Month: April 2025

before here

what beyond there

And then in the hush, a shift
stops the pen, suddenly exhausted
by the weight of what preceded it.
There are not enough words
to make a wall between now
and what is lost. No sense
running for another stone
to prop up against the last
already threatening to give.
The only steps that matter now
are into a nonspace with no
road to lead you anywhere
and yet the only here
there is when you leave
that other one.

dear might be

in close proximity, unhearing

i imagine sometimes
you as your almost-believable avatar who
one day opens an imagined door
or ears to hear, to let them, to all you do
not––
inside or out in these eons between us
and your almost-never, the moment
of this blaring nevermind, i train her
back to soundproof cellars
of some other time
promising to visit.

origin songs

& whose word

strange unseen dark of this body
heartbeating unto her first word

and it was good
and it was listen

all this before the hour of tower lights
and high walls blaring admonitions

ripe for falling from and that followed
and with it the word forbidden and us

tumbling after
& now is a good time to remember

how in the beginning
before the word

was her hearing
like come

lump

of clay

You go around putting on the necessary faces at the appropriate times, hiding the other mess in the back spaces of any given place or moment. In conversation you might allude in an offhand manner to the messes waiting in the wings but you know not to break certain taboos. One of these being an admission that you live entirely in the wings, just flying around in the shadows keeping company with the discarded stuff that has always been your kind. 

Then you are going about the motions of your seemingly appropriate life and then there is this urgent material flopping over and beyond the edges of every shut closet door, every drawer. One day, during a vigorous cleaning, you decide to collect the stuff. You throw out lots of things, but this stuff is something else, you set it aside. It waits, being regularly looked at, appearing to pose a question about handling. 

Yes, you tell it. Yes. I hear you.  Maybe it hears you, maybe not. You touch it. It holds the indent of your finger. It holds space, a malleable and formless lump. One moment it is magnificent in its strangeness, luminous in soft light, and another moment it looks like something a dog left on the sidewalk, and you wonder who does this?

One day, you pose  a series of related partial questions to the lump. Will you? And pull. Reveal to me? Knead. Something? And you spend time just holding the cool, lumpy mass of it in a hand, warming. 

Its formlessness is part of the appeal, and so is its willingness to bend to any form but precisely.

You handle it. Set it down. It now has a spot on the bedside table, beside the lamp, the pile of books, the coffee cup. The cat approaches, sniffs it, turns, sits beside the lump, then moves away.

Will you? You ask the lump. Show me? You mean your whole life but are embarrassed to say this aloud. You are not yet ready to admit to yourself what you are hearing when the lump whispers back.

You are sleeping, dreaming, or otherwise away when it talks. The cat, who listens with more experience and a more advanced sense of time and purpose,  gives you a pointed look when you return. You carry on, leaving, prodding, kneading, arranging, and setting it down. Then you sleep. 

Here I am, the lump whispers while you dream. Your whole life.

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