Phantom Limb

"Phantom Limb"

You are my phantom limb

I still feel your touch lingering

Your presence enduring, emerging

yet incorporeal.

Your distance haunts me,

boundless beauty shrouded in

regret and relief

invisible, astral, untraceable

but painful all the same.

In my sleep, I transcend to your higher plane

I still feel your touch deceiving

your essence pervading, preserving

yet illusory.

Your messages torment me

terrifying allure transmitted through

plain english and emojis

deceiving, dwelling, destining

but devastating all the same.

You were an incomplete separation

a part of me that's

unhealthy, unhomelike, uncanny

Your parasitic paws claw at my

unclandestine addiction

to your affection.

Your affliction has infected my

subconscious, my slumber ill with

voodoolike nightmares of you

The pangs of you participate 

in your ghostly tethering,

pulling at the scar underneath

my severed chest–

vestigial yet vital

all the same.

What is left but your residual blueprints?

Remnants of our unreal estate crash

investing, building, foreclosing, demolishing

yet imaginary.

These hallowed halls, where your shadow

visits, inhabits:

spooks my soul.

My longing for your deliverance from here–

unconscious.

I sense you when I shouldn't;

you are a specter,

danger close;

my inner demon,

extended substance;

my doubting,

my inertia,

my evil queen.

You come and go,

my extremities always

just a resting place

before you are called

beyond this grave,

wandering away

towards the unknown,

elsewhere from

my predictability,

my obvious obliviousness.

You are so close but

absent, indifferent, uninterested;

yet the hurt is all the same,

just as when we were once joined,

locked arm in arm, united and in sync.

I wish for courage,

my tissues bruised

from all the blows of

your tears meant for

another shoulder.

I pray for temperance,

my temples throbbing

from the joy of your company

being inseparable from the

sadness of our severance

I ask for wisdom, 

my anticipation always errs in foresight

when it comes to us;

your eyes can see clearly–

we weren't meant to be.

And yet I cling on, reaching out

to your spirit already

ascended, abdicated, departed.

I know you are gone.

All that remains is

your immaterial form,

a shape of you

glued to this organ,

playing a fugue

3.3 beats a second.

This dying waltz;

a broken record

for the broken hearted,

going the distance

to my neverland,

this lost boy who

refuses to grow up,

to move on,

who takes comfort in childish games,

whose Wendy has come 
to excise their umbilical cord,

but he tries to escape;

tripping, hiding, running into things–

embarrassing all the same

To you, my mind's figment

that manifests sharp thorns

throughout my body,

our connection is cordially

sustained through wireless waves

that come crashing down

whenever we perform

our ritual texts,

this black magic

is unsettling, your

power only grows to bring 
misery to my memories.

Keep them safe,

you are the key

to my chains,

you can unlock

these aches,

and awaken again

these phantom pains

from far, far away.

I only hope you find 

what you're searching for.

As for me, 

if necessary,

do it–

amputate.

Abstractions

To be taken out of context. The tree that finds itself still amidst a wind of colorful rain. The petrichor of youthful bliss. In bloom; the belle of the ball. Footprints in a sandy aisle; those white petals drizzling in my mind; those vines grappling at your tendrils– a travesty. Sorrow emerges from the ground of uprooted soil; the stains of wet paint calcified on your bedrock.

What have those words given me? A thunderstorm. A sunset. A horizon. Sight; sighs. A crown of ink. These hands. To have the ground underneath rumble words of betrayal. A thin film of soapy residue, bubbling in a vacuum.

And what did Plato really mean by the good? What were Nietzsche's dancing stars? Why Darwin when in the end, you lose? Lost without a cause, body without embodiment– the wind whispers the screech of your mind's window.

I know better than your impermanence; your non-cyclical metamorphosis. Angry or tragic? No either/or within the choice of the same problem. What else? I'll take twenty! Find me in the lost and found. I'm locked in a cage of two-toned sunburst Fender Starcasters, showroom paranoia in a downtown ceiling, meteor dressing in disguised metaphors. "Only a god can save us"*; no, we are already saved. Grace calls us to melt our hearts into a photosensitive gaze.

While modernity fabricates clothing with meaning, martial arts with feeling, philosophy with religion– you betray these words with those words. You hear my words as those words (those threats to stupid action), dumbfounding. No world can console a worldless phenomenon.

Rows of light, rivers divide, cast a spell on the sensuous tonight. More-than-human, with human, witholding your cards, keeping your faces on. Traverse, travel, journey along with the key, put her in your lock and never let go.

The gap widens above, in the sky. A slit of time, a ripple in distance, stretched to a gape. Agape is foreign, out of this world, but this world passes away; it was coming up, crashing down and turning inside out what remained of my core. My rootedness is in my stretching–we were a stretch: different, separating, becoming new immanently.

My legs are adventitious, mobile, kinetic; just as you wander into loves, I wonder at the world you've shaped and left behind.

You creep into my thoughts; I want to trap you! You, me, any outstanding grudge on who should be responsible for all this mess. My! My! Can a philosopher be ruled by love?

I am a rising tide without a shore to crash into. My thoughts are filled with sea shells and crumpled receipts; my pockets aren't lined with anticipation anymore, just reminiscence and my phone.

I want to say something but I'm paralyzed by your indifference to my wanting to say something.

Philosophy is a kind of poetry; our existence is poetic; commit to the flames my romanticism, my ideation, my existence, poetically and with every burning intent.

My life is now ambient; light embers kindle the sparks of little moments that contribute to the background aesthetic.

The drone of life hums along until from out of nowhere you're stuck with the simple realization that life's terrors come from its farness above us, ready to obliterate our life, and turn it into a state of groundlessness.

Show me a philosophy of life, I'll show you a theology of death. The distractions in-between have become apparent.

You held on, I leaped. You harden not my heart, I seek a new one. Renew in me my faith in your goodness. The heart rules the sight, the mind rules the magic, Your love persists even when I fall out of it. My prayer is a call. What calls for prayer is a calling. To focus attention on the inner life, bustling, rumbling, shaking, beating, living, dying, recycling. My heartbreak is no coincidence for prayer; in fact, prayer constitutes such possibility for a heartbreak. For my heart cannot break if not for it becoming soft– open to being of all kinds: Being-in-love, being-in-the-world, being-towards-death, being-broken-hearted. It is only in You that may make my heart anew, to build up, to edify my base, to prepare for fallen time to fall away, and contemplate goodness; this is my salvation– I am saved out of love and it is through love, a good love, that I may gaze into the world again and disclose the being-toward, being-with, being-for. Immortality through You; with open arms, I leap.

In losing you do I realize how much you're worth; lingering doubt for the lies of the star studded sky. But now, I leave you as you did me, to go and do something else. We've lost each other, we were always present but not anymore. We lost our essence**, and endure no longer.


* From "Only a god can save us"
** from the roots of the german word for essence: [Wesen] as derivative of "sein"– being, enduring as presence.