SEASONS

Why do you sleep with women?

The world today looks winter-dead, weighted down by white hardness of frost and threatened snow, but looks aren’t everything. Beneath, below, inside, within, sap still rises; green shoots gather, cluster, tendril and crouch to bloom. There’s a spring in my veins and a summer in my heart. But being here and now takes all my art. The surface stillness belies the bubbling underneath. Why act cold? Young or old, we are all always squatting on heat. Beneath, below, inside, within, there’s a volcano bursting to blow: all of us grow from the molten, still-smouldering, core of an ancient star. It’s who we are: rivulet-running lava-stuff: connecting, throbbing, pulsing, star-stuff vein-alive with passions so primal they sometimes frighten us. Why do I sleep with women? Why do women sleep with men? Who knows these things? The answers lie beneath, below, inside, within.

Does it always snow in winter?

Only if you get disconnected. When something is broken you start to break things. Not in the beginning, but for sure in the beginning of the end. Does she love me? For sure. Does she love me? Maybe. Does she love me? Who’s he? And whose number is this on my phone? Jealousy disconnects. Envy separates. Your head always aches. Your knuckles are always sore. There’s the rope, the club, the gun, the axe. Every night is long and deep and dark — much too dark. Beware the rapist in the park. Be careful of the blood smeared on the door. If the blizzards begin you can be buried beneath the snow. When the storm is over even your footprints will have been erased. Nothing will ever be the same again.

Do you love summer?

In winter the days are so dark and so cold that I don’t even want to get up but the summer springs me. I like to be sprung. I’m a green and blue and golden man. I watch her watching me though the mirror and I watch her back, tracing my fingers down her spine. Each bone-ridge and skin-whorl is a journey to an unknown destination, a voyage on an uncharted sea. Her face is always another place to be, a home to live in for a moment or an eternity. Her smiles are always warm and lithe and sprouting from a timeless blue sky. My skin hugs her shape; my sinews snap to the pattern of our days, our loins align to the journey of the careening, burning sun. We are two and we are one. Summer? Summer is hot. Summer is fun.

Does she love you?

In the beginning was our beginning but in every beginning is also an end. The ash falls on a thousand leaves. Was there ever another life? Was any death ever different from this? The ash flakes away and the leaves grow from green to brown and the sap that flows is also green. Our love is green and also brown but in unequal measure. She is my discovered treasure, my sparkle-jewel that I dug myself from the earth’s hot core. She is also the lava-flow that engulfs me. She strifes me, she wifes me, she stripes me brown and golden and green. Could I ask for more? I don’t. Could I wish for less? I won’t. All is all and all is no less or more than enough. Does she love me? She does. Why do I sleep with women? Why do you want to know? Maybe you should ask her.