On Sleeping With a Golem
Do not be alarmed when from behind and beneath the crown
moulding in the bedroom comes a torrent of honey. From out of the cracks, the
disrepair of this broken and infested house. Down the walls, the copper
curtains, the blinds behind, the two framed Chagall prints. Each of the four
walls is a sudden amber Pollack. Do not panic when the two power outlets
succumb to the same pressure, bending and snapping off the screws to better
allow for the waves of this. Poorly-patched nail holes become like puncture
wounds, refusing to bleed immediately upon injury. It comes from everywhere,
and everywhere where it should not, to fall onto four legs and into hair and
coating the concrete pillow case, and him (his). Lie there with closed eyes and
imagine that it does not end. (And it doesn’t—not after four days of this.) The
honey will slow with gravity and with temperature, but the pounds of it descend
inevitably through mattress to the carpet as more drips through the
newly-developed cracks in the ceiling, which is collapsing under the weight of
one-hundred thousand insect corpses and food—the torrent now only a moody slow
drizzle over the bitterness of this illusion of domesticity accumulated here in
his (him): notebooks and brown pens and newsprint envelopes and bust of Lenin
and the dog’s ashes and teratomatous teeth and the letter. Lie in the now
unshared bed with these indexes of him, clutch them to breast, and weep that he
is not here, like this. (He was never here, like this.)
Wes Jamison's work also appears in Essay Press, The Rumpus, cahoodaloodaling and elsewhere. He is a professor in
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