GEORGE ECONOMOU

Débat de l’âme et du corps

See you? No. But I think you could go to gehenna in a hand-basket, sweetless, weightless piece, piece poised to disappear into thin air, nonetheless piece of me, marrow of me, the unmarried of married me, the inviolable invisible of the dregs of my more violating than violated decades, still questing––could you be called––spirit, breathless essence of my non-stop breathing, of breaths caressing limbs and syllables, of filaments finely spun to tap the innermost springs, or my mere barking unmixed with wine or water, pure defeated air, yet neither desperate nor despondent, our hopes and promises of savor and savior being practically epoxied to one another, nonetheless destined to part ways on the day of division, but not without a trace of heavier me to fuel your soft blast-off into the wild blue black wonder, my indelible twin, where I can imagine you confronted with the sum of my following my eyes and heart and the answer as to whether or not a pretty girl is like a heresy.

      *

I couldn’t be sure my dianoia’d annoy ya’ because what you give, deeper and darker than words convey, says no, no saying, in its noiseless noetic, leaving me doubtless as to my doubtful state in the wake of your lilting silence, but no you make yourself known without fear that I would mistake you fauxnemically, that I would think I hear voices, for your silence grips me with my problem of having to hear you whom I do not hear because you do not stick it in my ear but in my heart to a T, and that’s why I can and do talk back this way because I have the stomach for it, and the guts, and the coraggio, if you will, against your so-called everlasting entirety,
your irreducible transparency that stakes its claim to all that is my innermost as alma irredenta, yours, yours, and sheds the batter my running, stinking colors wrap you in that I could not do without, without offering even to meet me part way, no, you must close in the clear though I would offer to grow old as your twin in grisaille.
      
*

Yes, grayash under granite is my destiny while you go on souling for soul, for more of yourself, supposedly slip the weight, pull a Harry Houdini (forgive me) supposedly, but suppose part of you remains with me, the suppositious soul that belongs to and dissolves in me,
or maybe all of you, which would make me your daimon, your singular fate, and would mean I’ve done all this on my own, and, just as I thought maybe it was you my mere mind that slumbered with me, you will take that small hop, just a six-foot drop, with me into the abyss, my impotent twin, but then I find myself singing of my beginning and end as you stand by grandly and spurn perishability, your hand, as if you have one, strumming strings of air out of me to play the song you allege is yours, and leave me, the so-called poorer pars pro your toto, to parse this maddening grammar of you and me, as if there were no possibility that the sum I am is all I am, first and last, and not groping for you in a state of perpetual desiderium.

 ––George Economou