Suppose this. Wind playing a tune upon my tongue.
I am in full armor, all the time. Guarded by a shield of
solitude. And if I let down the usual framing of the expected, the comfort of
routine, the boundary I delineate intensely, with grace? If I lower the shield
of this remorseless solitude and open my mouth, taste the inexplicable spice?
I hear the wind playing a tune upon my tongue. What I don’t know
that I know comes to me. Like a kiss, suddenly given.
What speaks then?
The whirrings, drama and largess of the world. The
tongueless voice that speaks for me, this text, speaks through me. Speaks me.
At the point of insertion I embed my most vital bits, chunks,
in between these lines the exhaled spaces filled with secret lustful fullness
of your evening shadowside and morning newness. Misted over the humid divide
the purple flesh tinted with hues of silent melting. My wings. Apocryphal,
stolen by time's ruthless pursuit.
And my hand, calligraphy bound, surrenders.
Written word moves in the rhythm of this hand from which it
appears, she understands a silent storm of words, my hand, she is coming fast,
bending around time itself. That’s how I steal time. A love letter to language.
She, the hand, loves him.
But I, am I my hand?
As I write, there is a permanent shift. It leaves color
splashed on my face. It opens me to otherness that surprises me, that calls to
me, an otherness I couldn’t have imagined. I embrace this fullness, its
inevitability, its is-ness. It ought to continue, I am a different body than I
was, it is truly a change, a casting of a new shape, tracing of unknown
textures, discovering new contours inside my skin. I split into a thousand bits
of information, I brace myself against this infinitude and let go of synchrony,
leave logos, abandon all caution, relinquish all meaningless farewells, eject
rehearsed duty, discharge postural verticality and horizontal repose, undo the
Gordian knot of possibility in a gentle slide into the bearing of previously
unmeasured, unimaginable territory.
And my pencil becomes a supple lance between my fingers and
I hurl it, words shoot across a page, line up like birds on a wire. Their necks
swell with the air of this rainy day, the round b’s and g’s, a’s and w’s
distend like the necks of songbirds, bulging just before they release a song
into the sky. At this moment the atmosphere itself crowds the world with all my
desires. And the day unfurls ahead of me along the deep furrows of time; now I
draw my pen like a sword, it cuts the paper, small slits begin to drip blood on
the white melting pellicule. Something dislodges and begins to travel, small
clusters stirring. These are my thoughts clasped together with the feathers
tangled in my hair. I detect a scent in the song of the birds, something I need
to write down, firsthand. Which hand was the first that enabled my experience?
Was it the hand that caressed first my skin, newborn? Or the hand that grasped
firmly the crown of my head to ease me from the darkness of my mother’s body
into this world? Or was it my hand from which I first tasted the protective
fluids surrounding me? Was it my father’s hand that cupped my mother’s breast
in the event that so by-the-way, off-handedly, started my engagement with this
world, firsthand?
Firsthand, I expose my flesh, the one that will not be
written on. This flesh is not a surface, it is meat in a bowl, it is under
earth, still moist and seeping all that is before words, before I write it all
down. I carve an ambiguous incision around the words, a dis-attached absence
that secretes from and clings to the meaning, uncompromisingly empty yet full.
In surrendering to everything, a sorceress and a hysteric, to the libidinal
place between the self and the other of the text, I circumbscribe in a double
entendre, a theoretical pas-de-deux, duality that overlaps, reverses
irreversibly into multiplicity.
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