Equations: Dialectic Form (2021)

#23
Of human bondage: Trish keeps me down at the heels. It always involves
someone else: I get picked up and dropped as others present themselves,
disappear. When I fade into the wilderness, it is with an incomplete sense
of self. Trish has lopped off a part of me and fastened it to her chest. For
eight months, my spirit life is a limbo; I go up and down with Trish’s
tides. By mid-summer, I have claimed her, using the diabolical as a
resource. Yet I still take her with the fierceness born of thwarted passion.
At the moment I release myself, her head snaps to the side, there is a
sharp intake of breath, and her blue eyes pop open and bulge. My body
wants to go into her as far as possible, to get myself back. I learn the pure
deliciousness of angry sex. The house she lives in has no central air; we
sweat through the long nights. Trish’s room looks out on a small
courtyard, with a central concrete patch and grass around. When we’re
stoned, I see Blakean striations in these little grass-plots; the smallness,
tenderness, greenness. Me and Trish are often stoned; we escape our jobs,
our uncertain futures (are we to be geniuses or nonentities), our sense of a
moribund United States (collapsed towers still fresh in our minds), even
the brittle hopes that hurt more often than not. The seeds we plant in
those little grass-plots spill over onto the concrete.
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