In the awkward arrival is a swinging steel gate, a door creaking in the silence past one in the morn, a hand cupped to the small of the back. There were horses racing across the arid fields abreast separating two different bodies, belligerents, Arabian chargers, (speed and beauty at the expense of brute breathing, hair tangles). The clopping is clear in the stillness. Have you seen two beasts in full gallop? I liked their names. That may be why we’re here. We sent out messengers with truces of mutual surrender and here we are. With fingers she parts the reluctant noose of a black scrunchie – cumbersome, childish, (these minor inconveniences are minute ceremonial surrenders to intimacy.) And the placements matter. A bishop moves diagonally across field ranges with eyes watchful for the queen’s hand placements, a gamble here, a state of play. There are tense moves and horses continue to gallop. They trace along the valleys between fingers. Mile by mile unmapped territories spill out in latitudes of then-hidden stretch marks, secrets, inadequacies, forms of honesty. Insecure folds and incompleteness. These once insularias are now familiar straits in seconds. And I liked the images, the chiaroscuro shadows and pronunciations of “nico-teen, nick-teen” from the yellow incandescent on the desk, the soft cigarette haze to blot out guilt, (and remorse), often both, that sadly even as far as we journey out into ourselves by the tunneling through of another body, we can only arrive so much at the far edge of language. It was the silent, throbbing, laying in bed in the dark. Maybe so much so it was less about the carnal performance and more of the audience afterwards, since an odeon of one demands and commands full undivided attention. One cried over the immediate loss of a lover and one for her general position in the wayward waters of her life. One wanted to be praised and one to praise. How further, lower, darker can you go when youve given up your only tangible trace of you? To a stranger? Maybe the truth is it was really less about that conversation but the conversation afterwards. The search for the black scrunchie on the way home. Lace laced all over the place. Here the intimacies end.
I never got as far as I can with this one
Battle Studies 