DAY 60. partner poem!

This is my collaborative project, read by two people. (Holly's half and Tim's slideshow of hands are missing so I'm putting pictures that Alfred Steiglitz took of Georgia O'Keefe's hands. love love love)

Both: What's up?
Holly: You know
Emily: Like um I guess
H: i mean
E: Maybe
H: Sort of
E: Whatever
H: I don't know
Both: We need to talk
H: What's wrong?
E: Nothing's wrong, I say
and think about how not-false, not-true it is
Right now my cells are grating against each other
My synapses fire wrong
Right now stars, ragged holes in the sky, galaxies of stars are
imploding and exploding at once
like wrapped-up angriness.
And we stand here, mouths moving, nervous wolf smiles,
laughing because not laughing would involve fetal positional crying because
"I understand" can't even begin to apply to us, not humans--
I can't see anything from the dark of my thirty cubic centimeters of skull.
Are you hearing the words behind my words? Seeing the face right behind my eyes?
Everything is wrong, because
we are writers in a world where communication doesn't really happen in words.
It happens in a flash of eyes that means "please don't break any more plates" or a twitch of hands that says
"i will never be able to tell you that i love you"
Words are the wild, hopeful thrashing of a wounded animal--
words are the rocks we hopped to cross rivers when we were young--
but how frequently we fall into the spaces between them.
Spaces full of humans where words cannot go.
We're falling into a gap,
We're so far from all right
that people now believe they need their minds altered to be real,
to speak what they long to speak, even if
the side effects leave them stumbling over their emptiness in the heavy hollow morning.
I'm telling you that even trees talk-- sending chemical signals into the air and letting them drift
never knowing
if they were received right or at all.
When we were babies we communicated through blood.
by flesh connected with our mothers
We're amputees now, all missing pieces, but nothing's wrong--
we can't keep physical and emotional conversations straight,
these connections we confuse, indistinct and painful--
but nothing's wrong.
How are you?

(cue holly: i'm fine & her poem)
(nevermind)
(say it)
(repeat beginning up til "We need to talk")