Dreams In A Backwater: Part One, III, (4)

(4)

POEM

The fist's power relaxing, a brittle blossoming,
words garbled, palsied, and partly hidden.
Caught by shifting wind, bumping, rolling,
lodging and dislodging in the cool green grass –
blindly? Yes: All words a kind of braille,
as senseless to sunlight as grooves in brain are.
It's from behind that I see, through the spaces that I shout
my noiseless shout; from between blurred bars
wrung by my hands, fisted, I peer out.

Voice untied, there is a singing in my head, alive
in some realm as still as ocean's depths,
as fathomless as outer space. Listen: One heart beats;
it pulses eternal as stars or fish. God loves a whore –
does he not? I kneel before some man's lengthening cock.
At the window light glitters, spindles, flames –
hell's heavenly fire ignites! But I, earthbound I,
seek no more than this: a brittle blossoming unfurls,
melting with dewdrops, tears, and spittle.

* * *

All my life, it seems, I have felt isolated, trapped, caught behind a sort of wall that I cannot break through. It's as if, hidden somewhere within myself, there exists another self who longs to be free. Sometimes it feels as if I walk about looking at the world through a pane of glass; sometimes even language, the best means I have for communicating not only with others but with myself, feels like just another cage. There are times when I think that language is only a farce, a facade, nothing more than the groupings of more or less arbitrarily chosen symbols that have been connected more or less arbitrarily to sound. There exists no way of knowing with certainty that any two people perceive the same grouping of symbols; all anyone can know is that when he or she uses a certain group of symbols to indicate some object or emotion or idea to another person, that person rightly perceives those symbols to harbinger the meaning intended. It seems to me it is only this act of intending that makes language viable, this act of intending which provides us with reassurance that language has one definite shape or sound. It's as if each of us was born with the ability to use this act of intending not only to map a shared language, but a whole shared reality. In this way we create a world out of the void. In a sense reality is nothing but a myth; in another sense, it is also the truth. But perhaps it is not the only truth; perhaps it is possible that other realities may also be intended. This notion may seem fantastical, and yet – why is it that all my life I have felt trapped, isolated, caught inside a mere shell? Why have I always felt this yearning to break free?