Category: earthling

ideas for beginning

somewhere, meaning

Start with want.

Begin with impatience, the stuck breath of what to say when everyone is always interrupting, holding forth.

Start with fever.

Begin with syntax as the opposite of cultivated rows of well-behaved lines, to swing the screeching monkey mind between vining ellipses.

Start with eruption of doggerel in perfect union with the fervent bloom of heart’s first blood, and with the last. Of everything. Start with everything at once, all at one time.

Begin as a reader. Begin with a piercing sense of fundamental unworthiness. Then say the word.

Start intending to get a closer look at the many-legged creature sliming under the rock you take to be your soul. Start naming the insects teeming in the soul, and the slime you mistook for a separate matter.

Begin with the end in mind––no, not your ends. The end. Begin with questions, like how many legs? And what is the taste of this monster’s spool?

Start with what may kill you and then get past it. Resist thinking this makes you stronger than those who start with what may kill you and then get nowhere. Notice how everywhere you get; you break open into more pieces. Break. Dance.

Begin building the opposite of a fortress. Start with rubble. With commitment and patience, one day you may evolve into an underwater wreck. Stick with it, and one day you will become the sand of an abandoned beach.

I mean.

Start with revision. Of the material as they have been presented to you, by all who meant you well, or ill. Start by revising the known story.

Begin against logic, against all reasonable arguments for some better thing. In hope and without any.

I mean.

You can begin with an attempt to explain, if you must. But that one, I think, is overrated. So little of this what will submit to explanation, anyway. Plenty of people get off on the idea of fitting saddles onto flying dragons, but some prefer dragons in their wildest states, breathing fire against any demands to explain themselves.

Start with putting a bucket to catch the drops from a leaking roof, or you can start on the roof–– or if you are really motivated, you can remove the roof. There are many ways to stop a leak, but none to stop the leaking of the world from the containers we try to make for it.

Begin with an admission. I am such a small container, and the world is leaking from me.

I mean.

Begin in darkness, deaf, and dumb as bedrock, mute as the whale as she appears to the climber who cannot hear her singing.

touring the empire

at midnight

There were forests and wildlands at the outskirts of the empire––still, can you imagine?! All quaking earth and quail whistle, where roaring waters sounded ceaselessly. We were paid to visit them, as translators––not very much, as everyone believed that none of the forms of this land had anything informative to offer. What they had to say was so much more than the intelligence the emperors were after but there wasn’t a word for what it was, so we returned without much to say, accepting pennies for our silence. We said nothing, too, of the stifling emptiness they built of gilded halls of recycled data sets, sharpened to cut the earnest pilgrim at every edge. The naked emperors bled, too, but no one spoke of this––neither the blood nor their nakedness. The dogs followed at a distance, to lick it up. There was no room in the shelters in the shadows of the golden halls, so we took our numbers and got in line with the others while the shining halls stood empty, dripping blood with the wind and the dogs howling through them.

wilding

to go forth, into seed, carrying on

If one day when finally tone-deaf I should walk guffawing into the solemn halls, swishing gauze skirts to knock stolid bishops over wooden kings while laughing too loud and blowing smoke rings, it may be observed, by anyone still living who knew me when I was more mild in manner and patient in my time, that she had been a patient woman, once.

But, as these things go, by the time the cork is good and gone, so are the ones with any memory of milder times. So, I will have to be ready when I finally go, to enter with full conviction into the role, because patience, however much a virtue, will only do until the time for waiting has run out, and after so much of that one has to decide to give up the temporary shelter that comes of waiting and dive in full and fast to what certain strangers will describe as the antics of an eccentric elder at fashionable parties, who, after all was just relentless with her offhand remarks, head back and laughing the whole time.

one beginning

an original affirmation

Take it, I said again, and gave
this body to mirror you an origin
in chorus of looping yessss, as
susurrations waving shores
to where they waited, wanting
words to answer but I had only
one. It was yes and child
yes again, and there they
were yes child and here,
meaning all of it.

benediction

from a time beside ours

Child. How old do you think I am?
Don’t answer. What can you know
of time, having tasted–-what, a drop?

What fills your mouth has enough
volume to fill the space of the cave
around your tongue. Hold it there
and pay attention.

Don’t talk to me about time’s layers
when an atom has flown like pollen
into your nose to stick like a note
at the back of your throat,
substance enough––

to make you sneeze it from yourself
like one or another abstract theory
about its essential substance
as though your words can do you
any good in your current state.

Taste, child. Try holding
what comes. Swallow.
Know nothing. Try again.

This is what we do.
They spit on our foreheads.
It does not mean to us
what the spitting kind want
it to mean, and so we carry on.

que c’est

Qu’est-ce que c’est ?

It is like wanting to be able to dance
in a place where my feet are steeped
in tar pits, and I am the soon-to-be exhibit,
wailing with my tusks turned to sky.

Je veux me réveiller et je veux croire
qu’il est peut-être possible de rester là,
pendant un petit moment avant d’être
choqué en retour d’accepter la violence
quotidienne.

I want to dream believing it is still possible
to stay there for a moment before
being shocked back into routine
acceptance of the routine violence
of a given day.

I sit here, bleeding, wanting to insist
let us not for now pretend to be saving
each other when simple company
is enough. If it isn’t, then what do I do
with this knowing? That you will never
hear.

The idea of rescue for anyone here is far
past the depths, and here is my confession.

I do not know what those depths are called.
I do not know this space. I cannot name this time.
And yet, time keeps insisting. On seeming to know
me. What a thing, imaginer.

But I suspect.
That something about being makes this happen.
Peut-être.
That I spend what life I have in service of what
I will never be able to offer in kind.

Où es-tu ? Je ne peux pas en voir.

Enough,
éventuellement.

When hope gives out, I only want
to dream.

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