After birth, I looked for a place to dance, but his web was everywhere. It was made of metaphors designed to capture life and lives, including mine. I learned to be still, as the living will do, noticing how everything that had happened went on, an eternal past.
Here comes another of the old men of fallen monuments, still craving to be mourned, to find the host of a living body to feed the death drive, taking everything in reach until the buffer between here and madness is gone.
He speaks of himself with pity, as though speaking of a god-like friend that had bid him a final farewell. Nearby lives were rafts, the impulse to grab, the refrain always mine.
Now I want only to un-forget myself, to make her un-forgotten, unsilenced, unearthed, to sing a voice I have stitched myself from smooth sheets of shining dark. To save the orange that this hand once knew and heard, the globe of its peace. How my palms once kissed its skin to feel the volume of its liquid pulse into lifelines.
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Adapted from Hélène Cixous’s Angst, as well as Vivre I’orange/To Live the Orange.