seeds that will not bloom.
The chill in the room is just crooked enough to pull me around and through as though with a hook, and the yarn over my fingers is just thin enough that I give up fashioning baby nooses. I want to learn to play the musical saw and produce sounds that can only be described as 'weird' in the original sense of the word, keening ululations that keep my block awake the whole night (bean sidhe). The phrase "in the original sense of the word" is a complete fallacy, I know this, but I use it anyway as though any of these words had any meaning at all, as though the hours aren't just ticking themselves off faster and faster, as though I weren't forgetting how to speak. I'd take the frost-sharpened hook described by the wind at my window pane and just pull out my tongue by the roots, really I would, but I still have some things saved to say before I lose speech entirely and admit that words never did a body any good and skin even less than that. The missing hours present themselves over and over again in my mind and ask for skin to cover their bones (despite), and even though I write that here for a nebulous (negligible) population to read, no one but me knows what it means. Again, the meaninglessness of language, when it can't even fill in that blank time, for reader (?) or writer. I would give my tongue if I thought it would make you speak, but statues don't--I shove down thoughts of Galatea, of effigies of the Virgin weeping salt and blood, seeping milk--and I know better now. I've bitten through my lips at least three times in the past few days, yet it always surprises me when the skin rips clear and I taste blood. As though I expected other layers to be there beneath it. I expect soon that I'll have chewed my lips clear off of my face, leaving my mouth bleeding and ragged and chapped and maybe pitiful. Did I just aspire to be pitiful? Or self-pitying? "Mea culpa," and I'll beat my breast and wail to prove it, though that wouldn't preclude a well-placed dagger or two. Oh, too late for that, I've bungled it, I've handed out the daggers handle-first, and now they're all pointing at me. Stomach soured, (superfluous) skin dry and scaly. Mutely, so as not to entangle words in anything this precarious, I plant mock orange and petunias, yarrow and yellow tulips. Save the daggers for the living.
"I feel along the edges of life
for a way
that will lead to open land."
--David Ignatow
Nothing yet in sight, though the wind sings loudly of something just over the horizon. Sheathe the dagger and take the wind's advice, too. It's the land I come from that she speaks of, though it's been sown with salt and burned.
"I feel along the edges of life
for a way
that will lead to open land."
--David Ignatow
Nothing yet in sight, though the wind sings loudly of something just over the horizon. Sheathe the dagger and take the wind's advice, too. It's the land I come from that she speaks of, though it's been sown with salt and burned.