poem

 Poem #30

there is no narrative, only experience.  there is only wow, never why or how come or who was that. only a surge of adrenaline that pistons off the line in hydraulic burst but fizzles out in a sputtering series of strung together words. just words.  that’s all we ever think it is.  there’s one thing and then the next one and then the one after that and none of it was ever meant to be. we make it so. but love demands the deepest hate and the darkness of void flickers with the mightiest light. we refuse to accept the capricious whimsy because we believe everything that is must be named using words we already own so that a story can be told before it has a chance to wisp away because we cannot imagine a lost world of words who have forgotten their meanings, drift unmoored, eternally unclaimed until a strong field draws them to this forlorn, yet elegant space. imagine a small glass-fronted gallery, well lit, unvarnished hardwood floor, a single piece on the back wall receiving them all, the giant white canvas spattered with innumerable inscrutable squiggles and Jasper Johnsian hash marks, a graveyard gathering of dead words reduced to patterns of arching curves and softly intersecting lines, the most beautiful rococo intricacies you’ve ever seen, which, here, in this room, right now, can only be first experienced. let this last. but then it must be named, a story must be told, it all starts again. you can’t help yourself. sounds slip from your lips, an inchoate language you're forced to conjure on your own.

10/11/21