346. To Open

O
mit
as a
word
and a
notion
from an
open door
that admits
what it can’t
hope to make
from or out of
a simple sense
of a word as an
encounter within
the space of singed
bodies of knowledge
where versions arise
and disperse irreduced
from the forms they once
and always had given the
state of the earth as flux as
flowing as tongue ebbs from
the back of the teeth and air
slips out into words and back
inward into breath we are lost
and wreckage of words and the
beach is strewn with letters and
vocules of the language we never
had meant to learn but which had
become us as we had become more
nothing more than a sound or what
remained behind after speaking as a
taste upon a tongue or the ear feeling
just a bit more acutely flowing blood in
its reticulations and in the catch basins
for sound but everything is awkward and
clumsy given to extremes left in place long
enough and it seems as to have always been
there even if it was no more than the passing
of a thought one of the small deaths of human
thinking that arrives each day refreshed shiny
ready for its place in the amazement of human
communication only to disappear to be forgotten
almost at the point of its unremarkable birth and
that is the way of words to flow out and through us
to intersect our bodies through our heads our mouths
our ears buzzing on the way through our fingers yet we
believe that there is something to them that they give us
more than they take away that there is some sense-making
from all this sign-making this trading of messages my small
letter to you my words in your head as you read it and words
that you send back if you send any back which is not required
because communication is a give-and-take and does not need to
be a give-and-take-and-give-in-return the voice is still there in the
air or on the page and meaning is nothing but the suppuration from
the wound that a word clearly is in the way that a mouth gapes with
a red gash whenever a word is released it is blood the pain of birth all
memories of what has come before and died at the point of labor we are
all something that has been ejected from a body removed from the bodies
of our mothers long in working us out of them and hoping to say something
profound from the mere act of expulsion the womb is Eden and we are its only
fruit born ripe and screaming the sea of the mother soaking into our skin we are
only sponges that soak up the world and die only to dry into crusts empty of sense
and import the remaining husks of selves that roamed the earth with the intent to
make of it something even if nothing much and to make it out of the words we took
out of it and the words we added back into it just as we accept and thus subtract one
word from the earth we return and thus add another one to it all without tally and all
in the manner of those humbled by the fact of existence however penurious even bereft
of palpable significance because we are creatures of the sign the signs we make the signs
we take the signs we find within the signless earth the lumbering body of the sea trudging
body of firm and supple earth the evasive body of the air around us what is invisible sustains
us and we are suspended in the dark cathedral of absolute meaningless yet we sing our hymns
up and into the darkness which is almost solid too us solid enough to keep us from breathing our
nostrils blocked with a black sticky substance so as we gasp for air our mouths bring in only more
of it sight is a solid sable eye of the raven the body of height all between degraded columns of sun’s
light falling falling heavy and falling hard shattering but thudding about us and we are barely mist
or missed by its weight what crumbles is the secure reality we do not live within which actually lives
within us we are giant bodies of sight cameras obscurae that reflect something into ourselves making
it real only through that unavoidable action however slight we are borne by the wind forth into life but
the wind is but the slightest breath from our bodies for we are all of reality and reality is defined by our
words the ones we pass between each other the ones we hold within our bodies only for ourselves the ones
we speak aloud but in places where only we can hear that we have not come here of our own volition we were
called into this place by people who did not know who we were or what we might do by children of other children
all of us dumb but chattering all the while as if we had something important to say as if there was something to say.

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