sometimes the amazingness of a movement is that it gets made at all, that we somehow get from a to b to c without being blinded by lights shone in our eyes, pathetic deer along a roadway we can't even begin to comprehend. walking sidewise around a chess board without questioning that moves must be made.
i'm afraid. i don't want to move, don't want to breathe, don't want to engage reality in the faint hope that thereby it will neglect to engage me. cleansing pain, but pain nonetheless, as a year's worth of dreams dies quietly, as i realize the dying took place long ago. i've carried around a vase of dead carnations, ignoring the rustle of their onion-skin petals, the crackling as i crush them with each motion. now i see the dead flowers and fetid water and wonder that i've spent so much of my life tending these. wonder more as i realize that i've been protecting dead flowers most of my life, holding on to things that died long ago, holding on to what might have been and trying to recreate it, get it right this time, not fuck things up quite so badly.
i had chicken for dinner the other night, and as i sat down to my meal, i didn't wonder what the chicken did wrong and i did right, why i was sitting down to eat it and not it eating me. chickens don't have right and wrong, chickens just chicken. it's what they do, what they are, how they are. but i tie myself down with ropes of should and could and maybe this time if i just breathe right and make the right response (not too much, not too little) it will all work out in the end.
it never does.
--
sine | deb
"but each of us
has his own kingdom of pains
and has not yet found them all
and is sailing in search of them day and night" -- w s merwin