my only remaining goal in life is to leave many meaningful things behind
so that in the way seeing a lost loved one’s formerly cherished things confronts us with meaning — the glass chess pieces this particular bass guitar the yarny blue cardigan — my number of cherished things will increase so that upon my leaving they will all bleed meaning
and ideally (if it is available to me) the things I love will keep increasing until including the entire world
so that then, when I leave, you will still have the entire world saturated with me
the way it would occur to me is “what would GOD think?” “what does HE think?” but what i meant was “what would you think?” “what would they think?” if they knew knew that i did not know what they meant by it when they say we are all sinners when they say deep down they hate each other i have never hated anyone until you told me the word to use for when I am dancing and interrupted for the feeling that comes up when someone is disgusting on purpose to me
i wish i never learned it they like everyone behave out from it from their own basic primal primitive perfectly human needs
i wish you would have known to teach me that instead to see every action as mere expression of some underlying unconscious motivation to serve life in them even when the strategies they use show up in the most offensive ways unproductive unimaginative ways missing out on us on me missing out on making life as wonderful as it could be
I am barely alive when no one can say who I am without a name.
I could be Kingsburrow and your subconscious would sense how you say king when you speak to me and it would bleed into what you see. I could be Heatherfly and you would wonder why time with me was always so light. I could be a subordinate name like Underheart, Brittleleaf, or Watergrave maybe you would be moved more easily with compassion when I am in need.
Whatever the case, I wish I could know what I was without one; without a name.
How impossible it is the Veil of Ignorance. We could not ever not know a thing about ourselves. It is just as some philosophers say: Wherever I think, there I am.
It is just as the LORD GOD has said, equally unsure of how to answer the question: I am that I am.
Who could say more about what we are than this? Every aim to be more precise will leave out eight thousand and two things: our essence, our beautiful needs, and eight thousand other things.
I have survived worse other people have survived worse some monks whip themselves some buddhas utterly detach some taoists are everything and everyone and all the suffering and all the joy all at once and I cannot tell if they are right or if I just cannot bear the thought of it the thought that this is all there is and all the joy and all the suffering and I have exposed myself to some who love me and when I am myself for long enough they, so far, have always stopped when enough pain for them accumulates and not another word from me can their soul intake so to some ribbon of words I return after every love has ended and every soul surrendered under the weight of me it would take an army to love me I know and it’s with the heaviest breath I can muster, what I wonder if I can say, that it does not matter and not because nothing matters but if all of us all together keep throwing all our words at the wall surely something could come together out of one of our mouths summing up the meaning of it all tying us all together little tethers through each other and it will take the entire world to love me I am sure but I cannot help my wondering if I should keep trying to not apologize maybe some cups of love are too deep for one are too deep to ever be filled up maybe I have the privilege of being an unlovable cup on this side of whatever everything is and some monks whip themselves and go on living and buddhas sit until they forget who they are and Lao Tzu remembers and GOD persuades the west to forget again and all I remember is the curve of her back settling in the slim of my chest our legs as tied up as any two could think of us and her neck as warm as velvet in the sun and the dip of her stomach just before my hands reach her hips and a sip of that space below her ear behind where the jaw dips in I can feel her hair from here short but pulled enough to make meaningful tension in the air I don’t know what GOD believes about any of us but I know what I believe and all I can hope is that it is enough
it feels like there is a tumor engorging, or whatever it is tumors do, behind the front wall of my chest applying pressure to my lungs and my intestines one could wonder if that is where the heart should be
I can’t think about that though…
the muscles in my arm pupate I can feel the larva underneath my skin just waiting to unskin and in my throat jealous and angry birds pull the material for their nest from the lining of my esophagus
and every step I take to quench them enrages every beak and beetle in my skin
I haven’t a clue how I endured it but it seems I did and that gives me hope I can endure it again maybe even another but GOD knows how long something like this could accumulate before I am just a lump of beetles and beaks and butterflies
It’s so easy to jump off Kansas City bridges there is one just feet above where the trains come through it wouldn’t take much to get mangled up in one.
Is it empowering to notice that I could? I wonder I would, therefore, always have a choice and am, in fact, always choosing to be untangled from the trains.
Can anyone hear the way I am everyday deciding life is still worth living?
I hope that we will never take living to be such an obvious thing to be doing.
I hope that we can live without ever feeling like we have to live without ever feeling like the only option is to live.
I wish that we would never relate to living the way a Christian woman relates to her husband always afraid that to leave would risk eternal torment in a lake of fire where there are no bridges or trains to get tangled up in. There would only be, I suppose, GOD at a distance waving with her husband.
and if I write a poem that gets famous I will say to Judah that we did it though it took us two lifetimes to do it and a human sacrifice to do it still I am certain he will know from whatever place he went that he too moved my pen and that his mind still inhabits mine and that when I see him again he will not be jealous of any success because he will know as I know now that he wrote it in the same way anyone writes anything when the words are just bleeding out of them onto paper or onto some inky silver computer screen one can almost never tell if I had the thought or if the thought had me
whenever I write anything I almost always imagine how it will read when I have been dead for several months at least and a loved one is fishing for some pieces of me while in the kitchen or at the dinner table or on their bedside or wherever their phone or book or tablet might be whatever it is they pick up looking for me I wonder how then it will read to hear that I am happy today regardless of what I will inevitably face
will it console you to hear that even if a bomb drops on me in the morning I will still have told my entire story to the entire world and everyone heard it or at least everyone I wanted to hear it and I think that really must be all that could mean anything
to be seen by those we love and to see ourselves as loved
and I wonder how it will be for you to read that I know you loved me and I always felt it despite whatever distance
and I hope that you can still hear that I did love you even when I stopped saying it
because I was afraid that saying it again would feel like a chain around your throat with your hair caught in it and all I ever wanted
was to see you so empowered to love the entire world if you so desire but
you got held up holding up in our room… and everyday I was so worried what I might see when I got home
I will never be glad about your leaving but I am glad that you stayed alive that you survived somehow and perhaps survived even longer than I will and perhaps loved even more of the world than I could
nathanael.ink 