The Unfinished

020

April 2020

I wish I could write to you like Spinoza, locked away in a rotting hold, singularly and utterly obsessed.

Then I'd write to you like Beethoven, accompanied by the growing silence chased away only when the ringing returns, ears stuffed with damp cotton packed in until — a sprout.

Then I'd write to you like van Gogh, a tortured soul? No. A being plagued by the same ugliness as you and I. An ear, a gun, and an open field on one humid afternoon, you say? Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong as filling gaps with rusted metal.

I wish I could write to you like Chopin wrote to Sand, like Sand to the world. Open, gaping carcasses, a pair of dilapidated, runny livers for lungs slowly welling with blood. A touch, then a burst. It doesn't ooze, it splatters.

Then I'd write to you like Faulkner, every bit a Southern gentleman. Perhaps not as lost, but lost only in two archetypes: blackness and the femme. Kipling would laugh, then scoff.

Then I'd write to you like Mozart, genius with twice the ego. The Weber girls? Two and done, only then to swim in liquor like it'd save him from a deadline.

Then I'd write to you like Paganini, Devil-born, Devil-made, Devil-dead. Devil-said he had a contract for a set of fingers crafted for strings, women, and bull.

Then I'd write to you like Tchaikovsky, knees on glass, pen in hand, national glory shoved down a throat like lost homoeroticism trying to find a home. To kiss a mistress is to kiss a country.

I wish I could write to you like Hemingway, holding surgeon's tools in magician's fingers and prodding where he shouldn't have. As if a crew cut in a great war wasn't enough, he turned to Jack and breaking women.

Then I'd write to you like Ravel, protege of Faure gone rogue. If only failure was satisfying.

Music — no, euphoria — to my damned ears.