My sanity is collapsing. My thoughts are like boiling water, my mind is like a raging, turbid sea, and words, words come pouring out, words like raining, drizzling hailstones, chunking houses, grounding the plains in fickle ice. The air crackles, incessant static, and all vision is the snow and fuzz of bad reception. Feeling shudders through me, through a beating heart, through air-brushed skin, through hair and cool and itch; the same dull smell, the same clear taste. I feel like I'm floating in an immense space of clearness. The ever pervasive sense is the sense of time passing, time slipping away like minute grains, and everything is calamity.

Devices break -- TV's, DVD players, computers, the world is all one big heap of broken things. Metal upon corroding metal, foil on crinkled foil, broken, brittle pieces crushing the edges of even smaller and more brittle points. A glaring light runs through everything, or the sapping static electric of light, and even the edges of pure forms are dull, brittle, corroded, and bleeding with rust.

My love comes to me from the desert; a harsh desert, a desert of nothings, a desert of throbbing bodies and the scraping away and tearing of skin and the licking, nursing of wounds, and my love comes to me in the desert, from the desert, bearing a book, a cross, a sign, and while the winds blow, he says, "Take the way of peace, the path of the righteous; be happy and drink from the well hallowed wells where all is clear water, where leaves drift about scarlet in the night, where life is a burning of sacred light." And what do I do in the pure blue sky of his eyes? I spit to the winds, I would leave myself cold, I wrap myself in darkness and ashes and dust. My own personality overwhelms him, settles down on him like a thick, suffocating cloak of smoke, and I can't escape this haze, this horrible haze that clouds over everything, makes the rocks blacker, and shrouds the azure sky and makes everything dark.

When darkness falls I wish I could swim a million miles. I wish it were only myself trapped in the cold darkness of the rushing seas, jagged rock islands poking out of the water by my side, far right and left, but myself, storm tossed and freezing, blown by harsh winds and scattered by rains while always the cool stars above, always the quivering libidinous earth-bound mass below, struggling until my over-taut, grinded grunting muscles give way and I collapse, and the cool waters close over my head, invade my brain and still my breathing throat, my gaping gorge. I am heading for my special isle; swimming through the mass of sea back to my country, back to my home-land. There it's always warm and dark, there the breaths come in hot, soft whispers, there there is darkness to cover me, darkness to blanket me, and everywhere just the cool, warm, soft, pliable, wax-like curving edges to curve me into infinity and cover me with nothing. Finally in the dark and eternal night of unconsciousness, of non-consciousness, I slip into all being and all being resolves itself through me; the nothingness has become all and the all nothing.

Until that moment of pulchritude and consummation, there's only the world of colluding and colliding experiences. The fallen world. The world that still believes the consummation of all matter is God. All matter -- the mass of rolling atoms; atoms pushing in the wind, atoms striking in the void, everything, everything separated but just little specks, tiny little dots of infinite mass, separated by vast distances, the distances as vast as the distances between myself and all others, between me and my boyfriend, the widening gap that I can never feel through.

When I'm with him, when I'm lying with him, lying next to him, I wonder -- can I ever please him? Can I ever consummate his desires? I look at myself, the livid piece of meat that I am; I find no peace in his arms, because I'm always quivering, always rotting, always suffocating under the tenderness of his embrace. I think: is this my final chance for love? Is this my final chance for peace? My desires, my wretched ambitions to write, my desire for the consummations and unifications of poetry, and my labors, all of my labors are interrupted by the stretching of days, the stretching of arms, embraces, and the cold fervor of one heart beating next to another. As if I want to be myself, I want to burst out of myself, but I'm afraid if I am myself I'll lose him. So I conceal myself, I go into a deep shell, I go into hiding because the truth is, it's more important to me to keep him, more important to me to stay bound together in his knot -- just never to be lonely and most of all to be loved. So I have no real schedule and I'm quivering to him live like an uncooked piece of meat. I'm an incoherent jumbled mass of words that don't resolve themselves, words that fit like puzzle pieces with the wrong ends, desires that don't quite combine, contradictory desires, contradictory thoughts; how can I offer this tattered, broken, quivering thing, searching everywhere for unity in books, everywhere for unity in poems, everywhere for unity in art, to someone else, a fragmented decaying dropping collapsing colliding overheaping overfilled overstuffed overmade and united bundle of junk into collusion? I can't mix myself when I'm overflowing out of myself. I want only to escape from my life; I want peace.

But peace is far away; but peace is the crackling of fires; but peace is the darkness of death. When I go to the place of death I'll go to a land where all wrongs are righted; where no longer can I hurt anyone I care about, or break to pieces and shatter the objects and ornaments I most hold dear and love. Every walking, every journey, every moment is a subordinate moment -- subordinate to this great darkness that will bear no subordination. I'm ordained to die, and confused with every waking moment, yet so desperately clinging to this quivering, clinking, roaring, collapsing, rising and falling, degrading sea of shadows and darkness, feasts and flesh.

Love is a great light, love is a great heat, love is something to be treasured with the kiss of red like ripe fruit lips, and something that is so rare and so precious it is a little green-glistening gem, a ruby, a good ripe diamond, or the sweetness of bursting in and through the mouth, a grape. Love drenches through the body and soaks the soul like wine; love make everything inebriation, love pines away always a fire against shadows, always like a throbbing sun against the night. Here is quandary: I who have aligned myself most close with death, I who take good kisses from this dark but comely sister, how am I to love? How am I to join my breast with life's hot breast, feel the heat emanating always from his chest and every limb without some plaguing guilt? I wish I could sail far, far down the Nile into the heated pyramidal rising spaces of Egypt, and then be done in the mounds of sand covering every ground, and bury myself with the wind. But life calls me like the hot sun burning the edges of the pyramids, like the broken Sphinx's nose, well seen, and glowering eyes will not recall me from their gaze. Life is the making of choices, the pouring of decisions like the spilling of ink, and every drop of ink must be salvaged, recombined on the page to make something more than music, less than noise. A seeker of silences am I; I join quiet whispers together into sounds, not wondrous but soft and sweet, cooing like death, but always to be joined to unity of life is a throb and a pain, a continual raping and a birth. Jon, this is my love for you; my love is the birth, the dawning of warm blood rushing to my cock spreading like a light over my body, a light I can't dimiss or even flinging myself against the broad and bursting chambers of my heart resist, and the cist of compulsion bursts, emotion washes over me, and I am bathing in a sea.

Someday when the sun is burning down on my skin and the soft waves coo on the edges of my consciousness and my mind is pliable and soft and melted wax, and my lips have the honey-sweet breath of the dew, their due, I'll think of you and your warm body pressed against mine now; I'll think how I was meant to be a crackling mass, a burnt and gooey, roasted sweet, something to melt and sag and collapse. For only by burning, crackling, flaming and puckering in the heat of life can we yield to death; and only then does time collapse to rinds and lees of burnt, ashes of coffee, remnants and weeds and desert sand. Scatter me to the winds; burn me like my poems, my love, and scatter me to the winds. Blow harsh and cold and cool and leave the endless stretching, blue, and moon-reflected sky so calm.