a corridor full of holes (if we can say that) there are pairs of eyelids hanging here and closed doors with dark lines underneath.
it's grim, i said, but it is a matter of perspective, and thankfully i was willing to swap so that my collection could stretch from one end to the other.
we slide along the carpet every morning, our snail antennae retract at a poke from the sun.
It's been a few months since I last talked in this manner. This is a voice, after all, a particular inflexion of my vocal chords; a deliberate accent. I remember sitting on my childhood bed with my back against the wall on the other side of the world. It dawned on me that this was a way of voicing how I feel that's more confusing for me than other voices. My words glide into each other and there are too many sentences. It gets crowded. It dawned on me that I could be more deliberate and align my words in a way closer to how they seem to draw in my own thinking. Less prepositions and logical syntax. Less questions about whether how I really put things fit how they sat in my mind. They didn't. This is a way of communicating that's supposedly clearer for people; it is not so for me. My words are knotted and ideas and images are tethered by wisps and inchoations. In my mind, time does sit, and so the rhythm of keep-going that prose suggests is an altercation with the physics of language in my own conception, for my own purposes. I don't own them of course, but I am making a distinction. I do not understand things, it seems. I stand by them. They happen, and I am here.
A where-wolf in the thrashing bushwalks of the freely-forested dreamt-up world. It's probably true that by manipulating language, by making concepts, re-making concepts, shattering consciously the categories that language offers us, we come closer to being mechanics. Figuring things out. This is a bottle. This is a nose. This is a nose-bottle. A bottled nose. A something we figure out, we image. No it's not real. Yes, it is really. Reality is an art, not the other way around. What I have accepted as 'the way' or 'the real' is just a figuration that could be something else if it is figured elseway. What am I doing? Figuring. Fashioning. Making. Newing. None of it is 'a' thing, but 'any'thing instantiated. Doing so makes me. It puts in touch me with the wording of me. I could be me, but I am something else. The verb to be separates. Punctuation marks. Short sentences drive points home off the cliff. I read back and a tendrilled worry inside me is felt. It slides on the edges. I don't make sense. What is the sense in writing something that does not make sense? It is a fashion of reality. It is as real as the real, but its story is unfamiliar. I bet it could become familiar if one wished to familiarise oneself with it. The syntax makes me feel guilty as if it should all be clear. Writing 'poetry' is easier for me, really, because there's less expectations of clarity, there. More anythings go, really, but even that isn't totally freeing. I write this for it to be seen. I write this so that you can see it. And that is the same thing as writing this so that I can see it. I put it out 'there' and that makes me feel validated. You don't have to say a word - I already know what I want and it is a trapdoor-kind of choice to keep it from myself (because I already have it, knowing it). I keep it there in brackets and build a frame around it that becomes a house. I live there, in want, waiting for an architect to knock down the pillars and the wooden panelling. No, really, I live there because I can make it appear like I do, and that's good enough an illusion for me to play with. I write this because I am playing. I think I live like this because I am playing and I can't justify stopping. The little boy I mention in the past three years and whatnot of this blog and writing, he who is anxious, scared, is an instance, a possibility, a reality. He really likes to play, and he enjoyed playing victim. Now I know he was playing, and sometimes I do enjoy keeping that up, forgetting. I have to forget, to do it. This is probably the 'thing' I wanted to get by writing this, after the words. A point of okay, of saying I choose to forget. I choose not to remember. This is my going concern/conifer. Imogen Heap's lyrics: "So how do I do normal? The smile I fake, the permanent wave of Cue cards and fix-it gears, Can't you tell I'm not myself? I'm a slow motion accident lost in coffee rings and fingerprints. I don't wanna feel anything, but I do, and it all comes back to you."
whoever you are, you who are here. I feel you in this way
again, I am found in conversation with here: there are cars and there are people and i wish i was tall so that i could touch all the trees. but my mind is preoccupied with past thoughts, with the two elastic years wrapped around [you i] so much that raindrops like to draw the veins of my hands on bus windows. going home feels like circulation, because there are no crossroads. i like listening to houses move and the road outside be smeared by tyres that evaporate. i forget and am reminded; i forget. there goes the sun down tickling the back of leaves and the giddy light catches between my eyelashes. there is enough slithered through to twist you upside-down and -up again. then i have to blink a few times roll back the film stretched over irises unstick you from the negative.
the rain hits me in the face. collects upon it, a spoonful of dots marking where i have been your fingertip drawing a constellation. when you look up, you watch the glow worms you put there wiggle, my skin a cave painted by your eyes, my stalactites a gallery of sculptures your nostrils chip away at as they hover, they a pair of twin dragonflies exploring. they uncover me, wiggle their wings in salute making my walls scrunch into curtains ready to be drawn.
for being a ship and asking for wind for your sails, for navigating without a map the crowded hillsides and rough streets that pass for a city of twenty-two years and some and for slipping a note to him laying siege to lay still and look in the brook with a stream, under the canopy of now, i thank you.
he has nails in the woodwork and it's when one looses that a splinter hits, i forget and am reminded by you that brackets come in pairs, and without the other, one is left to be a wish on a cheek.
I am on two momentae. The surf is on. Beginning with an ending, ending with a beginning, this is what I mean by riding a wave onto another wave. This cannot be the work of my thoughts, I conclude, but here I am. Steady(ing).
You can also find me on tumblr at http://hyphonowlet.tumblr.com/
Thank you for your presence and readership. And upon leaving, may you take a pocket of stillness with you, and a smile within, to share with everything.
