re-encountering language

one might get an itch that there's something new that can be done with language...

the most surprising thing that happened when i went pleasantly insane the first time is that i was possessed by the urge to write poetry. it was not polished, but i was astonished at the kinds of words that wanted to come out of me, words i had seen only in fantasy novels, words i never thought i would have the chutzpah to use with a straight face.

Hunt the divine. Smell its scent on the wind. Strain your ears to hear its voice. See its shadow on the ocean waves. Find the tracks left behind by the divine in mud, in broken branches, in dying birds.

this was perhaps the first time i had written something i did not understand. i knew that once i had been a simple boy with a simple song in his heart, but i had locked that boy up in the deepest dungeons under the earth six years previously and i did not immediately recognize the hairier and more feral boy with slavering fangs he had grown into when he broke out again and began howling.

Will anybody ever touch him?
Gently hold his hand and kiss him sweetly,
run their fingers through his hair?
Or gaze at him with longing,
tell him that he’s beautiful?
(Could he be beautiful? Or only
more
or less
a monster?)

what i had come to understand by this time, through a hundred clandestine experiments in the infinite art of telling the truth, was that all around me people who on the surface appeared sane, calm, and composed could be transformed in an instant into sobbing children by a moment of grace, that beneath the brittle ice of polite society ran vast underground rivers of pain of which i had known none but my own, and even that only dimly through the frost. in some sense all that had happened is that i had somehow, without the slightest effort, been granted the ability to leak some of these rivers onto the page, through a hole in the ice drilled by an unseen hand.

the wild screaming vastness of
another human heart
afraid and in pain
bloody and open
beating
in time
with mine
for a moment
and there
were no words.

it was as if i hadn’t understood the point of language before, or had forgotten and needed to remember it, that when i had been sane i had treated language production as an endless homework assignment which could never quite earn the A+ grade i craved (from whom?), that after sanity i had become newly aware of the dizzying freedom of language, the soaringness of it, and also of my own fresh desperation to communicate something real through it, to birth something alive and squalling and precious into the deadening world.

it only ever wants to say one thing which is nothing

and in the act of saying it

the void opens

every word is a tiny god and it needs worship to stay alive. i don’t know exactly what a prayer is, i definitely don’t know how to pay attention, neither do i know how to fall down into the grass. but sometimes i find myself on the ground.