#layeredwords

“to combat the resistances of language you must keep talking” --Anne Carson

I write most everyday. Since the end of last August, I have filled up two 150-page notebooks, completed close to 80 short poems.  I have written, if not so obsessively as now, since I was 15. I write poetry, with the occasional venture into essays like this one. I have trouble with narrative, one event leading into another befuddles me, as does conversation between people.  So I do not write fiction. Yet, I do have an interior running commentary on the narrative I am living, snipes and admonitions on my life as it unfolds. To push back against this cruel eviscerating voice, which adheres tightly within my skin, I write. I write to explain the world to myself, to explain myself to myself, to resist the world, which is lain upon me by the world. I write to resist the temptation to settle into myself without a thought. I am uncomfortable in most social situations. It’s discomforting when others try to define me, or attempt to interpret me from my writing. Yes, I am aware that all writer’s expose their minds in their writing. Even writers of fiction expose themselves through their fictional characters. Nietzsche wrote that in the end we only experience ourselves. Yet, I believe there is also a separation from oneself, a leap into the universal other, which occurs when one writes: a transubstantiation of individuality into a larger third person narrator, who watches and observes with more objective, more just, eye. Of course, I also know this is pure bullshit. I am as clotted with my biases and situation as anyone. But it is through writing, through the transformative nature of writing, where a third space can open, and one can enter along with whomever can follow into a changed world, a different, perhaps better place, if only for the time it takes to read the poem. And to keep from being defined, trapped even in these new spaces, I continue to write, to find a way to exist with myself.

for an "assignment" from C.D.

thought is an image I will pursue toward emergent clarity free from Reason’s cold sins where meaning’s ambiguity ripens sense flows like a spring from stone with a spasmodic grace across the face of the world not simply from structured steps rationing prescribed allotments to hold us close within some elegant number Instead I trust enough to follow words wherever they wish to go like butterflies across a field of flowers dancing in the wind

I wait too many patterns to negotiate across this gap between here and somewhere other— familiar tropes etched along darker rhythms which throb so beneath polite conversation

I wait for the tremors to flow from these threads to prove this world I’ve created to be more than mad hope for some other way some other life to feed upon some answer to call my own

I wait still as if waiting were answer enough for the cocooned questions left dangling in the patterns— husks I’ve eaten empty skins I’ve left like old suits frayed along the edges out of date and ill-fitting

“we are led to believe a lie when we see not thro’ the eye” -- William Blake

always a bit unfocused a blur a half second before whatever happened next what ever happened instead

more than something else an alternative to what is now a laughable ephemerality cast across a vague horizon

I step out at dusk and watch the slow rolling clouds shift light across a sycamore’s leaves like paint splashed across canvas

life flows too quickly to see the infinite unfolding from you