Title: Lofty Incantations
Characters: Jess
Pairing: Rory/Jess
Genre: General, Angst
Rating: PG
Word Count: 705 words excluding quotes
Summary: He is older now, and poetry is starting to make sense.
Disclaimer: There are about a million poetry quotes used in this, and none of it is mine. Everything belongs to its respective owners, including Gilmore Girls. I'm not even going to try and name them all, but if you want to know what one is from, just ask.
This came out when I was trying to write something completely different, and it completely random and a little experimental. What do you think? It looks better on livejournal, by the way. The link is on my bio. Much more spaced out.
He is older now, and poetry is starting to make sense.
The aching sadness and burning passion. The melancholy.
He blames her.
He stays away from the syllabi that were jammed down his throat in school.
(Sorry Walt, sorry Emily. Another time, you may have had a shot.)
It starts with the Beats, when he moves slowly away from the prose-like hysterics of Ginsberg (who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish) and onto Bukowski, Sandburg, Williams, Kerouac, the whole bunch of bastards.
(Buk is still his favourite, and he still thinks he would have been Austen's favourite too. Neither of them were huge fans of society they observed from the fringes).
From there he moves on to cummings, Neruda, Yeats, all the lonely sons of bitches.
The light from the street outside hits the pages in slices of orange light as he pours through second-hand books with missing pages and yellowed paper, and searches for sympathy.
Their words pour into him, spinning and yanking his soul until he is full up with their words, and has none of his own left.
Here is the worst thing:
He has lost his voice.
He sits down at night, in the morning, in the park, to write, and all that pours out of him is not his:
Tonight I can write the saddest lines
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the infinite sky.
Here is the best thing:
He is not alone any more.
The initial burn fades away eventually.
He moves on to Yeats.
Pining, yearning Yeats and his lovely Maud Gonne (and her daughter; teaching him that there are worse rock bottoms than his own personal bedrock).
Yeats shows him his future:
The last stroke of midnight dies.
All day in the one chair
From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged
In rambling talk with an image of air:
Vague memories, nothing but memories.
He at least has a shred of pride left, and avoids the original coveter: Petrarch.
He waits patiently for the day that these men's words (always men, he notices) cease to express his own pain. Then he can start writing again.
It comes at a funeral.
Blow hope to terror; blow seeing to blind
(blow pity to envy and soul to mind)
He travels back to that sepulchre by the sea.
She is ethereal, and she ruins him all over again.
(The irony is: he cannot feel anything without her.)
Yeats is sympathetic.
He chokes on the venomous bile of his own words once again, and vomits them all over the page, packages it, and sells it to college kids who think he is deep and radical and soulful.
He's actually just seriously fucked up.
At nights, whether his bed is empty or filled with another girl, he curls his hands into his pillow and pretends he can feel her weight beside him. Her phantom hair tickles his nose.
In the morning, he comforts himself with the knowledge that men before him have done it too.
I searched, but no one else had your rhythms, your light
Still, he thinks he doesn't want to be like these men anymore. The sight of his own face in the mirror, tarnished and rough (and is that he or the mirror? It is all one now), causes bile to rise in his throat. But he manages.
He plods on, ignoring everything but sales numbers, and artsy events, and the sway of the hips of the girl who lives in the apartment across the hall. Periodically, his hands clench into fists and he cannot unclench.
Every once and a while, the oxygen runs out, and he finds himself choking with need for her. The heavens open, and suddenly everything is in colour again.
(With her, it was technicolour.
He supposes it is the best he can ask for.)
And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
He wonders why he let it be her that ruined him. He wonders until everything goes grey again.
Was he always a shell? He doesn't know anymore.
She doesn't age to him, and he thinks it is the same for her.
She will always be his definition of purity.
He lost the taste for sugar a long time ago.
His bones ache for her, and it is not the sharp, bitter ache that characterised his twenties, but calmer, heavier. Deeper. He shudders for her.
Leaning into the afternoons I fling my sad nets
to that sea that is thrashed by your oceanic eyes.
And he is tired.
And he cannot find his voice anymore. He stops writing.
What remains?
He is disgusted with himself.
(Mostly he still yearns for her).
They had their chance, once.
He won't wait forever, but he will.
His fingers were once stained and blistered from pressing pen to paper determinedly. They are smooth now, and clean. His muse departs.
He stops writing.
We are like roses that have never bothered to
bloom when we should have bloomed and
it is as if
the sun has become disgusted with
waiting
Who is he, now?