mistaking the voice as capable of hearing
Hello?
Hello—
It’s good to see—
It’s me! Let me tell you about me.
Yes. It is you again.
Whom I meant to welcome.
Around whom I now cannot breathe.
Your voice filled the room before you entered.
Your stories, hungry as fire, asked to be fed.
I mistook the smoke for mystery.
Sometimes I miss the kind of silence
that didn’t need my attention
to exist.
to reject another tired hero’s story
Yes, I see those stories, too, all around me. The location and abundance of which some will exclaim, “are everywhere!”
No matter where I go, the one that interests me most is not a story, for it is made of what would not be recognized as such. It tends to feature a non-hero whose non-feats go unnoticed by being what they are–– more constant labors, and no less common than the fact of the web appearing between the branches of the fig tree overnight.
Many of those who proclaim most loudly that stories are everywhere! are in fact looking for the same story––as anyone armed with hammers for hands, might learn to see only nails. This much-sought-after tale is another version of the hero with his labors, slaying or banging on whatever he can’t pick up.
Lately I have grown very tired of its droning echo, and I do not think I am alone. This one, I think, has gone far enough. Give me more spider, more web, more patience, less noise.
Lately, I think, give me no more of these old stories, only quiet tending: of the careful meal, the clean floor, fresh sheets, attentive care.
It is possible I live at the beginning of the end of the age of an old story. As someone still alive inside it, I lack the perspective I would need to confirm or refute this suspicion with any presumption of accuracy.
Finding the ability to make those quiet and non-storied, daily events happen is the only narrative I can find valuable right now. This is partially because I could use some help with these things and also because I have grown very tired of that other clamor.
I am also weary of those who make, as a habit, a racket to entertain. These are different from those who make an entertaining noise for reasons they have not intended. I am weary of those who throw plastic affirmations when it is clear that all their expression can do is reproduce the old pain.
The makers of these pseudo-joys, in an effort to to capitalize on the coin of the realm, regularly add to daily misery by their steadfast commitment to cellophane-wrapped optimisms.
Meanwhile, so many dead. And also, so many able but unwilling bodies, who have made their non-decisions with brilliant sheens of glamour, who feel justified in their non-decisions to leave unwashed those dirty sheets, who unprepare the careful meal whether or not they will eat it, or to remember what hour of what day it is, now.
animal sounds
I arrive in middle age at a beginning, so now I write and speak. I do these acts to correct some learned habits of believing I must know where I will end before I open my mouth to say anything. Such learned habits, I see now, have conditioned my seeming docility.
Fortunately, I have no ends. Better yet, I see this now. So here is as good a place as any, to begin.
This is a small act of defiance, against the idea that the purpose of saying anything is to make a point and that the point is to mean something. Some perspective is afforded now, from witness. To the urgency of the kings of the world, to end this life. (To be clear, some make the point more subtly than others, but to be a prize is a kind of end, and it is possible to spend a life chasing this state, only to learn to see it for the burial it is.)
This affords some confidence to say that one approach that many take when confronted with the impossible fact of a life, is to bring it to a point. Some end to justify the means and all of that. Very Machiavellian. Such notions are rampant now. Knowing this moves me, too.
Nothing I mean to say is so abstract that it may be extracted, like oil from my flesh. Oil, biologically speaking, is the accumulation of bodies under pressure over time. I am nowhere near the age of oil, as I am still alive. The fact of being so is what I mean to value now.
Also, my connection to the dead. This, I treasure. How would I continue, I wonder, without their excellent company? The dead have always been around me, speaking. These and the not yet born have much to say, and little of their ripe and blooming abundance has anything to do with points. The dead, as you may imagine, often have a sense of humor when it comes to ends, as this affords their carrying on. The not-yet-born are young enough to laugh with full bellies of air, at the absurdity, of aiming for a point in the midst of all of this.
in possibility
what might a whole
faith
sound?
with her heartmind
with her souled body
in denial of dictates
by keepers of orders
to wrench by flawed reason
mind from herself
being from womb
also her
how would her chorus
shiver grace back
to her flesh
light back to word
mystery returned
to these folds
within her
extremity
what is the word for what
happens when a mouth
opens wide with cry so great
it makes no sound?
as an invalid premise for the work of supporting life
and the mass of a wait
sometimes it goes like this:
with should on one side, screaming
and on another, want––a solemn mass
bearing down until
one day, when the weight of it gives all
and then it’s time to hear the quiet part
now loud
and mirror shadows
The writer, aware that the telling of certain stories in the third person might, by another writer, be handled effectively as neat confessionals, sometimes laments. It would be good if she could walk into the world naked, saying “I am that I am!” like some deity.
Having lost belief in selves as focal points some time ago, now she can only watch what happens to her body with uncertain degrees of remove. Having also lost allegiances to what she once might have considered a certain landform of facts like a single continent against a singular ocean, she now thinks that it does her no good to try to figure where any of these went.
Now that any nascent sense of would-be self is gone, memory can also be recognized at some distance, for the fiction it is. Her old ways would never admit such heresy. Once, she tried to say things like “I did,” and “I went” and “this is how it was.”
She is no longer convinced that she has been anyone, anywhere, ever. However, given various expectations of the current milieu, this emerging understanding is going to continue to present certain problems. For now, the writer may decide to ignore these, keeping vigil in this bed in this underground shelter where this pen over this notebook continues to move.
*
First published in Exist Otherwise, January 2023
Our sands
With bone worn backs we huddle
in the shadow of empire, nursing
unborn stars, to beg the question:
how many dawns remain? Against
vain attempts to tame the hungers
of that constant, mechanical mouth,
its gaping hole the void in the centers
where we once met beneath another
sun, in another time, before time was
eaten too, to be excreted in legions
of micro units, meted out in
increments
of perceived
worth.
territories
where were we after
leaving forever sea
deserted now
light flash to blind
stirring some end
we held breath
over steam keening
at the hollows of
throats at the caverns
between gut and lung
where voice roots
defiant of confines
somewhere between
dawn and not yet
dark we pooled longings
in throats to spend them
when night came
our cry
