That is not it, at all.
That is not what I meant, at all.
I
The night is sordid and bare,
and there is a scent of oil and wine in the air;
Compression and rarefaction
My voice carries across the dark
Walls of stone that
Speak back in tremors
The canyon and I
We play telephone
With my very life.
Call and response, holler and whisper,
A sense in incense, ascending in scent.
The rationalist in conceit,
In compartments he found content
The heart whispered in soft dissent
I pray his sins do not repeat
On this night sordid and bare.
II
I am no ancient pine
Nor a fresh willow tree
Histories bored into wood
Rings of fire, flood and foray
And in one act the perfect archive
both spurned and shown.
With a brief blaring bang,
I would rather be a felled tree
Than remain whimpering
The rotten log
Our cells replace us
Though we are no Theseus,
Our vessels are strangers
To us, floating souls
Prithee, my soul, do not follow
In search of that new morrow.
III
The canyon calls a memory back to me
It says:
This is the loving father
This is the absent father
Whence the man
Was or was not,
Apprehend your theories
Behind clenched teeth.
And I call back to it:
This was the living
This was the aberrant
My eyes that would breathe
Suffocate between night and stone.
IV
All interlocutors are always
Mutually pushing each other into superfluids
Sound does not decay here
Though memory does;
The canyon walls and I
Our first words have long faded, it seems.
Cracks in ageless stone
Allow starlight to tickle the stream
My thoughts catch on the tendrils of moonbeams–
The living
The abhorrent
Naught but our game of telephone.
V
Here comes to a close the testament of my Soul
(Ici se clôt le testament…)
Come to its entombment when you hear the carillon.
(quand vous orrez le carillon…)
I neglect to call.
Between two walls
The dissonant echo
Of the inside of my own skull
Fades into a silent cacophony
For you are no tree
I cannot remember my father
It is not terribly sad
It is a tragedy
Goodbye to another is not so potent as
Goodbye to the self;
You are no tree
We are so free
Neither self nor physicality ties us in place
We debris
The slow death of a self-constructing soul
The death of an erupting knoll
The corrupting bole
Remembers this night was sordid and bare.
