Zibooku

I did not think I would die, I don’t think I thought anything, it was just terror, realizing that no one was to come, and watching the sky get darker, and feeling the cold start in. Always I screamed and screamed. I cried until I could hardly breathe. In this city of New York, I see children crying from tiredness, which is real, and sometimes from just crabbiness, which is real. But once in a while I see a child crying with the deepest of desperation, and I think it is one of the truest sounds a child can make. I feel almost, then, that I can hear within me the sound of my own heart breaking, the way you could hear outside in the open air–when the conditions were exactly right–the corn growing in the fields of my youth. I have met many people, even from the Midwest, who tell me that you cannot hear the corn growing, and they are wrong. You cannot hear my heart breaking, and I know that part is true, but to me, they are inseperable, the sound of growing corn and the sound of my heart breaking. I have left the subway car I was riding in so I did not have to hear a child crying that way.

An artistic image is one that ensures its own development, its historical viability. An image is a grain, a self-evolving retroactive organism. It is a symbol of actual life, as opposed to life itself. Life contains death. An image of life, by contrast, excludes it, or else sees in it a unique potential for the affirmation of life. Whatever it expresses—even destruction and ruin—the artistic image is by definition an embodiment of hope, it is inspired by faith. Artistic creation is by definition a denial of death. Therefore it is optimistic, even if in an ultimate sense the artist is tragic.

A book, too, can be a star, ‘explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly,’ a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.

I usually solve problems by letting them devour me.

I swear, here and now, not to forgive the universe / that would let me get used to a universe without you.

Late at night I feel myself glow from the inside. I nuzzle into my own chest, bowed at the neck in an attempt to climb down to myself, to put a hand on one shoulder, to whisper in one ear, ‘Here, it’s here, here.’ I read long emails I sent in the last week, letters I regret or that I’ve forgotten, that I’m scared to look over, small things I can’t believe I’ve done. Run to the bus stop because I’m allowed to, play the piano when I’m asked like a dancing bear. I squint at the train station, offer a ride home to someone I barely recall sitting in the pit of my stomach. We are all but expanding, bursting out of ourselves in the tiny hot car. He tosses a can out the window. I pull into the driveway and look at the stars, visible for the first time in weeks. The moon is never gone long. On evenings like this one, she sinks into me teeth first.

What seems like a reasonable distance to one person may feel too far to somebody else.

Submissions​ Open

No matter how honestly you open up to someone, there are still things you cannot reveal.

Afoot and lighthearted, I take to the open road.