The Unfolding

Whether they want to hear or not or whether it makes sense to your mathematician friend or bears no resemblance to anything real or unreal-let your thoughts scurry away under age-old wardrobes from which you saw a mouse run from when you were young and you raised your legs above your head for fear or to prove to your own body that it’s bendable-lock your parts in plastic containers you can buy from the pound shop and heat them up underneath the scrutinizing fake light of your workplace microwave that always smells of dead fish until something surfaces then get that initial thin film of debris off the way your mother’s mother’s mother taught you when she was making soup out of the chickens your father killed in the yard and you and your sister plucked feathers out of-you can still remember that satisfying pull so you should know how it feels when you get it right on paper-ignore death and the futility of everything you make and bury this under the non-guilt you felt when you cradled headless chicken in your hands-your poetry is much like that-with your miniature shovel you try to dig graves for things that do not wish to die and so you bury a version of yourself alive in shame-your shame-his shame-your parents’ shame-your country’s shame-your generation’s shame- you pretend your ragdoll shoulders are large enough to carry weights made out of stone you drag behind surround yourself with and pretend that just because it’s movable it should be carried-you hear yourself distant and young but older than you are right now only in whispers and you reach your hand through the ice wall of time and in the space continuum you find no continuation of yourself just a limit to your left where your right hand can’t reach and therefore it cannot write for let’s be honest with ourselves you write with your hand-if you were to write with your mind what structure would there be in place to stop the tidal wave of idiosyncrasies from tearing down the sensible establishments of obnoxiously ordinary people who have camped themselves at the edges of your amygdala reminding you of all you wish you did not fear-you feel a bones rattling out of their sockets tired-you wish for clearly labelled well defined columns in which you can categorise all your disappointments with yourself-you fear you look too much like what you know you aren’t and fear this ability you have to get them thinking you’re thin enough to be able to get pulled clean through the eye of a pin needle-your head has too much noise like the accumulation of sound from an auditorium filled with 500 women all speaking at the same time wishing their loneliness would transgress itself and become both an unselfish and real lover in which they can hide themselves from the world-which are the rooms you stand tall in-do you find yourself like the bottom half of a mannequin missing its left leg standing on an upside down bathtub at the edge of a row of terraced houses in bleak industrialised mid-Autumn-I have never felt more insufficient then when I’ve tried to write.