You love to see it—discrete individual units realizing they are not
at all that. Like a grass field caught in wind, finally understanding
its purpose, I breathe with the sound of God breathing.
Fading into obscurity hurts, like dying, and feels good, like dying.
I want to force you to hold two opposing ideas at the same time
until you recognize that nothing is on the opposite side of anything,
and all is violently and beautifully enmeshed.
I don’t want to force you to do anything.
I climb back into my body and tell it where to go. What to do. It
approximates my desires, leaving little ghostly scenes of what
could’ve been, what I really wanted, in its wake. Still, the body is
not a failure.
Yes it is. Of course it is.
I wanted to learn forgiveness so I learned to forgive my body for
never knowing how to look at itself and see a human. I have
endless memories of being spat upon in the grass, the hot, hot
grass. Sunbleached butterflies encircled me. The word faggot. I
was with god.
I learned to forgive my body because I wanted to learn to forgive
my father, and his father, and all of history. The lesson of time is a
lesson of bearing witness to the unwitnessable. How I won’t truly
be born until the very last star burns out.
Reality:
My father destroyed me because he loved me.
My father hated me because he destroyed me.
Do you get it now, how it works?
I write to you from beyond a grave that was prepared for me before
I could form a thought. When I was a silent baby, when I loudly
identified with everything around me, a porous signifier, not yet
differentiated from floor or ceiling or wall or door. I was
everyone’s.
I write to you from a time before self.