Daily Ruminations

[183]

travisclau — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 08:02:55 +0000

When love becomes idolatrous, the only way to redeem such an affair is to preserve its memory in amber within the compartments of your mind. As I wander through my labyrinths, I always know I can find your essence immortalized just as glorious as when I first met you. And by essence, I mean the words, the smiles, the embraces, the kisses, the communion of souls. The most unfortunate weakness of men is that we degrade our memories by the passing of time and flux of mind, but in this way, you are and always will be golden.

Furtive colors crunch under the foot of luxury

And I try to save you from being swallowed

By contextual rainbows and my paroxysms

That play echo and narcissus in the dark

Until we are all drowning in our reflections

An optic death by being lost among

These bladed mirrors encircling us like fiends

What you crudely see is faces among faces

Distorted like the funhouse that still haunts you

A clever euphemism for an asphyxiating life

But we shall play like bags of bones until

We finally stop rattling

Quaff me like an elixir tonight

Drop for ambrosian drop

As if the light in your eyes

Now sprawled like ragged tatters

Would unravel otherwise

Breathe me as your liquid phoenix

Whose fire burns down your throat

Up into the rafters of your spirit

As I am your sultry catalyst who

Shatters your frames and

Releases you into the night

[182]

travisclau — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 08:02:23 +0000

“Have you ever lost yourself in a kiss? I mean pure psychedelic inebriation. Not just lustful petting but transcendental metamorphosis when you became aware that the greatness of this being was breathing into you. Licking the sides and corners of your mouth, like sealing a thousand fleshy envelopes filled with the essence of your passionate being and then opened by the same mouth and delivered back to you, over and over again – the first kiss of the rest of your life. A kiss that confirms that the universe is aligned, that the world’s greatest resource is love, and maybe even that God is a woman. With or without a belief in God, all kisses are metaphors decipherable by allocations of time, circumstance, and understanding.” ~Saul Williams

Some kisses ravish you, and their lasting imprint burns into your skin as if they were wielding the force of the sun. At the moment, they are emblematic of the very essence of how you love. The tactile memory of that person’s validation of who you are and what you are worth.

Coupled with the right cocktail of words and gazes, a kiss robs me of my cynicism, my melancholia. But it is when those kisses fade into the past, and their tattoo disappears beneath my skin into the heart’s memory that they begin to burn most. It feels like that person’s presence has permanently penetrated your being and left this interloping part of them lurking within. Once treasured, now embittered.

But the warmth of nostalgia and clarity of hindsight redeem these late kisses. I’ve always remembered people by the manner of their kisses. I know how easily I am led astray by these moments of deepest connection, but I also know the men I’ve loved were, too. In those moments, you both suddenly deviate from the walks separate walks of life to converge in a single unity of lips. Desire pauses you both simultaneously in the same frame.

It’s just when one unfreezes and the other remains frozen that it hurts. You have inevitably been changed, but what was once the light of a kiss has become the shadow that hangs over your heart.

[181]

travisclau — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 08:01:42 +0000

You never ceased to remind me of

How the zest of pleasure wears itself out

After tasteless repetition until flavors numb

And though flirtatious flattery falls

Like honied accents upon these parched ears

I am not dilated like I once was for

My breath cannot be hastened without

The infinite art of your touch

Certain days so infinitesimal

Leave of me not a wrack behind

What unpardonable weakness befalls me

When I pause to consider the asperity

Of my personal failures that

Collect like the dregs

At the base of my heart

If I so audibly sobbed before you

An unkempt frenzy

Would that soften you to unbind

The fetters of silence and neglect

I have become over time like wise Penelope: I write away the fantasies I’ve spun in the night. As she temporizes, so do I, for I merely defer and delay the imminence of heartbreak. If infatuations must end, I must, with the nib of my pen, break the skin of delusion and disabuse myself of these failings of reason; pain is a reminder of the real. With my eyes to the heavens, I reluctantly inter my childlike divinity, and I sing these verses as its elegies. But alas, how hope refuses to die!

The night outside my window is screaming, and though wet with fog, my voice is not dampened in the least. I hear the sordid wisps seep through the gaps in the window telling secrets that will eventually appear in my nightmares. My mind functions on a surfeit of images: I spew and flood until I am stymied by the morning’s early grace. Yet sometimes, in an effort to keep black from white, the dreams leak into my waking world: life, in itself, becomes as mercurial as my heart.

[180]

travisclau — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 08:00:54 +0000

I have long let rivers overflow

From my heart unto my lips

For I do not believe in opposing

The way of water which

Carves through stone its own path

Adapting to the world of shapes

So I too shall run like rapids

Until this vessel crumbles and

I must drift into another

Dawn strummed her rosy fingers across the strings of clouds and her melody was the rising of the sun. These early beams that enlightened the east awakened both my mortal coil and the intricacies of a sleepless heart. And the pax of a silent house clothed me with rare smiles.

I am new again like the day.

[179]

travisclau — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 08:00:09 +0000

On the deserted curbside, I sat doubled over like an oracle awaiting his obscure visions. I babbled, I wept, I poured myself away into the pristine silence of the early morning.

And there you were, in the distorted form of a shadowy double, tormenting me like some sham of a guardian angel. Yet I buckled, shivered before your presence, as even in this euphoric state, you could somehow still terrorize me.

…and no amount of searching my insides would change that.

The summer haze always makes me crave adventure. Wanderlust hits, and I am at its complete mercy. A pristine tropical island. A bustling city. To be reborn again in the throes of curiosity and wonder of something so entirely novel. I love that traveling is a full sensory experience, something engages you in so many different ways simultaneously.

But as much as I love solitude, which I’ve come to appreciate as time to cultivate my mind and to convey my thoughts into words, I crave more than ever a sense of meaningful companionship. I find myself constantly moving away from large groups nowadays, away from the sensory overloads that is the clubbing scene or the college party. I live for coffee dates, for one-on-ones, for moments where you genuinely connect with someone.

I’d love to be lost somewhere with a friend, with a boyfriend. Someone I can share a journey with, my heart with, and my words with.

[178]

travisclau — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 07:59:26 +0000

Whether or not you happen upon these words of mine, forgive my imprudence, for I have a wild, ardent heart subject to the impulses of an impassioned spirit. While such a constitution may leave me vulnerable to depravity, my shield is my innocuous, undying hope lit like a conflagration just beneath the layers of my skin that, in effect, burn me alive with feeling. As you peruse this body in the meridian of youth, know that you run the risk of one who reads sentimental literature: you are indulging in my (and your own) sentimental luxuries.

Blessed is the flower of my life

Which blooms in the fiery wildness

Of a melancholy gloom tinted by

The lightness of being

Yet I am cast in the umbrage

Of your unbearable absence

That strikes at my knees so

I am but prostrate at the feet

Of your memory who sits upon

The grey throne of my heart

What I yearn for is the ecstasy of the moment, where you don’t get to the bottom of the glass and pour a bit more to get you through the night. Without the vomit, without the delirium.

Where a landing on your feet is a graceful arabesque, not crash landings toward rock bottom.

Lightness, joy.

I see among friends these prescient eyes, focused so much on the imminence of the future. But prophecies and plans often do not come true, and fragile hearts are left to be vulgarized until they become merely echoes of a once-great love.

[177]

travisclau — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 07:58:58 +0000

Falling out of love is a process of redefinition. It is painstakingly difficult to unravel all the words that have been said and all the meanings that have come to occupy the critical spaces in your life, and as you begin to break down the language of your life, you, too, begin to shift in meaning, perhaps nihilistically toward nothing. How does one undo the image of someone that the heart has incorporated as part of its very fabric?

Forgive me, but I can’t help but wonder if maybe “playing boy together” is just that: a game, a performance. Games end, and there are winners and losers (albeit relative to the individual). Winehouse put it perfectly: love really is a losing game with futile odds, a fate resigned. But even if it’s a losing hand, I’ll keep playing until I bankrupt each and every time.

[176]

travisclau — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 07:57:37 +0000

Solitude is a tyrant who breeds

Anarchy of the mind with

The seed of anxiety and self-doubt

And as I watch my

Bulwarks made of sand wash away

I move to drown your image under

The austerity of too much drink

And the waves of faces that

Wash over my senses into

The slow burn of numbness

[175]

travisclau — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 07:56:30 +0000

Palatial ennui inflames a

Flighty heart within its gothic walls

And I remain pursued by

Whirling chimeras and the

Undying wishes that seize me with

A sudden penetrating coldness

For such hauntings flirt

With immortality through memory

These words I flourish are indeed also my weakness. I can be beguiled by their seductive charms, thus I write to command them in my own hand. Perhaps my creative submission to these letters aligned make me puerile, yet I know that I must don them as my armor and erect upon my body the lexical walls against the foreign interlopers who crusade upon the sacred lands of my heart.

[174]

travisclau — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 07:55:33 +0000

While thin skin and fragility

May make me a mendicant

I beg not of your paltry offerings

If you can only spare but

Mere insignificant morsels

While I may give all else away

I cannot have you wring from me

My bowl of alms

For these scraps of memories

I have collected with torn hands

Are my sole possessions

“It is only when we no longer compulsively need someone that we can have a real relationship with them.”

- Anthony Storr

For all the follies and foibles of my romantic self, I know at the heart of the matter is that you really do need to let go to love. And as much as it may be a cliché upon cliché, c’est toujours la même histoire:

We all go round and round
Partners are lost and found
Looking for one more chance
All I know is
We’re all in the dance

Life’s a dance, indeed. I’m still finding my beat and all the right steps.

As much I dread the molding of these next few slow-moving months, I have much to prepare for. Some of the greatest hurdles are coming into focus, and I know, of all times, that I must be ardently committed. But I have found that among the wreckage of what amounts to a destructive year, it is often up to me to survey the state of my own soul and resuscitate it if need be.

To inspire is to take a breath, but I must also remember to exhale, to breathe out the excess and the negative. Every breath is a chance for healing.

Take a deep breath. A big breath.Now you can tell people your day was breathtaking.

Let as much atmosphere in as you can.Be cosmic.

Be You.

Be Love.

Be Awesomazing.

-Jason Mraz (courtesy of his Freshness Factor Five Thousand blog)