15 April 2024

 

To accept what is bitter. To perform a double italic, like a swan dive and its shadow off the high board. To mark what you would avoid, had you the fortitude to turn away. A boy resembles sculpture, covered in a dust mask. He worried that his bicycle belonged to someone else. Feet between concrete shelves, a mother off camera. A man in a room’s tight white corner, seated with one of his five dead children. Another hallucinating his pain. You shoot me and I shoot you and that’s how we talk over the picket fence these days. Or wall between the children and Auschwitz, bleeding sound.

Spirit exists without words, but so does hatred. A non-verbal space still absorbs sound. She understood what he screamed, without the ability to say so. That made him scream all the more, the man with the psychopath eyes. Aunty Portal come to drink one dirty martini with us. These gaps cannot testify to what went through them, sonic affect slacking syllables, if not sound. Regard the marks: comma, semi-colon, colon, exclamation, period, and come dressed as your favorite punctuation. If I am not comma, why do I hesitate? So much fun to cavort without words and their trailing grammar, like blank kites making holes in the air. Kite flies, but its string does not. Our hands are anchors to this seascape above the ground. The other day, the sky was a pallid blue, clouds mammalian. There are names for mist and for dry rain.

What is bitter might be wine. That it was water beforehand lends it mystery. That it’s bitter after makes sense. If I grow bark and leaves, or if you low like a cow, we fear the end of change. We had no hand in it, though our hand turns to stone. Metamorphosis goes down, or up? What is the value you put on yourself as bear that you didn’t as woman? Does honey taste more sweet? Tiresias in drag performs which gender? Intention begins from power, but ends with a solitary deer grazing. After an initial burst toward space, it falls like a balloon. But what is the it that is the engine? I’d rather not come before or after, but in the midst, where time does its squats and bicep curls. The power of it is in the doing. What mark is that—a dash?