Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Menagerie

The old language of mystery and mystification is slipping. I came here in narrow hours to try to find it. There is only a lack of light and a lack of sleep.

Remains: jumble of inadequate metaphors straining to describe the harrowing moment of lucidity when there is no longer an institution dangling vulgar carrots in front of your face. Bubbles, rumbling, volcanic tectonic rage: sitting at desks. Waiting. Everything ordained, everything comfortable, everything wrong. Can I go to the bathroom please? (I don't know, CAN you?) No adults left in the world. Nobody to break the bells in half, to draw the curtain just inches aside. Students, wards, anonymous phalanxes, all we have for you to imbibe are shards of fragments of incomplete ideologies. May you lack the faculties to arrange them into any kind of legitimate mosaic-language and may you never escape the maze of equivocation that renders you intellectual adolescents and our culture a true obscenity and disappointment. May you be forever content with the trinkets you have inherited in place of masterpieces. Before all else, may you keep our jobs easy - may you uphold unwavering deference to the power of scheduling and standard-fulfillment. And thank us for the kidnapping. Say thank you. You will be called an ingrate if you don't.

I have graduated and I possess: dreams, jumbled, too much for patchwork? A head full of conflicting, mutually-contradictory, socially reinforced and unshakable truisms, maxims, clichés, parables, proverbs, analogies, metaphors, plots, tropes, slogans, catchphrases that guide to nowhere but exasperation. Deep sickness at the realization that our world is driven by just such idiot semantics. I possess: one very large glass house. But my heart knows what my heart knows. I possess: enough desperation to consider dreams real things and to cradle their fragility in soft and careful fingers.

No comments: