“Longing on a large scale is what makes history.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“Most of our longings go unfulfilled. This is the world’s wistful implication–a desire for something lost or fled or otherwise out of reach.”
~Don DeLilo, Underworld
In the year I discovered
I was a lover I was a
glass-eyed and hungry
beast locked behind the
cold steel of my indecision,
unsure of what it was
that would make me whole
but wanting it all, all, all
to myself. How strange it is
to place a stranger, a body
cutting the blustery chill of
the street, into my mind,
by my side in endless permutations
of things I tell myself will make
me happy, a kiss or a fuck or a
conversation that only happens
in the scratchy highlight reel
of my fantasies. And stranger still
this attraction to people who will never
pluck me from the identity parade
of skimmed-over silhouettes; mine,
a wish made yet unfulfilled. I exist
within the shadowy halls of the
House of Black and White, a quilted
wall of faces I’ve never forgotten,
my loneliness uncovered and laid bare
before their eyes. I feel I must give account
for this shortcoming, must provide an entire
history of longing, an autobiography of
warmth lingering beneath the numb rind
of my fingers, my loins, my lips. But how
can you account for the world moving beneath
your very feet, how do you explain its wistful
implications, all rising tides and shifting plates
and stench of peat? And why do I feel I should
be ashamed of being ushered to sleep on the
rippling echoes of the confessions I whisper
to the moon, for hoping that someone else speaks
sweetly to its cratered face, for knowing in my bones
that these lunar orisons float through the cold
glimmer of aether between us, cruising along an orbit
of desperate optimism, but always just out of reach?
