An Ease of Pain [davion alston]

March 23rd, 2017

These past few days off were the end of Pisces season, were the beginning of a bud ready to unfurl, I am not sure yet of what kind of flower. From the euphoria of a high from being around love, from closing chapters and finding doors I did not know I needed to open. Last week a ray of light spotlighted onto the escalator while riding upon it, I waited to get to that light. While waiting I reimagined how you touch, soft and ashy. Your fingers, how they slid down my spine to my patchy lower back.

That feeling reoccurring as my turn came to ride through that warm light. I needed that, that objective moment to give me subjective feeling of the past. Then realizing to a few days ago through you that this rush of fear, this vacating of your presence to be seen through a seven digit phone call, was to be gone in the next forty- eight and was to be felt in the next forty- eight. Ignoring communication through out the day I pick up your last call, so afraid of the descending time you come over with your gold, with your god. She also awaits here with me to talk about subtext of her feline, of her womanhood.

You two talk, I listen, I observe, I succumb to the energy of that moment. You wonderful tar of a man with your belief system buckled tight. Under your black were the politics of your experience, your stories, and your mirror unto which I could see myself, open; deflowered. Connect four, I was red you were black, red rose, due to the embarrassment that I was in this open field finding myself through you, finally. You black because you knew whom you were, blocking my moves until you could connect yourself through me, until you could supplement me with the color of my true love. I realized my last moments were with you when the landslide of connect four pieces collapsed within the intertwine of our fingers. This moment is sacred. I felt the high of that moment and knew after you won the game, that I would also win. I would be all right, I stared, in the morning I smiled and in the evening I aligned. The cigarette buds collected on the porch, the wine stains accumulated on the carpet and on our shirts. I talk about the intimate moments of father and son, brother to brother.

My father carried me to bed when I slumbered through out the living room. As years passed he guided my teenage stick body to the bed when I was too young and too old. Now I sleep on the couch in the dark without his physical guidance. At first despaired, I realize I became the father in which I needed to do the guiding of your body to the bed, the bed I welcomed my brothers to slumber, to allow vulnerability when weary. The couch where it held both of us, you, new to my moments to my emotions. I allowed you in, I allowed you to stretch within my energy. I felt and I refilled.

We convened in the morning to settle up for the long haul. Oh how the bus bee was ready for new horizons, a bag full of lemons, and the philosophies of New York Pollard in New York City. I cried, loved, and in that moment relived, but in a more revived poetic notion. I unfurled and rebirthed in the running of the night. You were gone—we retreated into the bed. Where I guided your body. My gaze, so honed in so focused on your pry. We became one on a time that was not present, falling warm water became our mother environment as you unbuttoned me and placed yourself in the unfound gully. A placement so pure I could not do anything but tremble while bent, but spiritually inclined by your offer, I knew I will be.

“The problem is, of course, that art typically requires an audience which loops us right back to the problem of observing actions and losing ourselves in consideration of their imagined form.” – Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty