Verboten

 

Verboten

The world is changing very rapidly. We are like dancers. In the dark room we spin; only flashes of color from our flying costume are seen – by whom?

There are many kinds of dancers. Some don't even move and are only eyes unblinking in the darkness.

It was one such pair of eyes that was watching me, and only me. I watched the eyes and never saw them fixate on another dancer for more than a few seconds. They snapped back onto me, hungrily, patiently, and quietly, not wanting to be seen (for watchers' eyes are large and a dancer's eyes are closed).

We change our costumes often now. They are like ribbons in the long night of the world.

*

The world is full of noise. Everybody's chatter, everybody's life story: spewed out in a continuous, broken stream. An individual rarely makes a stream, being too disjointed; altogether one chaotic, bubbling brook, yet unbroken. A pair of eyes stands outside the noise in a quiet room that seems otherwise inaccessible, without others' eyes to indicate its window. I felt that I was behind the glass to the world; you were behind the glass to me.

*

The world used to contain many forms of love, but they have mysteriously vanished.

***

Impossible to describe the colors of this world,

Verboten love – I walked through it

into a non-real world

I don't know what it means to be a woman anymore

Normal has departed – I don't know who I'm for

There used to be a bright world containing many forms of love

But now it's only casual or, in consequence, obsession

It's a miracle this other way

appears at all for me –

I knew the instant that I saw it,

I would be let in

It rang out like my train arrived –

a calling of my name –

I'd barely even looked –

and it took me through the archway

into a forbidden world –

the world of unrequited love,

where everything is inverse and what you

see there you'll never else be able to glimpse of

– But there's no going backward once you have

passed through the door verboten

and the price for every moment to survive is to be in psychosis

You had best bring a notebook and a pen to write down what you see –

The only way to exit is destruction of the nonreal world

by contact with reality exactly at the moment when you can no more withstand

the tension, when the story building that's its pillar and foundation myth

receives no longer input, no more sign –

the nonreal world begins to break.

And you begin to see the trade you made to be here –

No platform which to fall upon, no cushion for the blow.

But I had nothing to give to it – only my belief and time

In fact it's having nothing and being emptied of a life and self

that made me feel at first this was for me

until the moment he denied – and then our love became nonreal –

and nonreality – well, it really is a place.

The deeper in you go the closer to its myth

through being inside the castle of an unrequited love,

you finally come to the un-Beatific vision

and you understand the world

that your verboten lover knows

it's such a secret, it can only come through into being through the nonreal;

and only if you step through the verboten door will you see it,

the door where you're not welcome, yet where you had to go...

he speaks in double meaning; he's a shadow who comes through

to carry you into the dream that never ends.

Is this escape or is this gift and can you no more want what you once did?

I want embrace, and love, and touch, and sex – but no, not him, he says;

the wants become so strange and new – there is no going backwards to

the wants I wanted so before I had passed through. What now?

The nonreal world may pop (for me) (as nonreal worlds so do

until they're called again) but my eyes are brand new

And I'm back in the world? Oh no – while I was dreaming wide awake

the normal world has disappeared, pulled out from under our feet

while we fast sank into stupor. I was exempt from it by this connection.

But now where is there left to be? You have gone, and there's nobody

who is with me, who could see the same that I see, who walked through the door that opened to me.

I have left a record – that's all that I can do.

Tomorrow's only task is to parse through what I saw.