I dropped my Discourse on the floor
and it shattered
and set off a cataclysm, of cause and effect,
and my heart dropped through my stomach,
ripping a hole in the space-time continuum -
Because everyone knows - That’s impossible.
But as my body imploded into a black hole in my chest,
I knew the silence in the room
was, too, spending forever in between words
to be sucked into the infinity I had just created.
The only time he was ever late
was to his own funeral -
and as everyone waited - we all knew:
He would have hated that.
We play musical chairs in the waiting room.
And sit, and watch, and mourn, and wait,
for nothing, really.
Out of the whole party,
only one is done with waiting.
And we’re waiting on him.
He would have hated that.
Hunger can be deeper than for water
an itch that scratches itself into a rash
a rash that welts and weeps and wants
and eats itself without start or source
and wastes still deeper skinless scarce
until its hunger is cannibal
and nothing but itself satisfies at all.
Hunger is hungry for hunger
consuming itself so strangled
until nothing but want can linger.
But want is abstract and fervid,
and boundless with boarders broken
so consumption is itself covet
until there’s nothing left starved and aching.
My speech is smudged impressionist
into sounds and air illogical
absorbed and stained by brain’s grey wall
until it’s sounds sweet vowels at all.
And no grand form can save it now,
it is in could time, not in noun.
And so it fades into hot air breath
and no meant meaning masked is left,
so all there is is nothing nought
we fill the space with dot dot dot…
The wordsmith works silently
writing over writing
over words whose origin is lost
in and amongst its own palimpsest
until the words themselves are their own history,
with cyclical inheritance
without authority
an author’s hand strays beyond the margin
the words wind round and round the beginning
and explode sprawling chaotic ink
censoring the chaotic blank
with something fast.
Until once again it is unmoored
by handless eyes and heart unscarred.
And from these eyes might birth a mouth
that chooses all the broken truth
in silence. To be written over its own hands
and told to other eyes without a sound.
His mask grows greedy under dim lights
clenched lips over teeth that bites,
grinning eyes paled and wild
for brutish toys hastily sold
to a fat pink sweaty child.
But his mask is just a mask
pretending to be a mask,
When truly his face is
faking a facade,
to children too green to embrace
his masquerade scarred.
For only under dim lights
can he expose
his broken face in broken shows.
He splits his words in wonky phrase
from fractured mind which can’t compose
his full function in words he knows.
So he sits silently in a face grotesque
fit for a world called the carnivalesque.
Words, words,
break her dialectically.
Stop her heart by killing her softy
in silence.
For it is not words themselves that break her
nor their meaning which you split,
But her silence is nurtured and grown
from difference.
From bias discourse.
Her silence is not natural,
and when she speaks her abnormal voice
sounds alien and queer.
No woman is no woman
in discourse’s deaf ear.
With no voice she is no man
And all is left is an ssssss
which follows her
like gas escaping a balloon,
She is a single letter,
an appendix,
like an ill formed siamese twin
eaten in the womb,
the beginning of but unfinished noun,
crippled and dumb,
nothing turned over twice.
For all you need to do to kill a woman
is tell her she has a voice.
The dining room was silent,
and everyone sat at separate tables
too,
so quiet it seemed violent,
and all wore similar suits
that rendered colour still and mute.
I sat amongst them,
praying for some sort of solace
but all I found was solitude.
Solid.
Stupid.
The waiters were faceless
and grey,
and no one seemed to notice,
but me.
And I sat amongst them wordless,
watching.
Sir, your Room is waiting,
I knew,
but could not move.
So they did it for me.
I sat on my grey bed,
waiting,
my consciousness aching
into aimless waking.
In time,
I learned the bed was not for sleeping,
nor the food for eating,
but for routine keeping.
At first I wondered if I would ever leave,
or if for past times I should grieve,
but as my suit began to suit me
and my face began to fade,
I stopped wanting to.
We’re all waiting for our past to be paid.
Without a backward glance I jumped forward in time.
It was like pushing a splinter from under deep skin
and it was sharply painful,
because I landed hard.
But before I could get before myself the now caught up with me
and I stand a foot away from where I last stood.
And I look like a prick.
Hands bared barely bent
on a demented clock.
Collecting dust
and rendered timeless.
Hands as if tied in a straight jacket.
Hands twisted, jittering between
Tick and tock
- as if an intake of breath between nows.
Stuck.
Between chokes.
In an eyeless house
jammed ticking on repeat,
forwards and backwards,
back to betimes,
as if begging:
Beg. Beg. Beg.
Into empty, deaf madness
no flowing fingers holding Time’s sands
deaf to clock’s mad sobbing into
bared bare hands.
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau in Esquire (April 2011)
the year that I was six the world burned
first it was the house where we lived
the only house I’d known
the fire began in...
