becoming christian, becoming me
Brush dipped into my deepest of sleeps, I can paint myself quite a dream when this artist finds his artistry. Her favourite colour is green. My favourite colour is her. I’m throwing out my canvas in favour of drowning in paint.
I’m listening to her breath as she sleeps. I can be hard, and hard of hearing, but I cannot mistake the peaceful winds that carry past those lips and grace my soul with their favour and flavour. She paints across me in broad, playful strokes with every kind word, she dispels my magic and glamour with every laugh and smile.
She asked me if soulmates exist. I learn of prayer only by praying to be hers.
I never expected to come through my ordeals unscathed. I wonder if that’s the nature of war, how the true test of a soldier is knowing when and how to lay down his arms and unclench his fists. She washes over me with every slumbered sigh, she paints me in emerald and cobalt and rain. I’m eroded until I’m hers and nothing else. I’m hers before I’m me, and I love, I swear it, I love who I’ve become.
And this illusion bends so freely, and this dream never creases no matter how I mistreat it in my mind. This woman can’t seem to find in my hands and my eyes and my voice the same brute and broken soul that my years have seen stomp about dressed in coarse memory and philisophical torment. Maybe he’s gone. Maybe that’s why I feel so light and so enlightened. If you grind a vase to dust, should memory allow, it will remain a vase.
I disperse as dust in her winds! Sweep me up!
This dream won’t see me wake, because I’m no longer dreaming. The winds of change escape from each of her satisfied sighs, and I drink them in greedily.
I am madly in love, and my heart cries it’s uncontrollable little heart out at seeing it’s very first realized dream. I cannot stress the magnitude of my experience enough. Of my infinite ideas, expressions, words, hopes, needs, loves, whims, screams, demands, pleasures, pains… I’ve finally actually fucking found one honest, pure form in this world, and my poor little heart is hysterical and livid at the very first glance: shocked and horrified at seeing it’s hard earned cynicism and jade trapping stripped away with the gentlest whisk of her fingers; vindicated and justified for seeing it’s unbroken, uncompromising faith culminate in the penitent service to an angel.
And how ironic. The girl who loves green loves the most jaded man she’d ever find.
For a man who lives only in, only with, only for his dreams: I just cannot; will not describe her beauty. I’m not up to it. I can’t deal in figures when all I live for is form, even if I’d only ever seen it in dream.
But I’m awake. And christ… I see her now. I see nothing else whatever.
Sweep me up!
~ Driz
Sometimes it seems to me that you exist only in my imagination, because what you write is so close the essence of things as I perceive them, but yet no one else speaks. I have to conclude that there are tens or tens of thousands who have learned to just simply listen, and that they were once me, and that I will be them.
I’d love to create a digital rendering, of her, for you. I’d need source-material that defines (at a corporeal level) what you so successfully define, here, in prose. It would only cost time. For you to find, and point me toward, images (not of her, but – instead – of elements that re-fract-mind) and for me to congeal those images. It would be a wondrous challenge.
JMH:
I took theatre and dramatic arts for a while, studied improv, that sort of thing. Training and working at that sort of endeavour, perhaps because we had such a great mentor, entailed all sorts of really creative exercises dealing with timing, feeling, moments, expressions, and so forth.
I remember one particular exercise, our entire troupe would lie on the floor, eyes closed, lights off, just listening. One person would say, “One.” Someone else would say, “Two.” And the count would continue, three, four, five…
There was no order to it, no rules. If two people spoke at once, we started over at one. What developed from this environment was a really intense experience, however.
First, you want to participate, there’s ego involved, you want to get in there at just the right point, call a number, make a contribution. You also don’t want to be the individual to fuck it all up, so you’re straining against the silence and the quiet, trying so hard to feel it out and know just ‘when’ your turn comes up.
So as we practiced at this, all tens and tens of thousands of us, sitting in the dark, an experience asked of us, we’re dying to contribute, fearing our missteps… we really just learned to listen.
Eventually we heard when it was our time to speak, and then and only then did we speak.
But that’s all the silence really is, you know. It’s an opportunity before it’s anything else.
So, without ado: “One.”
—–
Veach:
That sounds lovely, and a wondrous challenge on both of our parts. I thoroughly embrace your generous offer, and I’ll see that my next post gives you substance enough to substantiate your efforts.
Just wait till you ’see’ her. If I’m anything the poet I hope to become, I’ll do her half the justice she deserves.
Two.
Three. What you’ve written is so unsparing (inspiring), and it really will produce a different effect on each and every reader each and every time. I still laugh, overwhelmed. I hope.
Four.
I think man is always bound to a state of hope. It’s giving that hope a name and a voice and a direction and a space that it can laugh and play in, be visible in, be loud and uncompromising in… that’s the hard part.
She’s my direction, my hope has a voice, and when it sings, it sounds like the words above.