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PRIMAL ANAGRAM I used to try to employ words to express my feelings for you, and thought I succeeded every time. In an era when you avoided a small word with a big meaning, I followed, as a driver in the night, trailing the drunk who says, "Follow me, I know where I'm going!" A dark bauble ahead--he overcorrects, over the wrong line: the dead skunk sticks to his back tire, hangs to his tailpipe long enough for my nose to wrinkle before the carcass is slung across my windshield. I swerve, screaming, steering blindly, sideswipe the guardrail and plunge into a thicket of pines, ripe with poison ivy; a black snake dangling beside the passenger window. As the drunk on the road rides toward another bar. Climbing out, running in the opposite direction, I told myself the crash was not so bad-- I had the excitement of the experience, even if the cuts from the glass left a few scars, and I smelled like roadkill and tore the strap of my Italian sandals. I still had the words to make my listeners endow me into a cult heroine. Then, in the pit of another blue moon, the drunk returns: rehabilitated, reformed, but still able to perceive through an open heart--at a time when I stand outside the tavern alone, forgotten by those who felt I could do better than searching for the taillights of the one who knocked me into the curve. This time, I am Evel Kenevil, hanging low to a motorcycle equipped with its own painted-on flames, high acceleration . . . and when I swing wide to pass, I hear you laughing, finally shouting all the words I have used before, with a few new ones--and the one that you exiled from verbal expression, but confessed so many times in the silence between touches, the tender movement of your lips against my skin--the memory, the reality rides above the growl of my bike's engine to cancel out all other words, garble my carefully-built interpretations, creating a feeling that transcends and at the same time destroys the meaning of language. I eject from the seat of the motorcycle to land in the cushions of your back seat. |
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