Material Feeling
Most of us know and can admit to the pain of a friendship grief. Not knowing or not admitting to the pain of a friendship grief feels almost alien. Alien to the point it seems cruel, pathologically insensitive. I do not know how to manage this grief without your sympathy. I have an entire invention in the absence of what I want to hear. If you could just see what I see, and consider just one time, slipping through the manipulation, a manual maneuver. “A man amends a mess, amen,” I wrote about my dad so long ago the thing I wrote in was a diary not a journal. It is still more harrowing than embarrassing, thankfully.
An entire breath inside your chest. I keep waiting to feel your breath inside my chest. This chest has enough room for everybody but I really only want your breath here. A pipe cleaner is a craft material with no more dignity than a pipe too small to be of use except to the cleaner. “The sheer joy of doing or becoming work with materials as the instrument,” wrote George Nakashima somewhere, I’m paraphrasing or misremembering. The sheer joy of doing or becoming the material work.
I am working so hard to fill my chest with your breath it is about to be comedy, still more harrowing than embarrassing. Still more harrowing than feckless. Still more harrowing than you.
