In the pure liquid
In the pure liquid light you look for shapes and faces, expressions to shift your conscience into sleep. The windows inside the courtyard leer. Their light is buried in the more vast light of the softly churning waters from more distant apartment windows over the hills where homes lay empty, neutral. Your eyes race over the empty wet air conjuring her night window, the blinds pried open by a fingertip, the early morning pure blue lighting the entire apartment out of nothing but smoky stillness until long afternoon rays slide through the blinds trying to awaken her, a deep orange with no warmth, only exhausted luminance, bright enough only to shame. But she lays still and disregarded.
The parallel lines of shadow softly inscribe the blinds across your all pupil eyes, dry beyond blinking, the shadows of soft dust on silt eyes confuse your reception of guilt. The crispness of the fine lines suffers as your eyes strain. Rather than blurring with tears they grow scratched out and frazzled. The lines interweave and bundle together drawing a silhouette of prickles, dry reeds, hairs, and fibers. Her pale blue skin a crescent just above the knee and between colourless plaits on her neck. She stands at the edge of the window frame, her right hip and shoulder bearing on the cool jamb, her right hand hanging loosely with her knuckles intermittently tracing a short arc in the damp or buffing at the condensation in a reflexively absent movement. She steps away. Your eyes fill with salty light but do not close. Slowly the lines of shadow regroup into a bundled form. She reaches up with her left hand and places two fingers between the blinds and pries them open. Your dress is spread out in a sprawling landscape of flowers, turbid blue green. Her right hand smooths the fabric over her thigh and her eyes squint.
You close your eyes. Phosphorescent blooms burst across your lids in green and rose aquatic sinking smears taking the shapes of oblong slits, outstretched arms, destroyed faces blooming out of spots all clustered together featureless afire. Across your eyes burns the buzzing orange paranoia of the streetlamps across the alley swirling out of dust and night steam and you step onto the rim of the bathtub in the dark to the high window and wipe and arc of condensation with the side of your hooked hand. The sky is flat and brown over the purple brick wall outside the window. The windows there are dark and you see your face, formless fleshy mass, an eye peers from above the mess and you watch it watching it. Your legs are steady and you push yourself up through the window and into the cold steam. In each diminishing instant you are captured, arms hanging forward, ankles crossed and hair draped in a stringy cloak seeking the pavement, in every flying drop of water across the sky, from one to the next, upward into the clouds and from each you see to the next. You are filled with clouds and you reach out to befog her window, her eye. You breathe out the coolness in your lungs and it is you. It is more than you and it disappears. You breath out the cool dampness from cloud lungs and it is you. It gathers on her window and she watches right through it to the streetlamps, the sidewalk, the wire fence, the dry trees lost in low slung clouds of midnight.
The light from her window runs through the clouds multiplying into a wild flame. It passes through you but fills you all across the sky, omnipresent and inseparable from seat to desert. You feel things. Your stomach sinks, the blood throbs in your feet and fingers until it comes to rest beneath tingling splitting skin spreading across the paving. With pain the most distant fragments of your vast body override everything in between and claim the entirety of past, future, solid, breath, thought, and consequence. You are only the fretful stomach. You are the rotted and degraded foot. The physicality of discomfort and the consuming reflection on pain are tethered to the earth, they have mass, and with it they plummet from the nothingness of emotion and memory.