You dont ask
You dont ask anything. You dont ask anything of the walls or the black currents, impediments or diversions, and you dont ask anything of me. You are barely here. You rub your feet forward in short slow steps drawing the rainwater and sand across the carpet before finding a spot against the wall and sliding down to sit with your knees in front of your face. The curtain flutters across the kitchen, outside the same tired and still blue that you saw through the window, the light switches places. Here you are. You just sit. The things that push you are tired. At the bottom of its ebb the tide lingers. You stroke your chin as your legs grow warm without feeling. You feel sparkles and dampness. You wrap a towel around your neck and hold a mug of tea between your palms. Your hands pulse. The centers of pain represent the entirety of your body. The rhythms of heat and throbbing lap through you with the rise and fall of entreaties and naked trusts. A word spreads across you, a characterization or clue settles into the gentle stupor of your creation. You were the sand and the water, you were lost, now you have me, you have what is mine, you need it, I no longer do. There is no story in the words. They are characters that erase themselves by happening and being recognized. When they become real, shared between us, a little bit of me is let loose, a view, a movement, a lost hope, it could be in you, settling on your skin, it could be lost in the room, amongst the detritus. You dont hear. The things you need to hear about the replacement arent spoken. It has just happened that you will be when I am not and that will be seamless. The city doesnt notice those crashed asymptotes. My life wont recognize the replacement. It has no sentiment of this body. Things stay still forever. You cant occupy their places. They cant topple out of the dust; you have to escort them.
Your eyes unravel. It is late. You feel the mass of your head pouring in waxy torrents down your shoulders and melting into an upturned spreading puddle across the wall. You are soft and pliable. Mine. You are nothing. You are made of nothing swirling about spaces of dead breath. You have never brought anything to the world. You take from it. The world made you and keeps making you, youve never let it free from its responsibility, you pretend when you are looking into the clouds or through your eyelashes into the distance that you embrace the finiteness of your self, but you are not there or anywhere in particular. You are a collection. The garbage that you eye curiously for hidden incriminations is roiling with bits of you. The tired and submissive apartments where days end stuporously are bedecked with you, with your useless desires. By merely existing you believe that you are proof of something. You believe that you are proving it to yourself because to not exist is the most tremendous departure from the physics of dependence. You are a drain. How could you not be. There was nothing left for you to offer back. The opportunities that might have given your fate shape earlier were taken by hidden, more complete people and then they were gone and there was nothing left. Everything was done. But you kept on. As you circled the block without stopping, for days, you were uncoiling the time, using the energy, and occupying the stageset that had been meted out and was left in the world that had no use for what you might do with it. You hardly looked human. You were made up of pieces that didnt seem to fit. There were ledges and crevices and shadows cast back on yourself instead of smoothness and skin.
Your head falls forward. Responsibility, commitment, and support are human. Things dont fit you. You try. You keep trying. Your shape is flawed. You dont cause anything. Those attributes have destinations that you cant engage. You cant make something happen. You are the effect of everything, the tail of shame, the waste, the spume, the wretch, the broken dry soil, the terminal end of any action, after the goal, the lumbering ennui in which the spent old woman, a shape, nods her head at the futility of putting away another day but watches the sun rise, sees right through it, and you have been that moment since you rolled out of nothing. You are the bottom of a shoe, the black guts of the ocean, the rotten plaster of the desert, the things that I, falling asleep at the outset of evening, shut out of my thoughts. I will never see you and you dont exist. You are too much nothing for the something that I barely am. I need you. For so long I have been so little, in the end nothing, I want to leave nothing, but forever, you are endless nothing, the sea floor.
Put me in salt and sour water. Stop everything and let it fill the room. Watch me stop. Watch me until I know that Im gone. You are always the end, end me, seal me, pickle me, fall into my eyes and see, take me to the end, finish the task, take my breath and suffer my cycles, use my body, pickle me and come back when you are done, keep it living, barely, in the manner that I barely lived.
