Chapbook Contest: Between Dreams: Poem Letter #5

To Marcel: Nocturne


Once I woke up murmuring,
once I woke up spitting,
alone.

I was thinking of Lacan and sheep,
I was thinking of the body as organism,
the body as language,
I was thinking of first love,
I was thinking of screaming.

.        .        .

I cradled you long after your death, like many.
I populated my own life with your objects and characters and sensations,
so much so that I no longer felt
crazy.

How many hours of your life were spent sleeping?
Dreaming?
Flailing and kicking and trying to breathe?

The beauty you offered began with a murmuring, a spitting,
thick mucous in the chest,
lungs swelling with desire,
fluttering like fish gills, like an accordion played fervently.

.        .        .

When I woke up murmuring and spitting and flailing,
I thought of you, your heavy-lidded eyes, and your eternal symptoms,
and my own hypnogogic affairs,
all terrific
in the original and unpleasant sense.

I was thinking of decadence and sensualist politics,
the eroticism of flora and fauna,
the way my hair tangles on the pillow,
my first love and screaming.

My first love and screaming
and sleeping
and lungs filling with water,
and spitting up upon waking,
my love, Marcel,
you reek of cork and stagnant air.

.        .        .

I watch you carry the beauty of your mind in your hands like a cup of well-water,
not getting enough sleep or enough breath,
tirelessly carrying the beauty between your mind and the page,
like blood from the heart to the lungs,
from the heart to the lungs.