Inarticulate
I am trying, still, to touch something,
something I cannot name,
something that those of faith
and bereft of doubt might call God —
the inviolate kernel of epiphany —
not so much to remove the grey
between the black and white
as to know myself, my own heart,
to hold onto the days as they depart,
relentless, into the porous vat of memory,
something that will clean the dirt
from ambiguity, incomprehension,
the flotsam and jetsam
of unanswered questions,
some balm for all the conflicted,
itchy scabs of a life,
when senselessness is engulfing,
when all that is visible
is what roils beneath the cracked veneer;
reaching with fingers and body,
with heart and thought, to pierce the fog,
to follow the tactile lure
slipping always beyond reach,
as if it held within it all things lost —
innocence, a white, unsullied honesty,
a purer, less troubled version of myself,
an aesthetic of love —
as if I could peel back its membrane
and reach in,
trying to touch the untouchable,
to touch the invisible architecture
of silence perhaps, or the void
behind the silence,
or the implication of the silence
endlessly interrupted by noise;
or maybe it is the horizon’s edge
I stretch towards,
receding always as I approach,
or what unfathomably lies beyond it,
the cinematography of possibility;
or else my arms
are wind-milling at chance,
the sometimes randomness of intersections
that spins lives like die
and sends them elsewhere,
those implausible plausibilities
within the stream
of arrivals and departures;
or I am grasping at the sharp point
between contradictions
and incompatibilities,
between opposing hatreds,
historical enmities, truths and lies,
cutting myself,
feeling the red, red blood
well up in my hands, dripping,
where a drop of clarity might reside
waiting for light to strike it,
waiting for a pilgrim, lost,
to stumble accidentally upon it
in the age old tradition of discovery;
or I am myself touched,
tricked with these decoys,
delusions, mental wanderings,
and it is something else altogether,
something nameless, incomprehensible.
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