Verses & Versions [PROSE POEM]
I laugh and ask the depraved, sick version of me that is reflected in the mirror, each tooth sharpened to the breadth of a needle, if he would swim through Lake Michigan trying to reach the man he loves.
(Occasionally ‘the man he loves’ refers to himself, other times the world in its own personification, yet it eventually always loops around to the ultimate intangible experience. The harrowing ability to crave. This other me in the mirror is struggling with a love that has strangled the humanity out of him, and this is not true of the person facing the glass. This is very important to know. This tells the story, this grew the trees that would one day form the paperscrolls of his mythology. I’ve always believed that the most beautiful thing about mythology is the fact that someone out there will inevitably accept it as the truth, and then the lines begin to watercolor-blur between dimensions, obscuring the poles of the situation. Belief in something will make that creature real, animate it in the fleshbone. It isn’t worthy of anything, and I don’t know what happens after that. The mirror fuses like bone? The two versions of me exchange realities and subsequent wounds? The universe finds its balance again?)
“I would,” he replies, his words muffled through his brittle teeth. “I would,” he says, his hand magnet-drawn over his heart like the confirmation of truth, “and I would drown in it for him, too. I would sink myself down to the garden of fish, the final resting place of each blessed seacreature, if it meant I could give him a cradling shred of safety.”
My own heart’s rhythm flutters. “Is that really a good idea?” I ask him. “Is it virtuous to hollow yourself out for another? To remove everything that fuels your life for a transplant into a body that is permanently sewn shut? Is it damning to place each holy cell that composes you around the one man who will never love you back like a shrine, like a memorial?”
“I don’t know,” he says. The admission has created an agony that is visible, that forces his body to resemble the fading consciousness in the eyes of a dying man. The light is there and it’s dimming, and he’s losing function, shutting down, and the body of suffering twitches before it stiffens. Then he adjusts his tie, and places his hand against his side of the glass. “But it’s worth it. I couldn’t survive watching him suffer. Could you do it? Could you live with yourself, could you live without devotion, could you bear to be alive knowing you could’ve saved someone, if only you were brave enough to admit it?”
My hand is forced over by the ghastly, divine force of my own mind to rest against his.
My smile feels like reanimation, like necromancy, like foretold resurrection, and I do not answer him.