weakness

I am weak-willed. Weak-fleshed. Welcome to the world, you might be retorting smugly under your breath. Ah yes, surely. But as Rousseau said, "it's the common lot of humanity; I felt it more than another." It's perhaps not that I am more weak-willed than any other, but I feel it now in such excess... A phrase of Sappho comes to me: that "loosener-of-limbs" she calls desire, but she could have just as easily meant despair (and perhaps she did -- indeed). My tendons have given in; they gape about my body in horrible slack-jawed puddles. That's just one example.

My heart, a black barreled stove, beckons, smoky and warm. The path to it must be littered with exquisite little objects marked "drink me" and "eat me", or "come closer" and "even closer than that!". It lures the kind of Alice whose games are still running about on other boards, whose words have not yet decided to obey deixis, and whose cards have not started to take her seriously. There is another sign, it seems, just on the netherside of the little stovepipe's lid, wherein translated from some uknown tongue into a barely decipherable script are the words "run the other way"--or "pull your tendons back up"--it's hard to make it out through the smoke.

My weakness is for literature, for reference. The girl plays at the labyrinth only as long as she still believes in minotaurs needing rescue, in crumbs to be trailed behind her, and in sorties of various kinds.

If only I had something to write. If only you would wear my tendons like Humpty-Dumpty's suspenders.