From fairest creatures we desire increase

RR & A

The thing about you and me is that we rarely speak except to make the involuntary gestures that precede love making. We dwell on practical matters because we do not know how to make conversation that leads to making love, a bit like making bread. We don’t speak the language of loving and therefore the loving is intense because it is infinite in those moments when life breathes the sweet air of dying.

There are times when we talk of spiders. We are deeply moved by the image of cobwebs in a room whose doors rarely open for sunlight.

I was thinking of dust before you walked into the room. In bed I lay fully covered waiting to be denuded by your gaze. I am more myself in the dark than in the light. Headaches wear me out. I write imagining the moment of your arrival. We hardly speak and so much is unsaid. It doesn’t mean I don’t feel with you or my thoughts are not dwelling on how you feel. It’s hard for me to feel my body when it is not craving your touch. The need to be touched gave my body the semblance of the real.

“Will I be born again?” is the question haunting me each time I go through a phase of love making. “Am I returning to this world or am I destined to wander aimlessly in and out of space with no thought of either before or after?” What is it for me to give birth as if birthing happened in the brain taking the shape of a tumor that will alter the rest of my body?

My sense of beauty is a devastated one. It is about ruins and millions of years of wind and rain lashing out in fury at walls where a lizard crawls to safety in the gaps between stones. I want the faces of the ones I love to be imprinted on the landscape of a deathless moment.

I cannot be accused of not wanting to be born again. I can be accused of celebrating the arrival of the end. The primordial hurt will not allow me to be creative through a body. Bodies that teach me love also teach me to forget the meaning of love. Worn out with the body, I dreamt of spirit naked as the dark womb of my conception.

RR & A is a writer and independent scholar. He completed his doctorate at the University of Mississippi in 1997.

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