Vow of Leprosy
She rolls her eyes around the time my tongue clicks on the third syllable of “cryonic” and she begins to give less consideration toward my hesitant cadence than to the stillness of the ceiling and the silence surrounding my speaking, the calm created by my nervous lack of passion, my stoic revelation of desperation. I have a tendency to project my own insecurities into criticisms voiced by figments of other people inside my mind, so, in recalling the paradox of parables, I argue to myself that I’m not merely muttering riddles but elucidations. “Cryonic” is not just a fancy way of saying “freezing” - some stochastic synonym I plucked from a thesaurus with a pretentious intention of viewing my verse as more artistic when rendered with rare diction, but rather, it doesn’t have the hyperbolic connotations of the commonly overused “freezing” that I don’t want. Words that precisely describe our perceptions should not go unused, ignored and thereafter forgotten, exiled into lexicons and blacklisted as archaic, their unfamiliarity become the proverbial, verbal leprosy; we neglect not just groups of letters, superfluous syllables, but statement and sentiment as well.
Though the shivers brought to mind by the word “freezing” might portray the vacillations that express the indecision born of the abortion of choice, I’m trying to illicit different impressions; likewise, I’m not seriously curious about what a fetus might say if it could comprehend - let alone reply - when you asked it, “Do you want to be aborted? or do you want to be baptized Roman Catholic?” No, I’m investigating the significance of the fact that the inaugural event in the life of a human being is a choice that is made for it. I can’t remember staring down into the baptismal font as an infant, yet, last time I looked, I thought my reflection wasn’t just an image but was actually my youth, frozen with eyes cast above in fearful inquiry, held captive in a “cryonic hellmouth pool of chrism penitence” where the Original Sin I was taught to regret and repent was the choice to be born, while I would’ve been condemned without chance of contrition had someone convinced my mother that rape was reason enough to choose not to bear; that would’ve been her decision and her damnation as well.
But I’m here, and it’s perspectives like these that I want to share, though I’m suffocated in subtext that seems to drown beneath the surface, submerged in the subconscious residue of repression, the latent sophistry of lorn stoicism, so I don’t know how to emote the elaborate perceptions; as if with a confused definition of “Purgatory” - instead of purging my gravid feelings - I’m somewhere closer to Limbo, lost in the privation. It’s bleak here, like a blank, loose leaf of paper, and that’s how I used to see the stage, where my voice turned to ink while the ears of the listeners were their eyes so that my speaking at an Open Mic was the only way to have my work read. Still I fear few listen because I seem to sketch a better performance than I animate.
Now she’s there, refusing to pay me her attention until I steal it, waiting withal to feel something from me; even in my audience she takes center stage. But I’ve closed the channels of exchange between us, so it’s no wonder my admiration appears unreflected. Though saying so may complicate matters more, I must confess she remains not the object of my desire, but of emotions I care more about exploring, that I’m more aroused to expose between the sheets of perforated notebooks, where I find she’s penetrated my privation of experience and inseminated me with delivery. I now envision the resonance of my voice circumscribe about me an amniotic air that is heir to that holy water and the image I reflect breaks through the surface to affect that jaded gypsy, whose thoughts wander while she presides apathetically over this atemporal and internal conception of a matrimony of heart and mind that has annulled those unilineal understandings of inspiration and expression, of intention and interpretation, of muse and poet; the monogamy of these trite, traditional binaries has been dissolved, reuniting the harmony as twins reborn. I’ve been baptized in the manifest privilege of stage presence and ordained with the prepatent passion of contrived verse and now, my vow as reverend, instead of practicing celibacy when I visit the leper colonies of unwanted words, is to bring back with me the infection.