ghostwriter

we are all ghostwriters.

1. we familiarize ourselves with the other.
2. we take its story.
3. we offer a re-narration.

1. language is the other. we explore its contours, slippages and limits with adolescent tirades, escape its enclosures with experimental purges and mask ourselves behind its quiet story with adaptation and assumption. it is the subject that we study within every second, but not just from afar as stifled voyeur but intimately, hand in hand, step in step. this occurs like the start of a universe; an explosion from nothing; once there it can only refer to itself and it begins in terms of itself. it is dwelling, it requires space, silence, nothing.
2. the need for story rises, strong and keen, from this relationship. we house ourselves in the structures of accepted communication but find ourselves without purpose. the desire to tell, to relate strikes us as a dumb, mute urge propelling us towards direction and resolution. we are led, blind into the channels of history, a recognition of place and consequence and time.
3. it opens. language and history, space and time, forge a mutual awareness in which neither can recognize the other as anything and cannot comprehend of a lack in other. they are drawn together through a nib in a pen, unified strands of experienced existence, the two understandables: space and time. temporal spatiality. both exist within, and with each other, and become manifest within the clutches of the word.

for this is word.

word the symbol, word the signifier, word the silence, word the being, word the world. the word standing alone represents the two extendables of thought, the boundaries within which we may only, and forever will think. once beyond, then we are truly beyond and will not think of this infancy.

word does not stand alone. it is removed from its origins with each pen-stroke, but just as soon as it leaves, it returns, it is woven back into the space and history in the act of writing, mimicking itself, a parody reflected back into the glittering eyes of the spectre that released its cycles.

for the writer is not present, does not matter. it is not his history, not his language, he is within both space and time and can only watch as into a snowstorm held in glass. he shakes the ornament as hard as he possibly can and watches with suspended satisfaction as the flakes return to the scene in the glass in his hand, and nothing has changed but everything has moved. the writer shakes the known with every black letter he carves out, but his duty is not in the revolution of the act, but the conformity of the return. his presence is opaque, one may place a hand through his body he resides and transcends, he was once living and now is dead.

all words are written by ghosts.

cream days

the sexual ache
of the man
would ever
ridicule.

a crushed
steel state
and a million parts
will be kissed
to the deal
of the first,

and breathe
my habitual response–
a thousand doodles
and abstract thought,

the film gross
to my fear of being
the beautiful blue day.

chalk circles

the reusing of fallible words proceeds, a safety net bears my weight. i am bound by the security of flow and flux, change and progression, pertraction and subjection, costranophony and utilarity. most of the words you have heard and doubted, many do not exist.

they all contain the notion of a shift, of that change so frequently mentioned (how can i escape these wretched words?) and adored, a change that is needed not inwardly but outwardly. i do not feel the need to use it, but the word feels the need to use me, to parallel and justify my current existence (one of changing addresses, cities, socialities). i am the pathetic fallacy of these words; i provide a glowering sky to backdrop the word’s potency.

so, on progression: one cannot speak of the movement without talking of the beginning and the end. there is an enclosure within the singularity of the word, a limitless enclosure. the sky extends forever, but i cannot see all of it, all the time. poems are indeed enclosures around the limitlessly wordless, chalk circles of designation and drawn by the sole ambition of he who holds the chalk, the writer.

i seek to draw in chalk and my only satisfaction is that from my tiny chalk circles, ever so occasionally, one may see other chalk circles.

question & answer

i cannot but be dishonest.

the written word demands a structure, yet i think in epiphanies and without logic. i long to record every thought i have, yet i cannot formulate a syntax that does justice to such a distant strange soul. the spoken word demands an immediate honesty that my lips cannot phrase. the song needs a melody, but it would be crude to search for it and if i were to find it, what then? a definition of my affection as permanent as the darkness in which i love to write? a naming of parts?

to me now, all the art and all the design in the world are worth nothing to walking by the rising river on a wild, weathered noon with you.

stars in a blender

driving down stars to a black pitch
can’t remember
being so out of alignment,
they rattle and burn in this shaky blender.
wasted hallelujahs shatter my windshield.

was it a woman, an animal or water?

dust tastes like eternity on my lips
only skin and fingernails remember.

the theory of double trigger

• an impossibility is simply a possibility confirmed as impossible
• a possibility is simply an impossibility denied
• there can be no mutual exclusivity in the schematics of existence

[del]

today i deleted.

i don’t feel bad, and you should know that. it helps our fictitious relationship because you, dear reader, are not really there, and so won’t have noticed.

i told myself when beginning, that i should write unconditionally and without reprieve or remand; ie, no shame, awareness, and no [del].

but then i also told myself that i wouldn’t be self-referential, not through an avoidance of the first person (we are all that person), but through a blindness to the presence of the format, a willingness to circle the voice.

perhaps i have achieved that, not through discipline, but through some form of vagueness and an ambiguity that exposes these thoughts for the vessels they are.

kill me if i write, kill me if i don’t. the best thing is that i can’t see you.

the after purgatory

the lines are filled,
the release is the thing you see,
names and thoughts and replicated
conversations all written over
the top of a meaning structured
like layers of sedimentary rock

word over word, story over story,
there is a hell in those pages
that you may think you want to see
but you cannot, because a trail is
set in those pages, a course in lyric
that would kill you forever.