Letter To A Mirror

'Listen,

I am obsessed with shadows. When I was little I thought - here is
god putting up a play. On the pavement. How do we imagine, god
idle in the evening? Arm slinging out of a truckle bed - pivoted
on the sun? I would walk shifting shadows with that tiny form,
shifting glance from pavement to sky to where ever I imagined god
was, behind what curtains; digging feet into the concrete trying
to scoop each shadow out, expecting it to come tumbling upward,
flitter, fade. See, this is my childhood, shadows feet pavement,
god.

But this is how it is: I still walk to explore shadows. Walk
without suffix and stretch each alphabet beyond the limit of day
and read the poetry under streetlights and tree shades and orange
signs of gas stations. This is the language of darkness, you
understand - the way our bodies nudge in some sepia reality,
negotiable and silent. The way hands seem to touch even when they
are not; the way light is caught in these dark throats, like joy.
The way our bones project on this screen while it quivers with
morning, burns with the day, becomes soft with evening, blurred
with night. Have you noticed how shadows have depth? When we walk
the city at night as though gathering rent, arranging the streets
next to one another and ticking them off with our bodies, angular
- have you noticed how we sink into some shadows and into some
others, don't. How the night coalesces in some corners, conspires
in others.

Have you noticed how the darkness is snatched into form, and some
shadows heave as though trying to escape, and still others are
weary with love for their murky blood, sweat glistening in
translucence. I have wanted to slip through these pores with you,
because we become astatic on the street, you know. We become
ethereal and we glisten. And the shadows catch on to our bodies
as we move, tiny semicolons that prick us, make us exhausted with
our flesh. It is as though the earth is riddled with two
realities - it pushes the shadows onto our bodies; here is the
burden of your love. But we are not confounded. We are blurred,
but not burned.

And this is how you may find your city, your home, your lover.
When the realities approve. When your bones form a dialect with
the shadows and build and crash together, resolve a distance.
When I came here, I thought, this is the city in which I can
enunciate my body; this is the city in which the shadows are
comfortable. In which I can move my body under yours. Because,
see, it is either poetry or it isn't. Either we know the same
language or we don't. And if the darkness is incomprehensible,
then we are in some conflict in our bones, we are tangled and
rigid and soundless, as though caught in the throat of some
shadow.

Like pain. Without language.