hoodlum, masked as thought * 1/2/13

There is a space before recognition

that force-feeds me.

From there, an insistence occurs

before thought’s constancy

as a preoccupying morass.

There is this rife of definiteness

before the piercings of distinction.

There is a presence before

this ignominious and limited

sense as perception.

That ongoing essence of me

behind the claims to be me

that gets through this,

leaving a path to and from

unknowable remoteness.

How I have bones that know

but do not stoop to the telling.

Where I have teeth that repeatedly

stand guard and witness,

over breath, ingest, and conversation

they will inwardly assist

with what can’t be said. 

I am a carbon-dated relic of this

insisted entombing experience

and yet devoid

and distanced from it.

I am a bound and gagged absentia

living by the force of this truth.

My consciousness is myth-filled

yet it has the strength and fiber

of paradox, to grow on.

I perpetuate as shadows of self

to deductively prove

my substance of being.

Experience is the disease I suffer

to be sustained by this harangue.

I have no morals or carriage

to maintain,

for that which has of itself

as syntax,

keeps me away

from self-consciousness

as a confluence of sins.

I am but a topical scab, flaking it,

into this dance of oneness.

I have bruised as my sacred path

and blood-flow

as my inexorable birthright.

My manifest is of malaise,

yet there is an unknowable hum,

pronouncing itself by its absence

beyond definition’s embrace.

And how any self is in diminishment,

is this triumph in the making.

This universe is without conditions.

This manifest is without our permission.

That is our true home

as its emptiness regales in refrains.

As I am not my self,

with serenades that never say . . .