Hella

Hella

Hella

Joseph, I found docility in this room whilst you were
sleeping deeply elsewhere. The sun
accentuated your riper version of me―to channel your history; he left me,
so I showered, and took sedatives for the knockout pain.
You erased my image from the mirror, kindly; paternally inviting
a better one, a real Hella to materialise more truthfully in the morning.
The key-card had to be removed at the door to turn off the light,
so I tripped ungracefully, stumbled over the polished oak floor,
insensitive to my fallible sensibilities, and plunged for the bed.
The pristine wilderness of it―unhomed and oh,
what can I tell you? I envisioned you perched at the writing desk
writing only to me. I replayed our recent collusions,
ones in which I recited lines from my own poems―oh God,
the whiskey was just so deplorably good and the spices
must have inflamed my grandiose nature. Your private smile
had my own key of chromatic energy locked in it―the scales
of you struggled to their climactic point, just before bed.
I look at you and I see India― I took more sedatives episodically, forgetting how many I took―
couldn’t bash my lights out for the thought of you, oh the guilt
I passed on via hundred rupee notes into the dry palms of
beautiful male waiters. Creasing in the night from my elevated mood
transfixed on my shallow breathing, my imagined fatal
arousal re-lineated the room as my extended self, extended
over an entire continent, encapsulating the escapist in you, 
there is just nowhere you can be now. I’ll devour. Oh, my
coercive tendencies hold no sway here. The light dominates the feeling,
but look into its dereliction―oh―under these bedsheets, yes. Climb in,
do, I’ll pay all the debts. The sun has my back, the new day
writes it all off with my knack for making promises
and keeping secrets. I have a twenty year embargo,
then my books crackle with the cynicism
of having lost everything, again. I fully absorb and inhabit my solitude. It’s a beautiful art. The country
and I are your playthings and you are God of
right here and right now and all the gaps between day and night.
Oh, daddy. Cross my palms, I’ll not decay―the internet attracts
the vindication of us. You like an irregular heartbeat, like yours? A must!
You’re in the downstairs bar performing experimental cunnilingus
on a cocktail glass. The heart mourns its yearning, a speculation over ice,
over me―we perform what we cannot confront―who can
alleviate the guilt now―only me, and trouble. In the early morning
I hear the destitute erect the stage outside for a rich man’s wedding―
pea-eyed, I open the curtains on a twelve foot window―OH,
my, I must take a photograph and send it to you― from here, is a scarred womb with all its violence. The vegetation beyond
my room conceals what shimmers inside the oyster shell of imaginative
obsession. Prise this whole construct open, and I’ll be forever yours;
use your hands. The narcissist’s bed is dishevelled at once―
on hearing the ping of a text which opens the possibility
of the eternal, which is shut down in a singular moment, and time
therefore has a chink in its meaningless chain. How big
do you need me to be?―I can make
a room look empty. I can fill you with my phantasy―
project yours back to you where we nearly slipped
on the red carpet―the fairy-tale omits the possibility of failure
as you, my prince, become more hooked on the details of my desires.
Under a gazebo we make polite conversation with the other,
and gorge ourselves on gaze. The newly formulated lies. How
very progressive we are when we unrealise rules our parents
created so we couldn’t suffocate ourselves. zero hangovers in seven drunk days. Reeling from the embarrassment
of failing in front of you. What could be worse for a person
than seeing the faults in an uncompromising, compromised longing.
Every time a plane takes flight I think of
going down with the fuselage, with you. Every time we land
I am so saddened by our surviving. You wrote back, ‘it’s not me.’
A lump in my throat over the early morning meeting
over a grey boiled egg and sweet masala tea―in a God-forlorn
shanty town―practising starvation―because if I have what I want
the lack falls back to where it cannot be grieved,
killed outright, filled up or viewed from an essential distance.
It provides for me no less than one hundred percent my daily allowance.
If you want to be my hole, then swallow. In the belly
of a drowning whale, somewhere, our conceptual, united heart
is rotting. And anyway, my father, if still alive
would still be older and more fucked up than you. Even more
incapable of loving me. a megalomaniac or an addict, and all I got was this T-shirt, I said.
My aphoristic sense of humour develops chronic pneumonia
whenever you turn your back. But I want to see everything.
We are formulating our legacy through language. What price
will I pay for it―and can I stop myself before I write myself
into a phantasmagorical cave. Where are your blue eyes now and what do they
stare through, see without me. The hot coffee, the inadequate tips, the nauseating
chrysanthemums, the string quartets, the famous novelists,
the desire for infinite sex and drugs around the clock, the looped
jumping CD track, and right now―my veins and your veins
and the cosmos situated visibly in between them, between
our egos and our lack of moral responsibility―we foot the demand
just to spite the city―I lied when I said I don’t
assume a role for you. I assume any role I want to fit―
be my incestuous past. Eat from my breast. Foam at the mouth.
I wrote all my best work under the delusion of gratification
delayed several light years by the impossibility of romance.
If only I’d been more imperfect. There are no bombs beneath the car bonnet. You check
but don’t really scan. My white-gloved driver thinks I am rich and stingy
when in fact I’m merely a fantasist―you wish for me my dream―
you must first remove all desire from it―I couldn’t
fall back once I tasted it. Go home. My intelligence is a rainbow―
it’s a phenomena not a science. Oh,
I’m chewing hard on the nipple. The good breast heaves
only for me. There’s none for you so I’ll offer none―
I will drain her until I’m sick just so you can’t have it. The rain
hasn’t touched our skin for a definite spell. I shake hands
with so many people to emphasise my need for direct sensation. Regurgitate
my sweetness. I want back our lapse in consciousness, here;
check your phone again, you missed me. She bites through the cord―
jams the key-card in, saunters back down to reception
wearing dark glasses―crying―three hour sleeps,
jetlag of devilishness, and thousand rupee soda. I shrink down
to black mink heels with an appetite to die for. Nothing surreal
about unimaginable pleasure, except that it won’t last―my sapling
idea buried in the grave of primacy. See how
the erotomaniac, once spurned, never dies. My inevitable disappointment with words urinates,
blows its bloody nose, the pressure erupts, writes the word
IF I AM AN ARTEFACT FOR YOU THIS WORLD
IS THE UNIVERSE’S SAD MAUSOLEUM. I double underline
the word SAD as room service arrives with a man with steady
hands and he asks me why I’m crying and I take a picture
of the bourgeois tea caddy. My work
is bereft of all ownership now. I refuse to take responsibility
for what would flow through me regardless of my active voice.
You won’t recognise my pain, or my body. It doesn’t tell you any more
than that red smear when I wiped myself this morning
can tell me a single hard fact
about God.