who is speaking?
this question at least
as urgent as the other
more often asked,
on what they say.
who is living?
who is allowed
or encouraged
to die?
each at least
as critical as
the issue
of how.
order
and keeping
Tag: speech
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.
Holler
From an undersea expanse.
It started above ground. Then we
worked the present’s peace, as
the storm and life went on until
the whole story was underwater.
The lens moved to track the current,
the coral, its choral lives. The lens
was intelligent. It saw us. We
looked back, our entire lives
before us, now beyond speech,
the brave vessels of our knocking
hearts still moving by the word.
We held new names inside us,
hinting at what we were and to
what we were being returned.
Down we went. At last,
there was no time before this
but our remembrance, and some
would make trespass of memory
holding it close, would hear its
first utterance in the water, like
Mother even now, in
this constant dusk the day
still breaking in my–––
But she said:
Hush,
don’t speak to me of
souls. Not here, at this
late hour. Only hold.