Choreographies of Distance

Reaching through the dark expanse

You’re fluttering against the luminous screen with the persistence of short-term moth memory — except you’ve never been here before. Longing to get beyond the glass, the allure of an indefinable incandescence — you’ll scorch wings in the attempt.

Connect fingertip to cursor, lighting up those high-voltage sentences — you’re asking to be electrocuted. Dare to play with fire.

In the beginning was the word — this too, how we began — genesis of desire.

Inhaling ideas for oxygen, consuming declarations, intoxications of intimations — your seven-course feast for the sensibilities, now that tongue and stomach are at an impasse — the realization that Breatharians perhaps survive on rarefied thoughts, like a living library.

Hover liminal theoretical offerings like a hologrammed courtesan — temptations of the mind to seduce the body electric anima for animus — fluid exchange, even if it’s osmosis through glass and spans of underwater invisible cable, somehow synergy occurs — and are the fish dreaming of our conversations — evolving eloquent tongues out of the roots of their gills.

You hurl ignited narratives at an imagined location your laptop knows more about than you — the precision of latitudes and longitudes siphoned into the slipstream of binary code. Emissaries of the ether that bend to your bidding — a postmodern Ariel in our pheromonious Tempest. Quick now — to him fly You’ve seen him via video — could mistake his room for a place at the end of your street.

Why can’t you walk there?

Instead your words fly free— by-passing customs with film star flair, side-stepping pandemic impassabilities. You’re jealous of their intimacy with his eyes — you’re the one who yearns to be seen. While you’re running laps — again — in a delta-contaminated 5k radius from the seat of your own encumbrances. You cauterize the absence with the continued cacophony of your magnum opus— but it bleeds into the lexicons of longing you send him — it’s hopeless.

Hemispheres apart, your day his night. You rise in his future, he lays down in your dream.

Everything you feel flows back to the Other. Endless permutations of amorous associations — the image-repertoire, dazzling refractions. His cheekbones cutting through a conversation. Bookstore windows flout titles you’ve dissected together — gleeful conspirators against any attempt of temporary forgetting. The constant call to mind — a redundant cliche —his name always already there.

And that word — desire — is seeping through you again — when you despaired it was done with you years ago. And you’re falling through his blue eye in the center of it, feeling the sigh through it. That sigh with the humidity of a far-off night and the arms of a lover reaching through the dark expanse — intimate choreographies of distance.

© Melissa Coffey 2021

Choreographies of Distance is in response to the prompt by J.D. Harms of: the Other perspective. It is subtly permeated with references to one of my favourite postmodern texts exploring the semiotics of desire — A Lover’s Discourse: In Fragments (1977) by Roland Barthes.

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