Silence is Golden

Hunter of Silent Flight

I don’t know how to bend her heart. My word-barrages only
tend to separate us. Its her fault; she drives me to these flights.
Near her I grow increasingly lost, energies dispersed, elemental
and dissolved. Nothing like control remains. I am all gut, windy.
All Desire. All Want. All set in flux like nature, moving
everywhere at once. I try to hold my tongue, think "Quiet.
Steady," but the word-tide I cannot stem drowns my cause,
threatens to deluge my best, and tender, and kind intentions.
Why should words come into play at all? Words are strangle-holds
in an ill-advised and hopeless cause. Silence says much more.
More silence tongue or else, I fear, she’ll point us toward the door.

Or maybe words chisel things, hunt for
a voice that would not speak, that would prefer
to sing if only sing it could. And I a Michelangelo
confronted with a silent block of promise, a figure locked
within--one only I detect--then called to name the yet-
born thing the only way I can. Still, because she knows
my oafishness, and all the clumsy routes I’ve gone, she
knows that I’m no artisan. Not only can’t I sculpt or
sing, words remain a clunky thing I toss out like an
army made of breath, excavating passing things,
things beyond my depth, the things that pass between
us pure, beyond all fashioning. Unspoken flights I seek
to name with an arsenal of words, though pass they do
like eyes askance, or flee like flying birds. The meaning
that I want to make, with words I hope illuminate, of all
these words that come and go, the best of them is “Love.”

In the Still of the Night

Maskulinity

I suffer periodic delusions of grandeur. I move in nighttime spaces, blurry spaces between grandeur and despair. This despair comes to me in colors I cannot name.

I ask why. Often. I suppose grandeur weighs more heavily after one publishes a book. But after that? I didn’t know. Don’t know. Self-accusation. Doubt. When I began to write it was out of love. How do good things go bad? Acclamation. Artifice. America.

It’s that night-space between, lingering, interminable, that makes me want that sleepless, dreamless night to end. I drink to close out the dark in-between. Drink shuts things down.

Sometimes (rarely) I cry. Anxious moments instigate tears. On those few occasions I do cry, that surrender means I’m on the edge of some annihilation. I feel unstable. Vacuous. Afraid I’ve never lived. Bravado slips off night’s ledges. Fear inducts tears that cling. I can’t even ball up a fist to shake at God. I’m a poseur. A dilettante. I go limp.

Nothing has ever come easily to me. Only this mask. I am Mask-uline. Ha-ha. I drink. It helps me every bit as much as it kills me. It helps me because it kills me. It helps me. It kills me. It is killing me. Help me. Don’t.

You see? I am beyond delusions now. I am only sharing feelings, feelings like rose and indigo inks drawn and set down on paper. An image from another time. Ink is no longer “drawn and set down.” I don’t know if the past was any better. It was another time. My gut has history. My sense of things has been forged over time. In the end, my feelings are tied to the past. My life. A history of wasted time. Of not knowing. Dreamless life.

That sounds terrible, doesn’t it? My feelings. Very Dr. Phil. Very Dr. Joyce Brothers. Lost in an age of celebrity shrinks. And for all of it, I no longer feel. This is the extended irony that runs this narrative.