I Am Santo

It’s those that share the air with us that are expected to draw from our clutter of irrationality a viper filled with poisonous strikes, but it’s instead the unknown; those colors and shapes undefined in daily life that could appear potentially so magnetic that our fixed position falters and we lose our senses, falling in a spin like a compass tossed into a cavern of endless reach.

True North is the care. Respect built from trust. And when those bricks are sealed with the mortar of love, they crack and stress under the duress of unforeseen inclemency; a knowing wink or gentle brush of skin, familiar gestures physical or virtual that whip winds and hurl hailstones at this faultless edifice. And all of it will suddenly crumble, mortar dissolving to water under the heat of blind disgust for the pieces held in place, the air around all of it and the history shared. A silent cacophony, the Earth quakes without rustling a single leaf and the structure of this union collapses under the ugliness of a spidered mirror’s visage.

“You know me,” it will say, lips pulled back in a sneer revealing teeth stained on the bile of a thousand vomited aggressions. “I am you and the flip-side of everything you’d thought this would bring.”

So rose oil turns sour and the air fills with sulfur that stings at pores even as sweet scented words from which no meaning is derived are bathed in, an encyclopedia of kindness and gentle regards tossed into a blaze ignited by disbelief. For were any of it true, why the sting of the unknown? Why the answer to queries of obvious intention?

These attempts at seduction should fall on deaf ears but are heard and then sweetly handled with polite delicacy. Love knows no such courtesy, it answers suggestion with indifference, never leaving a scent to it its trail for the open hearted to follow. For this ardency is a closed affection, locked away off any known road – any tamped down path through the wilds of longing. It’s an unapproachable beast with glowing eyes mating feverishly in the dark, seen only by the foolish and touched by those too naïve to understand that they risk being torn apart by committed folly.

It’s not for them, this heated bliss and careening sense of purposeful desire, yet the teeth of a snake can poison even the most intimidating animal, bring it to quaking knees with tears brimming at the corners of blazing vision that blurs and loses focus. Ivory fangs, these others, and they sink into flesh, tearing the blood and fury out of this wonder even as nourishment is drawn uninterrupted from a well of infinite concern too far away to be tasted.

How then is the far cry of a willful heart a siren for alert? It’s merely a shout in space, a sliver of fast light in a night sky dressed permanently in the designs of ceaseless passions.

Blue, Green and Brown, they watch with a brand of attention that requires faith more than any religion, despite proof being tactile, devoted and welling up in great breaths as muscles grow tight and hearts momentarily arrest in their steady march into the next moment; time spent trading words like precious commerce for a broken heart’s value. This is a cracked center, around which affections dance to obvious rhythms unheard within, and its brittle design affords little agility to pretend at sharing music. It dies as they draw near; shedding sheets of ashen pulp upon which are written obtuse declarations of needs unable to be met, desires drying under black suns.

From two there came one, and as three the ground grew unlevel and cast youth into a drowning fall where the airless dark swallowed a tarnished heart, spit it back onto a desert trek and then retreated as if only a temporary eclipse, proof forgotten during the softening of days that rolled as grapes into press. Extracted was Black, the finest vitality; blood to nourish, sweat to intoxicate, and seed to demand primal groans from adorned wombs hungry for light laced with darkness.

And so Blue bound to Black and the spiral of their joy flushed cheeks while drawing applause from a golden flock that celebrated, talons sheathed, the ascension within their happy ranks. It could not last, and as Navy birthed Red and was left the purple of a day’s final breath, so too did the darkness retreat leaving in its wake a violet star; a mother guiding precious life stung by black, but glowing vibrantly restless like a quasar, fire at its center, red cool skin at its surface.

And the Black scorched Earth as passion with Green, crushing mountains and churning seas as if mixing every known perspective into new truths where gravity held nothing close and distance was irrelevant. In their heat, spines cracked at the heights of wet congress, teeth sinking into flesh and memory shattered as if written in sand. The Green grew a verdant emerald, wrapping crystal arms around the shadow in effort to capture and cure the poison core. The embrace found air instead.

And it was so that Black curled into Brown, a complement of suffocating light and acceptance sought to strike together as flint and stone, spraying their sparks across a dead firmament where stars would regain their luster, fed by nuclear ardor. Merged by need, their dark cried a single wail of exaltation and slipped from their clinging form to unveil the sum of all color – the pure white of final adoration.

She was a million shards of glass splintered across an endless stretch of ground where no two pieces could find their mate without crossing an impossible gulf. Without a center, she’d spun off from everything as if gravity had no providence over her spirit. Floating away, lost to the stars and black, she didn’t understand how to piece herself together, never mind how to connect with another soul not cast off into the night as she had been, for there was no known glue to bring her home.

So they invented one, fabricated it out of assumption and suggestion and built a false tether back to the core of this cracked Earth where each face around her smiled easily without the needed extra pull her own lips required. And she maintained as best she could among their logical motivations and their passions which knocked around her insides as shapes with no edges. There was no pain when she drowned in an undertow of disappointment nor did it sting much when she was impaled on the careless assessments of those meant to act as her guides. For though they stumbled, it was she who shouldered the blame like an ass, lost in an unforgiving desert, would an immeasurably heavy load that threatened to crush bone and tear sinew.

