Ale ⋆˚࿔

“Each one of my ribs—I will open each one of my ribs with fingertips, break each one of my ribs, and allow you to dive your hands into my chest so you can feel the beating of my heart. I will show you that life isn’t always warm, isn’t always veiled in dusk and emerald.”
― Pauline Albanese, The Closed Doors

“I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it.”
― Franz Kafka

“Where the Moment Is”

I forget whether I ever loved you
in the past - when you enter the room
your climate is the mood
of living, the hinge of now,
in time the present tense.
Certainly you are the world
I am not done with
until I dispense with words -
Neutral as nature: something I say
will flash back like light
or shadow: you wait and become
a stranger I've not met
or hated or slept with.
The action begins quickly
word, inflection, reaction fall
into his place the moment is;
sometimes I can pre-determine you,
and taste you
becoming in my mouth,
a blank map to explore
in silence, a thought gone out
of me to make you be or say -
Eventually you back against
a wall and I or we may
suddenly find our mouths screaming
in anger or laughter
without meaning - and wince.
But the damned trouble and after
my existence - in my absence
you expect or mourn without a sound.”
― Al Purdy, Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy

“For I desire the dark, the naked, and the lone.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal