Wait For the Night
Wait for the night to come, they said.
Paul’s Substack
Once upon a time, I discovered I had many voices in my head and I needed a place to put them—then Substack came along. "To suggest is to create, to name is to destroy." —Stéphane Mallarmé
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The Lost Amulet
You moved with gentle hands, sleeves trimmed in marigold, your soft voice stretched thin across the ribs of the earth, your sweet touch warm enough to mistake quiet theft for kindness, slipping decay into things as if you were mending them. I carried your beauty like an amulet, not noticing how it was already burning through my palm, By the time the wind lifted you from me in a flurry of brittle…
Dark Blossoms
Originally posted August 15, 2024
Remember
Remember how love first bruised the hard stone of your heart, how it tugged at your sleeve like an excited child showing off his latest treasure?
Another Way to Leave
When we first met you were clear-eyed and determined to remake my world. I forgave you for your candor, the way it told me nothing but the truth, until I began to understand this truth was a kind of promise, and that promises are only another way to leave.
Cloud
Looking down the hillside I see red clay, ocher, green veins, the ruined colors of paradise. I lay down head on sweet grass, heels on a flat rock. I watch a single cloud move across the sky, drifting, round and white, a stillness so complete it trembled.
Refugee
If I speak, it is to complain how her shadow no longer casts itself on my eyelids, how my sleep is starved of dreams, how my poems are as vacant and faceless as the refugees huddled in the suburbs of love, how the words live in squalor and misery, how longing for them makes me feel so useless and incapable. When I reach out to grasp them, all I bring back is a handful of empty air.
Jeremiad
with minor revisions
At the End of the Day
At the end of the day, I cease thinking, and try to touch the absence which contains all forms. I watch the world rearrange itself, too quickly for the heart to follow. Evening presses its weight on everything, a soft, unanswerable gravity.
Failure to Name
I reach for a word and find only the space where the word should be, an absence shaped like a question I have asked all my life. What I feel is immense, yet the sentence I make shrinks it to something manageable, something ordinary. Perhaps this is why we are so often disappointed with ourselves: we mistake the uttered for the real. Still, I speak, not because language suffices but because silence…
Easy in the Night
Maybe a song...