Under these expectations, unmuted, she would lash out and destroy favorite gardens, color on walls, break the legs off every table and chase the dog into a dark closet with matches. Or so must have been the worry for why else would they have sent her to breathe deep under the salty surface shimmering in the eye scarring-kisses of a frozen sun? Forsaken, she bled until hands shook as if under constant trauma, skin drawn pale and eyes – rounded with unmistakable sorrow – lost their color, faded to gray and watched the indifferent days spill before her as if on a wheel spun fast by Godless hands.

Her feelings, ferns hidden amongst a dense forest of evergreens. Her tremble, real and unrelenting, a quake in fingers set to task on steady endeavor, sharp edges handled with as much delicacy as could be summoned under the cracked facade of a good daughter. Never given a chance to stand with the ground hugging at her feet in constant assurance, she floats over the rest even as she forces her steps to model those of her few friends, her shiftless lovers, and the lineage that forced her among the rolling heavens where she’s best suited not to fly away, but instead to embrace the infinite blue surrounding her and play as an angel; directing tiny tethered souls begging for guidance she never knew.

In the moment of this transformation, her heart breaks, flooding the doubtful with salty runoff and giving youth a center she’s lacked but pieces together with every smile.

The scars on the windowsills, don’t they hint at love?

The care of the tape being applied each season the trees sprout their new life and the air warms as if bathed in the sun’s breath, she blockades her home as would a frontiersman his clan. It’s a gesture expected, perhaps common were it not for a history that disobeyed such sense.

This is how she cares: through action, through protection of the people held in time to the rhythm of her pulse, a steady beat that uncomplicates the complex and strips the puzzle of its loose architecture. For she is straightforward and direct, an inflexible line where mountains demand gentle routes of a circuitous character, and she doesn’t notice or care for their desires because this is simply who she is; a rock on the path that forges on as if a glacier, unyielding to any obstruction, indifferent to any circumstance. And yet this isn’t a fire burning through days of challenge that line up as tinder hurdles on an endless track, nor is it a simple test of temerity, for the cool in the air is pleasant and soothing and the sky remains unchoked with the charred smog of common adversity.

Incendiary practice dodged, she controls the course with calm and the compliant fall in line as they should, not pushed or convinced so much as swayed as if a tide under lunar pull. And he slides into her undertow as well, despite fighting for a beach that would surely rob him of life, for he is impulse and daring, a flash of rabid charisma that knows no better of this world than the next wave ridden; the next bite at release.

Yet she holds him in orbit, her gravity maintaining for him a steady path despite his hunger to spin out into the black in search of stars swaddled in nuclear passion, the pull of the unknown thrill crossing impossible distance and beckoning him with the possibility of more. But he smiles back at her, graciously thankful for her hand and breast upon which she’s shed countless pains as saltwater spill, and she’s spoken to him in quiet tones to quell his raging heart. For she is love in action, the balance of accommodation and respect, guiding hands leading to a darkened room where expectations are sated with tenderness, and care is deftly administered in precise measure – not without smiles and sweat, but at the expense of hours seeking less ardent affection: a hand held, a task completed, a kiss shared but not pursuing breathless resolution.

His love is fire and bluster, the grand gesture played before an audience of fools, the scent of rose and iron cast into the air where others stir, striving for attention yet turned to ash in his searing artifice. And she turns, an act of simple care committed, a window sealed to stop threats to that which she holds most dear, a sonnet sung flawlessly without the dissonance of infatuation.

Can we glance downward for a moment? Study the firmness of the uneven surface upon which we stand with locked legs unyielding to schedules and responsibilities, but instead made still by a command not from within so much as an answer to this moment.

Can we arrest our search for the next pleasure, a quick stolen bit of reflection amid the bustle of our constant striving?

Can we just be alone here? Despite all of the traffic and clamor, it’s starlight that threatens to steal us away, even as the glimmer is faint through the choked atmosphere and reflected glow of the city night.

I don’t want them. I refuse all of it because now there is just us, standing firm on these crooked cobblestones laid down by calloused fingers decades prior – now cracked and bruised as much as those hands must have been – and I won’t speak of any of it, chasing their industry away even as I stay fixed on their labor to dissuade words that demand utterance.

Let’s just hold this moment in amber, us without the consequence of each syllable, action or shared breath that exists despite the impossibility of this vacuum; us together with our ears turned away from the constant reminder of this temporary bliss. I could kiss you, lean across the small space between us and steal the taste from lips I crave each day we pretend our lives mean anything else, countless hours, minutes and seconds that scream at me to abandon all of these precious concerns, pull up stakes and answer the call of a beckoning heart.

Let it all fall away like the clothes you hid under from me and the distance that produced us despite the logic that we were intended to be tied close for every breath. They slid off you, and you were revealed naked to me, heart and skin, imperfections of both exposed not for judgement, but for healing; holes and wounds to be filled and healed without consideration, as if I were poured into you, completing us both, the fill between these stones upon which we now stand as I call for the world to arrest its meritless procession and sing for us, a wordless melody of ethereal timbre that wraps around each one of our souls, pulls tight and collapses us into an airless instant where we, as one, share final breath with smiles; knowing we belong where the song began, outside this world and its festooned order, and instead in another made of light where our reflection is a single entity. So let’s wait out this moment, ears raised above the din of progress and focused at the very essence of this air surrounding us – this feeling – awaiting the fragile song calling us home.

I will stay silent. I will not crowd you with proclamations or conclusions. I will not reach for your hand of meet your eyes with mine because I will not say goodbye. Not now, or forever after now. Not ever.

Just listen.