Neruda

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.

Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.

Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day

I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,

your hands the color of a savage harvest,

hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,

I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,

the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,

I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,

hunting for you, for your hot heart,

like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

- Pablo Neruda

I read his words and realize how far away I am from a real mastery of language.

Admittedly I'm reading a translation, but still.

The way he molds and shapes words to fit his unexplainable ideas.  He

 makes them do the things that he wants them to do.  And as I pick it all apart I find that a way he really makes that work is by combining senses and merging desolation with love (in this poem at the very least).  He harnesses that dull ache that you feel when she enters and leaves the room.  That heart sickness that bleeds you dry.  That makes you want more and more until there is nothing left of you, and everything left of her.

I wish I could make words do that.

I try.

Quite often in fact to make the kind of lush poetry that races hearts, and skips beats.  I look to master and amature alike to glean from them any scrap of knowledge.  And when I have it.  It works well.  And when I don't.  Such abysmal failure.  But I don't stop writing.

I was talking to S.F. as she ran her hands over the tattoos on my fingers.  Tattoos that stand for the dear departed in my families.  I was talking to her about FAB and how he encouraged me.  And how much I adored him and looked up to him.  Is drinking yourself to death suicide?  That is how it feels now.

That there was to much pain for him.

And I find myself plunging towards that same depth sometimes.  Where the beauty and the pain become all confused and I want to just sleep.  I want to sniff out Twilight on the barrens.  I want to fall into dreams that don't end.  But then I think about the words.

It sounds so foolish.

But I think about the words, and how much more I want to say.  And how many more people I want to hear.  And how I lust for immortality for me, and for the ones that I love and adore.  That keeps me going some days.

It is selfish but true.

File under Vice.