Tantamount to hiding is not allowing your eyes to settle on another’s for too long … I can stare out the window for hours, I can stare at this buzzing flat screen for days, but I cannot look anyone in the eye for very long, and when I do it is completely forced and conscious …

I cannot look you in the eye and find myself staring back, finding you mirror my impulsive need to put tongue to flesh and whisper through these membranes, find labyrinthes of association and meaning lurking beneath

concrete meeting the intangible, intangible becoming concrete

my finger just above gliding across, the curving skin of soft pressure, breaking surface tension ever the spantaneous dancing female gigolo that i fancy myself to be

it was intoxicating … as you’ve said

i bled for you this morning, i imagined power shifting between us like waves of ocean tides, of rushing you against a door and listening for breath, not words, to tell me exactly what you mean, want, need

it is strange you are everything i ever wanted but never had

and of course, now that i have it, it must not be, it must be another human construct, another wave to sooth the dryness of sand, of what is, what must be, it must not be real, staring me in the face … it must distort at arm’s length, not practical, not warranted, not together

not with you, but against you as i have learned to be

not for you, but for me, as it is my independence’s rite

all to run away from myself and bath in the cool comfort of pragmatism

as i work, the cerulean sky reflects light off pale skin. my face stretches taut to conform the will of so many faces, so many self-control mechanisms. i wipe the sweat away, feel the burning heat of skilled muscle movement, coordinate my mind into this coiling spring of potential, the dynamism of rooting my imagination in the concrete, the tediousness of my careful fingers molding textile, colored mud, tired soil, organizing, sorting away life’s cluttered messes to make sense of the chaos of this mind, of its splurged applications

i am showing you what being alone really means and you see, you see right through me to yourself and back again

but i am at peace … really

maybe you will reach me one day in the onyx lining of a night, where i am vulnerable and moon shined, where i need to need … you are one of the few that has the patience to unravel these daily mysteries, the mysticism of human ritual and dance

we will, we will …

i wasn’t lying when i told you i feel free with you as no one else, and i am realizing the simplicity of that is all i ever needed …