Circe's Vortex: A Poem of Forbidden Love and Hallucinogens

I met her through a friend. They were living
together in a three room house a few blocks
away from the old place my grandfather died in.
It was always strange and familiar driving there.
My friend moved his brother in. They were somewhere.

Their parents moved out of town.
They were somewhere, too,
always somewhere else forcing themselves
into the middle of it all. My friend
kept running away, sprinting into the next
same unforgiving red brick wall.

She was small, skinny for a mother of two,
and quiet with a fierce light behind her eyes
like a feral cat staring back past a flashlight
and into me, her body calm as liquid stealth.

Two years later it was my birthday.
I was drinking rum and eating mushrooms
with my friends at my parents's timeshare.
All the walls were yellow, and the cheesy motel
paintings began to tear sideways
like a television with a bent antenna
blurring through unfamiliar channels.

I sat outside on the deck smoking cigarettes
with my friends. I thought they might be talking
about me, but I couldn't tell, their voices
sounded so distant I strained to hear them.
Around their falling tones slid her
guilty whispers in my head, purring on the surface
tension of my thoughts. I heard her voice
and she sat there, gazing on,
following me deeper in.

I looked out across the lake and saw the trees
move as though they were cast in a web,
each filament glistening with light
shining from itself. I pulled the strands
closer to me, I tied, like an impatient
spider line to line. Lightning flashed
through the storm haze on the horizon.
Rings lit up around her head like sacred flowers.

She threw her legs over mine
when I sat on the couch, tingles pouring
through my body like an orgasm. My skin
buzzed with the euphoria only danger can provide.
Our webs tangled, intertwined. The silky
feeling of our flesh weaved through
our exhausted bodies. My friend lay on the floor
melting in, nearly sleeping, and silent.

Last month they broke up and she moved to San Diego.
Before she left I held her in that same yellow condo,
looking out across the same matrix of trees.
I needed her to know how her soft, scarred face
resting on my ribcage stirred the living force
of my body. There were too many emotions to name,
so many mixed and nameless ones. We only
knew the moment of one certain thing--
the coming instant unfolding; unfolding.

I made one of the hardest choices any man
should have to make. I just hoped
the long love of a friend might forgive
our own. The next week I took her to the airport
and the whole drive I thought one thing:
"say something," no words came, and swam
through the maelstrom of fragmented words
and feelings sinking into my chest.

I held her hand until she stepped onto the escalator
toward security. I turned to watch her ascend
like a goddess who has visited, intoxicated me,
and withdrawn. I kept thinking "look back".
I don't know if it was to see her face
or to know that she wanted to see mine.
We locked eyes, and I know what happened.

I know one thing--she is there in San Diego
in the sun, perhaps on a pier
looking through the webs of people, and I can
feel her here brushing her hands across my chest,
curling her legs around mine, pulsing,
like her sacred flowers--our bodies
greedy with desire and ravenous,
scratched and clawed like two animals
on the frenzied beating edge of death.

That is how to survive. That is how,
instead of waking every day to die
at someone else's hands
we choose to test a small oblivion
in each other's, her tongue fiery on my lips
like the feather of a rising phoenix.

So, I have gone insane or am in love;
tell me the difference. We do what draws us,
what must be done. Please, do not blame
the clock for keeping time, or failing to.

But show me, with the exact laser's edge
of your words, my heart dissected
on the table of your hands.
Point to the clicking valve, the coarse artery,
the thick and muscled chambers of this waking heart
most guilty for the work of moving blood.