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That 70’s Show ’98-’06

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i had just read a brief history of time. remember that night? cosmic vertigo took hold of my insides, i quit cigarettes that instant, i crushed my last pack and i declared, to you, that death takes everything.

stephen hawking explained: the universe will have an end just as it has a beginning. so having no more time to waste i told you i loved your face more than any other faces and if there was to be even the tiniest trace of me left behind i wanted it to be the way i felt for you that night.

you blew smoke rings from stitched lips, and i talked in circles around you. bleary and bloodshot our eyes closed. you maybe never read stephen hawking but i know we both ran like bandits from sleep.

I talked about how Robert Jordan said, “the wolves had no notions of time the way men did, no reasons to divide the day into hours” how the seasons and the day from night were all they needed. you had a wolf grin and would reveal a smoldering smile.

earthy smell of marijuana permeated your beard and seasoned our tongues. *omitted, wasn’t it really something? being young and together the way we were. smoke stacked to the ceiling and the lamp glow casted halogen haloes around our heads. don’t you agree how the sun always set too soon?

i’ve watched the stars, since, hoping the universal flow might be reversible. i assure you they tell me nothing of what will remedy any earthly turmoil. especially not that of someone like me, so small and so alone.

though, i love you so deeply when i set my eyes upon you my pupils pool wide as i embrace the pressure of your body’s presence wrapping steadily abound my every bone’s soft marrow: i don’t dare proclaim that your love i know, nor that the love i feel could ever heal a single mortal’s bones. despite all it’s desperation and wonder, the emptiness that swells my soul like a cavity could never be filled by anyone other than me.

when i divide my life into fleeting seasons i recall how the spring loves flowers so greatly, it lifts me every year without fail from the winter blues. yet, the winter still claims every petal and every leaf, eventually. just as my warmth is always devouring the cold weather you breathe. the motions wait for no one, time is a lethal thief.

though my brain wanders towards you and my limbs creek like the branches of trees, fingers empty of your touch like the winter misses spring leaves. i know you were a season and i needed to grow alone.

still the movements of time and her changing seasons, this bitter wisdom that has come from age and grace, nor these emotions that crash like waves cannot keep me from reminiscing so sweetly how we spent entire days and nights: undressed, wearing only one another, or how the sun came up too soon… *darling, i want more time with you.

–six pm | *i want more time with you 

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Avatar the Last Airbender 2005-2008

i. most magical-beings prefer wild things.

time was where you existed. here. in this space where i have banished your physical form. i print your photographs and reduce you to only 2 dimensions. i spell words, iambic poems, and call the lyrics hexagonal. weaving messages like memories engraved as memorials into the air. symbols burned into my lungs drumming down my throat in heartbeat pattern morse code. pat pat pat the cadence of your character presses beyond its own boundaries and establishes new limits.

bars of sunlight create glitter of dust, but cannot provide magic powerful enough to overcome the grip of this depression. no words can cast a spell over overcast nettled clouds conspiring rain exclusively via creamed coffee eyes. turns them wet and red like koi ponds drowning the sunlight in your ripples.

i have had an eternity to ponder the philosophy of life. i have come to this conclusion: god’s first display of power was to name things. when you kissed each one of my eyelids and named me ‘honey’ i saw my life the way you’d been dreaming it. and so you became holy my blood thickened to the consistency of a viscous liquid saccharine, too morose to pump reason through my veins.

i longed for you. no. more than that. i fought for you. and you are a warrior so you must understand how much you meant to me. i was delicate and focused until you wrapped you madness around me with your lips and i kissed you and drank of it until you grew bored of me and then the madness abandoned me to the quiet.

your body tanned by the unforgiving work in this sunshine. i admired it like Adonis. i saw my reflection in your sweat pools and fell in love with myself in you like a sick twisted Narcissus. like dust in the air the sun made magic out of a thing so common, made gold of a working man’s skin tone. and i—ivory slave to the moon kissed by her beams, spoiled by pillows and pashmina and sleeping until noon, soft boiled eggs for bed in breakfast making love in the frame of our bedroom window. with purple eyes bruised by telescope keyhole making the tiny universe large enough to bite… making me so much smaller. so small that you stepped all over me. too small to swallow you.

Avatar the Last Airbender 2005-2008

ii. i was almost ripped in two, once.

together we were decadence, furnishings forbidden by all ethical code of conduct, conduits of sin: ivory inlayed with gold filigree and no honest man would dare destroy it once it was put together… had we not peeled ourselves apart. pushed awry by the moisture of an enveloping world, God’s masterwork raining on man’s made masterpieces of precious materials soaked in the ripples of rain. nature has no regard for peripheral trinkets like carved tusks and mined metals boiled and thinned and pounded and husked to be a shadow of what it once was. we were to be reclaimed like everything too ornate for utility. we would be stolen like the jewelry we are and tucked away until the estate sale of someone less grateful but more wealthy.

i thought I had it all, that i’d finally held everything…

but my gold-rushed to the coasts of C a l i f o r n i a.

leaving me- ivory with a cold bone heart.

