Heartburn
-"The Book of Right-On," Joanna Newsom
I don't know. I get visions of you sometimes. I think you come unbidden, a random selection of eyes and hairs and Picasso-turned mouths, but maybe not. Maybe I want this kind torture, these after-images of you sheeting across my retinas. They make me feel like something real happened even when we both know that it didn't. You stopped being yourself long ago, so long ago, and you became this archetype. You had hydra heads I could chop off and a new one would grow in its place, eyes red as a pickled cherry. We're both vicious and circling around one another. I'm your Hercules, keeping you from being sure and you're my Typhus...my monster, my Hephaestus, lame and huge and building something that will never be able to bind me.
I think about what the Hellenistic Age was, I think about us in our togas, before we were space shuttled into this era. Before Jesus told us we were failures before we ever learned about the test. Before we knew we had names to misspell, before we had a history to make a foxhole out of, before we were split down the middle. I don't know if you had a problem with it, with your Picasso-turned mouth. I don't know if you understood the truth painted on you in big blue swathes. That's my hope - that we are equal in our failures. That I'm not the one making big swings without a blade in my hand.
How can I still miss you? How can I hear songs and think of you, hiding like a tiger in the metaphors? How can I keep that flame of hope, that eight-day oil, burning long past its desire to extinguish? How can you be my devil, bound and free all at once? What cliff can a prisoner drive a slaver to?
I have to do this for a reason, the pleasure of melancholy? The pleasure of faith? If I can sustain myself on such little dinner as the hope you would've if you'd known, would've wanted had you had your evidence. Does it not burn to know that I'm the fuck-up? It doesn't burn but that it glows; I feel in service to something unspoken. I feel like I am the divine priestess of something kept in little moonstone boxes, in leather books, on parchment. I feel like while I am the dragon, the Cerberus, the harpy with the ivory claws, and denying access, I am the sibyl, I am the one who knows...though I cannot decipher what it is that I know. I have the secret and I know it is important to keep. I know it is important not to profane.
I don't believe you're happy, I swear I hope you are, but I feel like you must miss the shape of something like me in your life.
