Balmy (notes)

Domesticity a balm for all and all. He’s entered into contracts, into binding agreements that he’ll honour through sickness, if such there be. Through health, through disappointment, through growth and through necrotic vomitings, meiosis, aggrandizing and braggardly foreboding – the detritus of a soul at large.

Not ducking responsibility. Not shirking. Meeting the disregarded task, the drudgery, backstraight chinhigh. Always. Seeking rightness, feeling affirmation in what is done, what is right. A pair of heeled shoes tossed in the storm drain as he takes shanks’ nag, hoofs it home. Doing what is right. 62% of all journeys by car traverse less than 6 miles. Upstanding. Decent.

He’s found peace in these things, the traces. The battled leads, the lines. The chains that measure the breadth of things, the links, the spans and the shaftments. A means by which one might measure, weigh, plumb one’s solid involvement in the world. Metron and trochee, whole hurled elements spat or smoothed through the lingual casemates.

There’s a tremendous and lasting pleasure to be found in another’s presence, to the exclusion of all others. A joy there – an unconsidered tithing, an offering up. To continue that alert breathing, to fossick out, to turn over the stones on another’s more proper utterances, essences, the floating rib hooked and whole under the flattened palm. In the night to reach out to another’s body and to find that hip, humped fawns, deeper, darker than blue – to find surprising, reckless desire at dawn. A paradigm, shifted.

And he’s correct – upright. He’s upstanding. He breathes a light, mint-scented mist, flosses, rarely drinks. A beer, occasionally. For what is right is what is written, and in what is written he can find it all. Not with an arrogant certainty, nor without a tremulous doubt. But it’s right there – it’s right, there. Inerrant, whole as written, beyond question (but not interpretation). And in us all that petit bon ange, the thing in itself, fleck or spark or grain. That which we are, beyond all else.