3 0 0 0 m i l e s, from my head on your shoulder.

you are banished from my pillow case.

a scar across the sunset sets the scar across my forehead purple while my neurosis picks at scabs turning towels red. the scar across my arm begins to glow under the moonbeams casting soft hue about the encroaching shadow and i turn on flash to take its picture. the dusk sets the scene for a martian planet without ever having taken off from under the oppressive atmosphere of mother.

i lay down on top of my roof and pray that i might roll off and never feel the falling. gun metal cold of a steely eye contact briskly cuts me without ever having to make real contact at all. i lay here fuchsia in my panties, i squabble with the seconds. i forge a foxhole in your neck nape to survive the nuclear winter. i reserve my american right to lie bare in your arms...

….i delete your number from my phone.

–six pm | *all the elements in honey

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Photographer: Paige Six

I’ve waited quite literally a lifetime to settle into the type of love which brings the terms settling to a distinctly new definition. I love my husband the way I love to run barefoot through grass. I love my husband the way I love to find shapes in clouds.

So when he came home yesterday telling me he needs more tests, that his back may be giving out not due to the degeneration of his discs which the VA insists is not a service related disfigurement, but because there may be a growth on his spine, well it felt fitting that the bright side of his diagnosis rests on the chance that the signs of a growth may be only a shadow.

For reasons I will not disclose in this portion of my writings: I feel like Faust. How beautiful it is to feel the skin of a lover who embraces you so whole, gentle on the blade of his fingers my cheeks, wisps of baby hairs, and the gentle swell of grey hairs spreading across our hairlines. How heartbreaking it is to put the plans to buy a home on hold because treatments cost so much money, and money doesn’t grow on trees nor has a history of populating my pockets for too long.

We used to sing together in his silver Elantra “it just takes some time…”, but the closer I get to whatever remains of my life the more I understand how time only takes. Every break I take risks breaking me as well as it can rejuvenate my body and mind. The fine line between resting and rusting, how I’ve made a living of walking its tight rope. And the bygones kept floating by.

We still sing together, more than ever. Only it’s in our white Buick. My only regret is that we didn’t realize that this was the best life could be. We went our separate ways for so long, and now we have no idea what’s left. It’s such a bittersweet kind of dream life.

Paige Six | 10.07.20

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Emotional Alchemy Issue. No. 1

Being chosen for print has always been an object of my desire. I have always wanted to have my work accepted, appreciated, and loved. But what is this driving force that keeps me sharing my words rather than locking them in my armoire to be discovered upon my death like Emily Dickinson?

Jacques Lacan coined the phrase ‘objet petit a’. What he meant to accomplish was noble in my opinion: was to put a neat bow around the emotion surrounding an unattainable object of desire. Was to give humanity a phrase in which we could communicate and relate to one another through our unique shrouds of longing.

I particularly love the use of small. tiny. petite: ‘objet petit a’. Because it feels small, doesn’t it? Even though it inspires our bigger calls to action

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Would you call it an echo? Or perhaps just a ringing? Picture a soft Doppler Effect: a subtle vibration that flows in waves, a pattern that we can follow until the next soundwave disrupts the flow changing our driving direction towards something new and more colorful? Hubble might have said so had he not had so many more important realities to tackle.

Is it to pine for an unspecified, and perhaps abstract moment in the future? A greatness? Or maybe to long for it to rectify the regrets that haunt our past without consequences of regression? A reunion?

It is a ghost that hasn’t passed away yet haunting us, speaking through code upon a ouija board and we simply will not say good bye? Maybe it did die and we’re arrested in the denial stage.

In my time postulating how to put this phrase, ‘objet petit a’ into poetry I have come to some conclusion as to what it means to me, currently, or in the past, as to you are most definitely reading it as it was in mine:

Imagine a mote, a spec of dust, neglected maybe, inside of us that we cannot pinpoint, something too small to see without a microscope. Yet it is powerful. The quantum quandary that allows for the tiniest pieces to hold the greatest potential force. An atomic explosion resulting from hadron collision. A Big Bang. An accelerated particle in all of us that was dormant for far too long.

It’s not missing, I think, even though we search for it, chase it, dream on it. No, I believe this ‘objet petit a’ takes on the abstract shape of an unfillable void. a pocket with an endless hole. While one small spec may light its dark tiny spaces for a while, its insatiable longing pulls us towards the next object of our human appetites.

And it makes us great. It makes us better. It makes humanity, when working towards a cohesive goal more whole. I am proud to be a part of something that made the world more beautiful and kind, even if it is not my final destination…

Paige Six | 3.20.20