Wednesday, December 14, 2005

THE TRIAL


For Barry
I have created nothing, not even myself. If I had, could I have, I certainly would have done a much better job of it, done things differently, put more effort and thought into it. I think thoughts, not ideas or notions, or ideas of notions or thoughts. To think otherwise is pure folly, miscreantism.
Eleven Hours

I’ve only seen one dead person up close
and he’d been that way for eleven hours

his hands were gripped into fists
knuckles whiter than chalk dust

and his eyes were wide open
staring at something on the ceiling

or maybe at nothing at all

Death does that to a person; puts an end to life. If I had created life, I surely would not have created death, in fact, the though would never have entered my thoughts. I say thoughts, as I have no mind, or none that I am willing to concede that I have, had I one to concede having. Barry didn’t deserve death, to die clinging to a filament of life that eluded him, was just out of his grasp, tricking him into believing that there was life at the end of the struggle to live, to regain control of his life. The notion that one must live life on ‘life’s terms’ is pure foolishness, an act of unmitigated stupidity. What, I ask, are life’s terms? How can something that has no self-consciousness, no selfsameness, have any terms at all; and if it did, expected us to live our lives by them? Life’s terms are spurious, unconscionable at best. I rather say we live on ‘death’s terms’, trying to elude the inevitability of life coming to a screeching halt, hands gripped into fists, eyes staring blankly at ‘life’s terms’, which are no terms at all.

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"Poetry is the short-circuiting of meaning between words, the impetuous regeneration of primordial myth". Bruno Schulz
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