Kajitsu [FRUIT]

"According to the
Qur'an,
pomegranates grow
in the gardens
of paradise
(55:068).
The Qur'an also mentions
pomegranates twice,
examples of
good things God creates"
...
"flower is the symbol of summer
...
"If an orange is
peeled with a knife,
it is possible
to cut the peel off
one long
unbroken piece.
Schoolgirls in some countries
chant a rhyme,
and throw
the long orange peel
over their shoulder,
then look
how it falls
to find the initial letter
of the
name
of the boy that loves
them."\
...
"some countries, 'blood oranges' a
symbol of the death
of Jesus."1

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(I)
Our fall from grace was the color of a rainstorm; white streaks etched into a cloudy sky, a gray and silent beach. I look into your face this very moment and in it, past all the bones and the blood and the nerves....I see nothing. I hear nothing. Your mouth, working fast to expell the pestilent words generated from vibrations deep within you [good vibrations--bad vibrations], pink-dyed hair and a halo of fleshy earthworms glued to your skull, your neck, crawling towards your eyes. There is nothing in you...a nothingness far beyond that which you say I lack, far beyond that which I know I gave you.
Oh, stop these birds from flying, end the steady crawl of mist and fog across a barren and brackish landscape of blackened water.
But I'm lying. You are just as beautiful, and ten times as eloquent with the gold-silver light touching your back, rimming your face in gold, and the violent color of your feather-down hair is glowing, flooding out in a halo of unrestrained memories. And there is much---far too much---that I can still feel behind your eyes, past all the anatomy and nerves and blood vessels.
Nerves. Those were some nerves we had, and it's been long, far and long, but just look---just look at how far we came.
And at how quickly we have come unmade undone unwanted. 5

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(II)8

We've only and ever been a line from a teenage song, angst-ridden soaked converses dripping with the blood of our still-beating grenadehearts. Walking cliches. A cliche now, or the opposite, falling and twisting and burning, I'm melting this sand into glass, I'm boiling the ocean away, but you are ice, and you jump to the water, freeze it half-melted, smile at me with two black and burning eyes, your lips frozen in a sneer. A kiss. A smile.
One-eyed Freddie knew us better than we ever knew ourselves--he knew the ending, when we could only see the beginning [beginningbeginningbeginning], endless opportunities. And then we dissolved into metaphysical madness, and you dyed your hair a violent canary-yellow for one day, and we waited in line for tickets to the greatestshowonearth in Seattle, and we came apart.
Even now the cliche burns in my chest, and I cannot even legitimize the pain I'm feeling, because the birds won'tcan't shut up, but neither can you, and your fingernails were never black. Well, my dear, I can't give a single damn, because mine were never yellow and red, fire hydrant and hot dog colors, because you shrugged off my explanations and we lost our way.
There it goes. Like a Journey song, like the end of a funeral, like the beginning of life [all little tragedies]. But our lives are truths, just the same, and we didn't take 'the midnight train', but we played a game of midnight pool, and you only hit the orange ones, and you never saw my eyes, you never saw my end.
Now here's a memory for you, the greatest moment of my life, a religious experience--us, buying oranges and tangerines and mandarins and tangelos and pomegranates. And us, chewing on the seeds and getting sick of oranges the whole way to denver, [I felt sick from the endlesssmell of oranges and you smiled mysteriously and laughed that we would never be in danger of scurvy]--I didn't laugh, just ran to the rest stop and lost my way home along with the oranges and tangelos and pomegranate seeds between my teeth, orange in the water. [back then your hair was blue--the opposite the opposite of orange] but what does that matter now? 9

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(III)11

Two unspoken words and you turn away, sand falling from your skin and hair, falling away with pieces of your skin, turning this beach a bloody red.
Fallen....we fell long ago, when we ran and hid and ran until we could no longer find ourselves, could no longer see the old ones we were, could no longer remember the way home, became one of a pair and nothing more.
The shoe drops, there's no way out and I lose this last marble, orange like the beginning, throw it into the sea with the old rings and an inuyasha keychain, turn around and I find you are the mist, and you were never here...but no. I knew that all along. You were lost to me in a hospital room, replaced by the smell of orange floor sanitizer and feathers. You became feathers then, in the moments before you blinked. That was all it was-- I told them, but they didn't believe. I believed. A simple blink--you forgot to open your eyes. I was sorry and you were sorry and they were sorry but it was something below your skin and your muscles and your nerves and your bones and it was yourself that put the pills in the orange juice, your pure and only self, and nothing more. There was no late-night acid to burn away your brain, no early platelets, no pneumonia or fire or car crash. No clean headlights and dirty collisions. It was all you, creamy skin and a pomegranate backpack, maybe ten or twenty of the things, their skin tattooed with marker words--all for me, all perfectly labeled. [giving away possessions]. No danger for you, no ziptie ring that wouldn't come off, no zippo lighters, no loss of self. Too young, and the aloneness beckoned like your skin, like a ring hidden in an orange, like your fallen face.12

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(IV)15

My mistake. We didn't discuss it. It was me, none of you, and we were suffering for a few days, and then we drove to Denver. The ocean beckoned, with its promise of balsa wood rafts and dreams and scurvy and cheap hotels on the steaming tarmac of western cities. It beckoned, and we laughed, feasting on the oranges of our early years.
My blood boiled and it ran across the floor and I sank through the styrofoam, the styrofoam cups with sticky-sweet oranges, blood oranges, and the bottles of pills on the floor and in your stomach, and your cherry-bright lips, your pink-sweet hair. Cotton candy on the floor, melted and mixing with my blood...you never lost our midnight games and you never lost at all, you never had to lose, and your last supper was a feast of oranges. My hands were around the pomegranates, a backpack of loss on the floor, a packet of dreams for you.
The western cities are mine alone, and the final kiss of death and oranges was the fall we needed to finally lose the final circles of our baby-blue dreaming. 16

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(V)18

I had a feeling for this ending...even at the beginning [and secretly, I agreed with freddie-the-one-eyed, because I knew there was a subtle darkness that seeped out of your eyes and your mouth and into mine when we kissed, coloring me pomegranate-red].
It is all stained in your eyes, staring out at me through the mist and the fog and the rain, colored pomegranate in apology and looking past the rain-filled spaces that I hold. But it's too late and I am a cliche, and you are an apology.
It's shining past your eyes, and the pomegranates I ate the whole way here are pieces of sand from your cheeks, the parts of your self-in-me, and the samurai-plated-armor of your hand, hanging over a denver balcony. The focus is gone, So are you. But you're walking with me still, down the beach and into the ozone. Two cliches for one. A tangerine and a pomegranate.19

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