On the screen of my eyelids the overheated projector hums out a sweaty recurring scene of you and me at play on the bare mattress on the laminate floor of Lula's Lounge.
Always the dream begins with the hollow clink of nos canisters rolling across the soft curvature of the earth, you busting for a piss, and going out back into the garden to leak and light a joint.
Light headed from doughy rising, I join you and at this point we're still just talking, and everyone else is either asleep or otherwise dead to the dream, far away outside of our extravagant ambition.
The reel slides forwards at speed and you're topless and we're on the mattress now and you've these few blonde chest hairs circling your nipples and maybe now you're certain I'm interested though to me it's all still very new as we appear to be melting.
It's what I hate about substances, soporifics, vacancies. The suspicion you can't ever get past that it might all just be euphoria, a queerness of the trip, mania. When, in my actual thought, the ship has long sailed. We've been jigging on bifurcated waters, probing the maelstrom, for our whole lives.
But lying in my bed, now, my actual bed, beneath the surveillance state in the crow’s nest, I'm gluey and earth bound, and my guts aren't trustworthy.
Recess I miss your spring in my soft grip, your stubble striking fire against mine, your jaw at work, your fiddler's fingers pulling at the frayed edge.
Reach out if you can.
Baph
letter #2
Dear Recess,
I was so surprised to hear from you. True, it was dreamtime on the picket line, and we stood there with bricks falling about our ears, and I could hardly hear what you whispered to me over the sound of the fash and the clueless hippies, but still I read your lips, and saw desire paths form out in serpentines into the wide open riot space.
The Cornish coastline. Who’d have thought? Your cutlass tongue cut right through. Your sex marks the spot.
It makes me angry, sometimes, what's come in between. We were turned. By work. Imagine having your love plundered by the fact of labour. There was always the rabies of capital all about. And your family called you straight home. We didn't have a chance, did we?
I know it may be too much to ask, but can you put your self down in writing? I'm craving for your loops, your crossed eyes, your dotted tees.
Love,
Baph
letter #3
Rhys,
There will not be a day where I won't reread what you wrote. I will revisit the park and enter the convenience and gaze at your handwriting, or I will glaze over lying on the long sofa staring at the photograph of the scrawl on the toilet wall. And that you wrote it out as a shanty, and made me picture you in a white and blue stripe, tied to the mast, your ears open wide. I read recently that pirates were the most radically democratic people ever to establish societies.
I might regret saying it but it needs saying: I know it’s not to relive. It’s not about trying to start over, redo, do again. But knowing that we actually were, were there, that I was me, that’s it. And having it in your hand, writing on the wall, that’s it.
It’s what it’s. & here’s to not forgetting who we aren’t.
