed color the way others bleed breath after indifferent breath - because they must.

and i've been thinking about words again, their weight and texture in the mind - how small the strokes of the writer's brush are - how they simply suggest, and some yearning, expansive thing in our hearts fills the rest in without question - how little i can say. how i can never capture - or recapture - the slickness of the sky, or the smooth fullness of water in my throat.

margaret atwood has a series of poems couched as songs by animals. song of the worms ends with the lines: "when we say attack, you will feel nothing/ at first." but the one that sticks in my mind is called corpse song.

I enter your night
like a darkened boat, a smuggler.

These lanterns, my eyes
and heart are out.

...

or you will drift as I do

swollen with words you never said
swollen with hoarded love

that isn't the whole poem, but i don't remember where all the line breaks are. i'm not afraid of the words i'll never say. i'm afraid of the words i'll never know. the words that don't exist. the words that are shells of something more and essential and primal - sunburn, sex, sweat, moonlight.

so watch for me by the moonlight. i'll be looking for the words not yet born.