Fluffy Singler
Forty years in the wandering desert would break our wills, keep us from our
gods until we forget their names like motherless children playing alone with
matches, banging on pots and pans until no one would listen anymore, growing
like weeds unplanted dandelions unwanted. Lack of light and water could not
kill us, mutating on pollution like a new virus. I’ve forgotten how to
write my own name, no longer know how to sleep with both eyes closed, held
sentry so long for your return. How will I know you if you’ve lost the
password?
I want white wool amnesia pulled dark over my eyes to forget myself like an
old woman’s Alzheimer dreams of girlhood, wake up and discover you beside
me, feel your soft skin against mine in a red lava glow. You are a mystery
to me–a puzzling sacrament, a sacred puzzle, the smile of the Sphinx. I
don’t need books to teach me what my hands already know, what my fingertips
can discover. I want to know no more than what you keep in your eyes, your
memories as my own to wash over me like the tides I fear
no crashing waves the floods do not daunt me. Tell the story of your
exploits. Weave Odysseus myths; sing the song the sirens taught you, a
soothing exotic sound to roll off my foreign tongue. You are a lost
language. I carve pictures into stone because I have no words to speak to
you, try to decipher you into glyphs I can read, conjugal verbs and sounds
unnatural to my palate, the taste of you when I say your name three
times–an invocation, a blinking neon mantra–tell you the lost story of my
soul. Charades. Sounds like
first
word.