I feel a tension unlike any I have ever known
resistant to description I can only give you images that are vague and far-fetched
images I do not expect you will understand, images incapable of resolution
ineffective in communicating, and at this point I am reluctant I admit
but it is necessary to make the leap, to tap the arm and find the vein
and tap the arm: I am standing on the tip of a sharpened pencil
because I am sharpening the pencil. It is in the old style: hexagonal,
ridiculous the saying that relates virility to having lead in his pants,
was the wood too near in fact too close for tact to use? to say:
he has wood, not to see in it the lead, it would anyway come as some surprise
and be writing blanks with clear white men not shooting black men dead.
The shavings are softly scalloped and fall away, while the lead fractures in shelves
and detonates, ripping from its promontory the summit of the tension,
I feel but can not put my finger on, a writing tip. Unlike the old style,
I am standing on, the pointed tip itself measures not the margins of my safety
rather the slenderest opportunity to find any purchase to leap from:
on the skin of what is split it would be the tension of not feeling any shame
growing more slender more minute every passing minute, as if to tap the vein
we could not rise and break the surface because we were below it with our instrument
and our terror our torture was in understanding we must sleep-walk on a hair-trigger.
{ 2016 01 18 }
