we take our thirst and drink it all down. and we take our homes and tear them all down

It is hard. It is hard. It is hard. I don’t know how to settle that. Sometimes I feel my whole body starting to shake and tremble. And it gets louder and more pronounced inside of me. It becomes part of something on the take of catatonic. But I am not. Around me everything else; everyone around me is still. Deep in I can’t follow. All I do is sit on the surface of it like staring out at a lake. The lake is in a desert and it is hot. The sun is beating down but for some reason I can’t stop chattering. I can’t stop moving on the inside and fluctuating on the outside. I jerk and string about. I don’t know why.

The desert is there because it is hot. Not cold. But once I looked at a desert frozen over and with ice and snow all around it. It was the prettiest thing I had ever seen. I wanted to live there in a giant house. With a huge fireplace and orange flames. I wanted to move around in the morning eating fresh fruit and picking the logs out of a great chest to throw onto the sandstone hearth. But this isn’t the desert I see.

I am not sweating. There are no clouds in the sky. All around me is silence except the loud body. My body. And it won’t quiet itself. I try and breathe and it won’t. And I even try to pass out. But my stomach forms a strange pit. Like it is separate from the rest of my body. If you picture a house that is multilevel. With that one higher plane and then the lower. It is like my body is all the lower plane and then at a point in the middle it is raised for the higher level. So my stomach separates in two and I don’t know what it all becomes. But I can’t sleep. So I can’t drink or dream. I can’t pause or tell myself stories with my eyes closed. Instead when they are shut I think of the same room with the same person and we are talking. Normally it would be fine but there is that riot going on inside my body. So it’s a mess to talk to anyone.

The desert lake is peaceful if I am not there. But when I stand on the edges the water ripples. Slowly at first. As time passes and the sun seems stuck; in its one spot the lake grows more and more furious. It takes all the calm and tries to infuse itself but it fails. Because I am standing there and I won’t stop. And then finally in the most horrible part of it all.

Everything stops and I retreat back and further into something. And I think to myself that there was some action. Or something I was completely capable of to conquer the shaking of my body. To control it. But it retreated and I am left with a strange aftertaste in my tongue. Like when you sleep for a real long time. And you wake up, its dry, and the air is bitter.

I know that somehow I could have swept my hand or said a word and then it would shoot out like a rocket. Like its own ray of light and tumble along the desert blowing wind and sand in every direction. But I never get it; and I stand there thinking that it might happen again. What am I going to do when it happens again?

---

oh why, baby
why do we run.
why don't we take our lives and run.
tell me
the world is gone
then i can cry in shame.

we tore down our house
and gave it to that man.
with the beard,
who had scars and rings
all over his hands.

baby, we lost it all now.
i lost it all now
and found the deep night that existed down below.
my place is shame,
your husband is shame.

we tore down his life
and gave it to you.
with the long black hair,
who had rings and gold
all over her hands.

time is here
to blow me away
with the wind,
the wind.

and the people will say
that the husband
left in shame
your shame.

we tore it all down
i was thirsty and dead
and you were dead.
and all the time passed us by
until the shame melted away.

and we were gone, until
were gone.