Valhalla

[deleted]

A.A. Milne, from “Now We Are Six” (1927)

I.
It’s funny how often I ask of myself,
“Does he love me at all?”
“Does he love me at all?”
And when I have asked it, I ask it again,
“Does he love me at all?”
“Does he love me at all?”

He is sober and sexless, with magnificent wings,
his mother —- deceased, his father is mean,
his body is a concept, he studies the spaces
that twist without breaking, that fold into faces,
he is always so sad, but he carries for me
twenty-three cigarettes, lit just so I’ll see,
he knows what I mean when I speak of the gang bang
of people I’ve drowned in, the whole city long,
he is kind, and he’s mine —- only when he has the time -—
he says only my name, in lieu of a rhyme,
and he thinks of my feats the whole world and more,
but never of me, never me, anymore.

“Well?
Does he think of me at all?”

Well, he is kind and only mine when he has time,
He says my name in lieu of ‘I love you’,
and he thinks the world of my feats
but nothing of me, never of me,
not anymore.

II.
Valhalla is a sex dream,
an orgy of triumph and victory,
I do not want to be here anymore,
Everyone here is beautiful and Heavy,
Valhalla is bounded between states of
Psychosis and your Mother’s transparent
Happiness —-

III.
Your mother once called me up and the lights were a seance of red-blue-pale like your mangled throat, asphyxiation, then there were the long round calves of your mother, once a two-pronged heron boy and then the next best thing, you became a man with boy qualities, eternal age of eighteen, Valhalla was only your dream, your only dream.

IV.
Dear two pronged heron boy, I just had a thought so large it continued inflating until it killed itself
Dear two pronged heron boy, the antithesis of life is pilates
Dear two pronged heron boy, my novel is called I, Libertine
Dear two pronged heron boy, am I beautiful
Dear two pronged heron boy, I hiked to the top of the Rocky Mountains in search of Spiritual Renaissance and died with your name on my lips
Dear two pronged heron boy, have you yet to reach eternal stasis or is there yet hope for me
Dear two pronged heron boy, your mother has stopped calling
Dear two pronged heron boy, why did you kill yourself
Dear two pronged heron boy, does the power come from finally asking the question, or from never asking it
Dear two pronged heron boy,

V.
I still remember the police report of your bruised throat, it was an ugly assortment of colours, you would have liked listening to me tell you about Spontaneous Combustion. I still have your medical dictionary. I wish your mother would call.

VI.
SOME OF YOU NEED TO BECOME COMFORTABLE IN YOUR SOLITUDE. LET’S BE REAL, NOT ALL OF YOU WILL FIND LOVE. SOME OF YOU WILL DIE WITHOUT EVER HAVING TOUCHED THE WARMTH OF A WOMAN’S BOSOM. SOME OF YOU WILL DIE WITHOUT EVER HAVING BEEN LOVED AND THAT’S OKAY. ALL YOU’RE EVER GUARANTEED IN LIFE IS YOURSELF AND DEATH. HINGE IS SPIRITUALLY ERODING YOU. YOU WILL DIE TWO DEATHS. ONE OF THE SPIRIT. AND THEN LATER, ONE OF THE BODY.

VII.
A ballerina’s slipper. One long misshapen calf.

VIII.
I was sixteen, two-pronged heron boy was a couple of years older, he smelled like diesel and earnestness. He held my hand at prom. I no longer remember his face, only the viscosity of time back then. Everything was slow. Everything is slow again. My responses drag. My empathy arrives late, if at all. I move through life as though submerged, watching the world articulate itself without me. He liked to talk about Valhalla and the glory of it, I had a hard time believing he could ever be heaven-bound but perhaps, I remember thinking, he is Valhalla-bound, he would die a glorious death in battle, it is a shame though, for him to have committed suicide. A shame, a nice boy, he kissed me once.

IX.
If it were all dreamless, waking would hold nothing to envy. And yet I welcome sleep earlier each night, one minute more, then another. My days shorten in theory; my dreams grow teeth, gain mass, become more real than whatever daylight brings. I think about that theorem he was trying to teach. Noether’s theorem, where every symmetry has its conserved quantity. Rotate, translate, shift in time, the laws remain. Nothing is really lost. On good days, this idea steadies me. On bad days, it feels like proof that whatever was not preserved, my mother, my gentleness, two-pronged heron boy, my faith in endings, must not have counted as anything at all. I dream of Geniuses and mental illnesses. Correlation, causation —- what brittle words. I cannot decide. Astuteness becomes useless in a landscape where dreams ask nothing of you.

X.
Living like this feels punitive. Memories of sex feel punitive. Memories of eating, drinking, waking, breathing. Punitive. It goes on and on and my grief seems to protrude out of my body like a thread. Leading me back to the same house, to the same man, to the same future. I have resigned myself. I want to lie down with the dead, but he was close enough. All the same. All the same. I miss people without logic. He does not understand what he does to me by saying anything at all. A dream, he said. Awaken now, he said at last.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.
I do wish your mother would call but I will refrain from explicit self-negation.

XV.
The bruise of adolescence and first love is unsightly and unkind to my adult body. None of this really happened. There is no “two-pronged heron boy”. The boy, his suicide, Valhalla, has always been a long term fantasy of the realization of the very real pain I carry. Manifested into a day dream, “Valhalla-bound” , there is no such thing, “two-pronged heron boy” existed once, very long ago, but he is a hallucination. I continue to hear his voice and my step-mother asks if I am ready to try therapy again, psychoanalysis leaves me bereft of “two-pronged heron boy”, I tell her no. I call this, “radical recontextualization” and she calls it “a deferred suicide”.

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I have been compulsively posting, sorry, but also not really.