“Wild Horses-2008, Springtime in Shelter Island”

(Old work of mine lifted from a poetry/prose journal, circa 2007/8)

To if it as of which, I’m sitting or was, in a car with respiratory arrest, underwhelming in a void, watching in my head: everything I ever wanted. 

How far can we go before noticing how people differentiate similarities of their homes? 

Living alone, a culmination of external circumstance, allowed us to exist independently yet juxtapositioned, intricately, integrated within time-space. I heard them bicker, shout, anger another, talk soft, talk family, interrupt, be rude, get coffee; I was ready to leave, then I asked, “what’s the purpose of experience?”

Thinking of us through metaphors. The truth of my delusion was misaligned, and I produced, personalized vivacity from imagination. 

Daydreaming’s my cognitive renaissance.

I escaped. Time-space outside in third person, an alternate fantasy. It was awhile before their eyes pierced mine, making my insides shake, difficult to shape depth from precision.

How could I forgive myself, if I didn’t know I ever existed? 

Later, I sat in the back of the car with them, feeling like a child, but old enough to have children. The distance of eastern Long Island, wineries, green grass over rolling hills of sod glassed and masked in a cast of iron fog, for miles. Smelling wealth flushed temperament lawns; I see wild horses roaming the countryside if before my eyes, before people destroyed her soil. 

The word ‘civilization’ doesn’t make sense, because there’s nothing civil about it.

Can everything in our existence be funneled into an assumptious, single phrase, if we aren’t sure they’re here?

I question how I look at things, I question how I question the question of looking at things. What were objects of my fascination and objects that lied beyond/outside my biases? My world felt like it was coming to an end, without depth or dimensionality, like it was going to be ending, assuming it was even “mine" to begin with. 

Around her family, throughout the duration of our trip past the Hamptons, I was made painfully aware of my presence within the structures of society and class. I was an object for her, stranded, tossed aside, as everything she ever got. She had access to everything she ever wanted, and it was all she knew, though for short moment, I thought we loved eachother, but…love was just, the genealogy of chance, a lottery ticket of circumstance.

My mind’s an asylum of refuge from a life witnessed. I never felt quite right nor wrong, never fitting in. A transient observer or probe, a ghost of the life I woke up to. Is a driver of a vehicle not part of their machine? 

In and out of consciousness, out of time, out of places, out of excuses or justifications for my fictitious tongue, I wandered. Becoming the person who I didn’t mean to be, but still I daydreamed everyday, like it could create meaning, a doorway for which I could step through, then escape.

“I need to find a way out. I can’t do this anymore.” 

My ghost’s outside this body, that life, that name, identity, the people who knew “me” through dull eyes. This is the way I remember us: not what’s been done or what’s important, but the world’s acknowledgement of us.  

What life I lived isn’t anything other than an agreed-upon set of continuances. 

I don’t remember much, after we had breakfast.

Depersonalization like waves. “It’s alright to be alone,” and judged, not to feel loved, even if our tears emptily vanished into the abyss, we would still have a granule of experience that might’ve existed. 

Watching time and a life thrust upon me to pass by, watching the moment slip away into dusk outside, the lawn dressed if her white gown, we’re barefoot then/now, taking pictures of one another. I wanted more than anything to feel anything.

When we create, do they know we exist?

I scrapped together enough truth, though, to let someone know, whoever they may, that they can be loved, regardless of who they were or never was. Life is worth something. We’re literal energy. An existential panic attack will not last forever.

…you, are? 

Not alone, you in whatever we call consciousness. Our ghosts, our breaths, are here, right now. They are forever with you, part of this temporary madness we call love, we call Earth, we call memory, before it all goes somewhere. Like your kiss in the springtime ether, lost to no one but breeze and wind, I see your golden hair entrance my sin, and imperfection(s).

The spring, the trees, the flowers, the birds in the distance, the sunlight stretching forth and giving us all life. One day we can be free, I know it. We exist(ed).

Wild horses. 

© 2022, A. M. D’Angelo