hush

without motion, i don’t know what i thought would happen. i hate this lack, this absolute zero of achievement. it was always going to be like this, scratching at my pockets and waiting for january to be august to be like last year and the next.

sitting once more upon the bed, i try to write. poetry writes itself here, time stalls. my pen has been dead for days after and before and during, always. this encroaching space of promised forgetting stays, a fulcrum of purpose among the crouching iron soldiers, kneeling in deference to the monument of another soldier with child defensively and tenderly held on the hip, like a mother’s hold. the angle of the soldier’s sword is held in deference; the stare is at no enemy but the past. the positive resides here, dulled by the wind, but it is still here as an affirmation of an old negative; the loss of war. we can but take our breath in the face of such unknowns, such is the power of exaggeration beneath the entrance to the memorial.

there is the motion; within that memory, within the visions of the slate junctures like broken bone. the everyday seeks its own landscape internally.

so the experiment of deprivation fades. even held up against the flickering light of that pale wall, a failed experiment is still an experiment, even all day by the window, just looking, the worth presides above and beyond the judgement. to not take this risk (which is to take none) places you as a symptom of yourself with illness approaching. this is a protest against ambition manifesting itself not through creation, but fulfillment of what i am supposed to be, my assimilation of affect.

and this affect echoes through the empty rooms of the house, a boundless exploration allowed by loneliness and potential, the choice of alone. and it is a choice heightened by the lure of perception, a choice always, a choice of the quiet times, my friend.

i talk of the quiet times, to myself.