Shams' Muse

i climbed up some mountain you see, and i'd been struggling for a long time on this one as mountains can be like that. i'd been struggling across the sea and then I found I was suddenly there with almost no effort (surely there was effort, but I'd forgotten how many boulders I'd tripped over). And when I was there, I thought the view would be better somehow or no, that somehow I would be changed, that I would be something more than the sum of my parts, a person who'd climbed. I felt sort of ordinary, as though what I really wanted was just to be like everyone else and I wasn't really sure why I wanted that so badly. It wasn't anything to be ordinary short of boring and I was boring and I am probably going under again.

the test of patience even if I hold you in trust hold me in trust a million times I want to say to the stars at night where are you?

medea killed her children to break your heart. i still don't know why people identify with her.

i dreamed the dream of the house, Shams, the inside of my house, which is in fact an apartment. the interior had grown dilapidated and was falling apart from a fungus that climbed up the walls black and fierce, pushing the drywall from the inside out, pieces of plaster falling like large snowflakes.

I am writing a love story about myself, Shams, and I am the protagonist, or one of them. Only we don't say that kind of thing, can't call it a love story, because he's too cool for all that, too cool for me, too cool to tell me that he has me in his eternity just in case he needs to break in case of emergency. Boys are careful like that. In my storym he is carving my name into his blood, rearranging his DNA, the plasma, so that it buzzes in my presence, sends chemicals in a flood at just the simple thought of me. And he can't stop that, can't stop this urgency for me, this scent in all things that is me-ness. Love is such a forceful demoness, and she has him pinned even if he struggles against it. My story is more about a silly man. In front of my eyes, he puffs himself up and struts, so that my heart beats, not because I think he is great but because he frightens me, with this threat of this callous indifference towards a hundred different faces and people, a smal...

damn you, damn you, damn you. Again, I prove again that I am an incompetent idiot, incapable of taking care of myself in any meaningful way wahtsoever. I've lost my metro pass yet again, or for the first time really. But I've lost things more valuable than this, and every single time, I am ashamed.

one day, shams, I can write a love poem a happy poem, a poem that i know is merited by the one it describes because he loves me so much more than I love him. Isn't that the way of things for women? nothing works until a man is consumed with desire, consumed with the sickness that life is meaningless without? He wakes up and holds me in his mind, a virus of the blood that has changed the very plasma of his cells. There is no day without me. The other dimensions are so small, I could hold them in the palm of my hand, and yet my eyes don't see them in front of me here, right at the end of my breath.

love's arrows are such barbs in my hind and i'm scratching at the welts they give me tearing at bolts of flesh to get some poison and i'll suck down on this raw, red wound gaping and winking at me, on my arms. I hate this disaster. I hate it, I hate it. And the disaster is that you will not go. You will not.

the degree of anxiety is high.

you know how these things go, Shams. Easy come, easy go. So it always is for me. But if the story is over with one, so it will begin with another. From where I sit, it seems so dreadful to have nothing to sing about. Though I wonder, Shams, if I am just lying to myself.

i am watching this paper on the ground out the window as it creeps along a crack in the wind, listening to someone talk to me and i'm not even here and he's trying to impress me or reach me, but i'm in no mood for this kind of thing anymore i'm tired today i'm tired with all you people. leave me alone already. i crave the silence of my own house, and not talking, not listening.

where are you, Shams? My head is full of songs.

in my languid moments, like now, now that I am tired and frustrated, I would like to lay down my head in your lap and look into your eyes. and you could tell me, don't worry, i'm here. You can brush my hair back with your hand and say don't worry, i'm here.

Agamemnon, full of heart, is always confused by Menelaos, his sword bearing brother with full beard and big laugh, drinking from a horn, and drinking with the men, playing cards and telling stories until all hours of the night. If Menelaos were not his brother, he could understand why Helen left with a younger man, a knockout like her married to an uncomplicated man like Menelaos. It never could work. Helen might have liked Menelaos rugged good looks and his rustic ease. He never cheated or lied, but quite probably never felt so strongly that he needed to. Though agamemnon... Agamemnon had more pain in his days, and didn't (this is a good one, again, a start of one. I will work on it)

my hands are so cold