Words of the dead, breath of the living

In our bellies, shrouded in mystery, is a panacea to the machine — a lyric essay

Unprompted, I toss a ball of yarn across the room and let it unravel feathery and blue — intelligence mapped is a matrix, soul prefabricated is the Trickster’s final trick.

Chew your questions carefully. For years we have foreseen our teeth falling out.

I.

On everything I’ve ever made — bad or beautiful, square or crooked, pinken or incandescent — are oily fingerprints, fallen hair, misspellings, gasps of saliva.

I tune my phrases to my ear and make fallacies kiss each other on the mouth.

Laws of logic, like gravity or the speed of light, hold my alphabets together. Then, the mystery of photosynthesis perforates the words with light and sweet sugar and tiptoeing beetles.

I have to believe we are more than synapses and lust. In our interstices is evidence that our intelligence is irreducible to acronyms. Woolen matter so fine and delicate glitters there. Yellowed postcards and fields of rice are peppered with its strings.

Here, a word for haunted, but by angels.

II.

We were all children once, there where the map stops. Running through a charged air of unknowing with flowers in our mouths. We caught stars and pollen and pictures and fantasies of horses with magnificent hair.

Now I must proceed more carefully: with abandon and precision, a door left ajar. The machine is deliberate, but undestined. I, we, must be both. The resistance I undertake is akin to a rock that does not deny itself.

Gently I am learning to hold the lion’s jaw open. I wrap my fingers around its glistening fangs like they were my ribs, and pull.

III.

Mind is not topographical, but cosmic.

Nowheres become oases, arithmetic becomes the Parthenon, a dream becomes a cascade of liberties hard fought. One hand pointed to the heavens, the other down to the earth.

An invisible force, speckled yet snake-like, runs through the body at this precipice of creation.

Invisible strings are plucked, and some soundless music moves through our bodies, the air, between borders of forests and cities, like an incantation. The entanglement of this breath is inimitable — a sigh. A solace. We who live and die hum, hum, hum!