3. LATIGAZO – WHIPPING
EVAN
Do you really love me?
Why should you?
I don’t any longer
Believe In friendship.
EVA
It is a horror, an outrage
That we should not be together. I struggle against
The wound of not knowing where you are each minute.
Everything you do is more important to me than my own life.
The whole of me is with you.
I see and feel you so distinctly,
Your beloved cold hand in mine
Your touch on the nape of my neck.
Joy and agony
– my insides torn by pincers.
A double goodbye would have been awful
– two bites on the bullet of pain.
This love is like something we have given birth to.
We must never blunt our imagination or tenderness.
Don’t get a cold in your soul.
EVAN
Are these abortive suicide attempts?
I disappoint everyone.
Cut the cable. Set me free.
I deliberately left one of your letters for Elayna to find.
With me love is linked with
A need to betray. I invite possessiveness.
She made me promise our love would never be physical.
I lied fluidly.
EVA
Even the thought of
Such a loss of pleasure tears at my heart
Like some medieval torture.
You harrow me unbearably.
My defenses are down.
I’m filled me with a sense of ghastly injury.
How I wish I were more beautiful –
It’s my mouth that ages me.
It reveals my greedy secrets.
I want you seeing all of me –
Even if it hurts. My work
Is my legacy –
You are your own child.
You preserve your youth with the harm
That you cause.
I feel I am dead and already
Interred – in you.
You are my eternity.
EVAN
Repressed boredom causes blocks
You can’t have everything.
I am kept aloft by the conflict of
Unbearables.
It makes me happy.
EVA
If our dancing life is over –
Should I enter a convent?
There’s no point in being alive
if we’re not together.
I show my deepest self to you alone.
EVAN
Please – no more shaming conversations
Over Irish whisky. Let’s cut our losses
And get some fun from life.
Your miraculous capacities awaken
My belief in myself.
EVA
The gash in our love might close
But I’ll never forget it’s there.
Life with you is a remote happiness to which I cling
EVAN
And all this time you write such
Fantastic books. If you were as unhappy as you say,
You couldn’t write so well.
I’m proud to be
The whetstone on which you sharpen –
I should be thanked for all your works.
Writing to you
Makes me itch with a beastly itch –
Exhilarated, punch drunk
Feeling your enthrallment
Despite the day’s malaise.
I can’t put my heart back in the hollow
Where it used to be.
You force me to see
Myself.
At the peak of my ambition,
Beauty and power curdle within me.
People are so easily fooled, so
Satisfied with little
identify my performance with my Soul.
You’ve spoiled me for everything.
Stop warning me you’ll take a lover –
I don’t own your life and never aspired to.
There is heartbreak here, but is the ghost in the house
Or in me? We argue about who has the worst friends,
But our friends are all the same. Please
Send another psychic telegram, “You’re the One.”
EVA
Your last screed was a masterpiece.
I believe writing it
Creates that eczema from which
You say you suffer.
My friends at Tosca said it’s bad manners
To make a depressing fuss
And get other people down.
EVAN
Is the strength I draw from you a fairy tale?
I am appalled by the joint misery we feel.
Why should we not rebel?
EVA
You shed your light around me.
If only we could stand each other.
You’ll keep the blood
Running in my veins
Threatening to spill.
EVAN
Someone said I look ten years younger
From drinking your life, I’m sure.
I need my own room because I sleep badly and
I like to roam at night.
Tosca is too emotional to be good taste
But I’m happy you enjoyed it.
I feel far from you right now but
Underneath
I’m outrageously glad.
EVA
Your diplomacy fascinates me.
Your mettle is the stuff of history.
When young I resisted education
Like a fool – But
It makes everything comprehensible.
What kills me is having to deal with people.
I tie myself up writing
Imaginary conversations with you –
It’s possible you’re a creature of
My invention. Our pattern seems set –
Or is it?
If treachery can’t break it,
There is no death.
Alysse Aallyn 