day 29: edit away the disturb of loneliness.

“Be good and you will be lonesome,” said Mark Twain.

Silence can be so loud, you have a difficult time connecting to breaths. However, silence can also be a song you memorize and never forget the words to. It’s melody will become like a harmonized history of everything you ever called beautiful.

They called you good. They said, You agree to too much and you give in.

So, you stop. You fold your tongue into intricate origami contraptions. Your taste buds turn into swans and kayaks and butterflies and boxes.

There is so much generosity beneath your fingernails, which is why you bite them. With each spit of keratin across the room, you are spreading this munificence everywhere you go.

Your yawns do not need to be introduced. You can laugh at a joke that remains inside you.

Why is loneliness such a whisper? Have you even memorized the various octaves of your sighs and gulps? Scream out your alone and be inside the gloriousness of solitude.

circular framework of solitude.

We don’t really need much. There is water. There is food, which can be found hung on trees or sprouting from ground. There is air. While hunting for a place of resuscitation, I think of what is necessary. As a writer, all we need is some paper and something to write with. If there is no paper, there is skin. There is concrete to carve our letters on. There are buildings and bathroom walls. There is memory. As a writer, all we need is silence, but even the new york sirens and screams can yield enough words to work with. These days, I long for a yurt. A circular structure that offers enough seclusion to welcome in some words. A house without outlets. Windows with the scent of wood smoothing its way onto skin. An avenue for rest and translation. As a writer, we live so much of time in solitude. To home-birth the words out. I search for the soil to dig my nudity in and live out days to unwind these letters.

an (atheistic) approach to belief

I carry a bible in my pocket now. It fits inside fake leather dip of hiding space. On the subway, I sneak it between my palms and underline the language that makes my blood seep through the holes in my skin. When I drip, I take note. This has become my companion these days as I gather up bits of moon and shadow, and conversational outbursts with others. Love is found in these pages. No need for beds or hand holding anymore; in this bound collection, I have found what I am most in need of: challenged thought and deeper meanings.

My volume is a bit different. There is God mentioned, but less attached to religion and more saturated by the language of poetics. I call it my bible, but it calls itself: Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke. Sixteen years ago, a teacher of mine gave it to me and I have carried it from home to home in various states and mindsets. What led me to reopen this book and sew it to my body in this way is what I think might lead others to attend to their own searches. Seven years ago, I fell against pavement and received nine stitches among other medical help. One month ago, I fell in a different way and this book is my cane. For now.

I am not sure the moment I started calling myself an atheist. Several events could have led me there, but I believe it became solidified when I couldn’t find meaning to the parts of me stained and scarred by these happenings. I just stopped believing. Though as I look back, I still had/have my beliefs. I believe in magic and found it in humans and love affairs and at the tops of mountains and in cabins. I believe in poetry and the essence of its healing powers.

This is probably what led me to house this particular “bible” in my pocket.

Rilke writes, “…ask yourself…whether you have really lost God. Isn’t it much truer to say that you have never yet possessed him? Why don’t you think of him as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity, the one who will someday arrive, the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? Don’t you see how everything that happens is again and again a beginning, and couldn’t it be His beginning, since, in itself, starting is always so beautiful.”

I replace “God” with “love”. I replace “God” with “words”. I replace “God” with “you”/”your”. 

All of this doesn’t have to be an end to something. That period at the end of the sentence could be its beginning. The loss of another could be the beginning of something so much deeper.

Yesterday, I was thinking about pronouns and how we are given a name at birth and a pronoun attached to it, but what if it doesn’t fit? So we make our own versions of what we need and what we are. This pertains to my atheism or what I thought my spiritual (non)belief was called. Perhaps I was never one. Perhaps there is something in between belief and non. Like: betweeniest. 

My mind is not set. Even at this age, it changes. Sometimes, it falls apart and I have to reshape it. This can be exhausting; however, it offers me a chance to rummage through the parts of myself I so often neglect. We do this sometimes.

So, I take off on a trip and feel the miniature words of Rilke press against me. It is erotic in how alive it makes me feel. Fear is what has kept me away from living (at times). Fear of understanding what I just don’t understand. Finally, finally….I am ready for answers found in these letters written between 1903 to 1908. Still relevant and connected to the language of the earth we all linger on.

And that’s kind of accurate….we linger. We loiter. We endure. And to fill in all the gaps and breaths of silence, we question.

timidity of tumbleweeds

A human up north howls on a thursday, slips thunderous moon rocks from beneath tongue into poet’s sockets. There is so much symphony in your satellite, how can one focus on mathematics or meals when you exist. There is no wall there is no lean there is only congestion of solitude. What do you mean you want to slide your memory behind my knees. We walk we walk away we walk around we walk until     until there is someone who meets us  and when that someone is found, there are splinters and cocked mouths. Enter storefronts: speak about what began before the scaffold. Call out a name when you wail against another and pregnant the heart to feel sight again.

paralysis of gaze as pants unzip toward puddled ground

photograph by francesca woodman

From far away, see gizzards.
See Stockholm commuter train and newspaper unwelcome mats by throbbed feet.
See dancer or poet or unclaimed daughter or unemployed prodigy.
See airbrushed beautiful.
See exercised appendages grow frigid from the pinch.

Move closer now.
Closer still.
Get in there.

Notice the tear.
The point of reference from childhood.

Notice the frugality of sound.
The desperation for audience.

Someday your lonely will rock against me and create a baby.
This baby will have teeth where arms should be.
This baby will smudge like erasable ink.
This baby will be the weight of dictionaries and have skin sutured with semi-colons.

Someday I will feel clean enough to ask you to puncture me with paper clips–
to keep me together
codified.

Someday I will offer my real resume flooded with suspended spermatozoa and handcuffed to-do lists.

Someday I will send that letter.

Someday I will find you where I left you on train track where you lifted my shirt and dripped sofrito down my throat.

Someday paralysis will be more than a frozen and closer to a communication of stillness.

Unzip pants.
Walk away from clothes.
Hug the first puddle you see.