Experimental

Hush

‘You pursue essentials I ride with the random…You struggle towards stillness I rest in movement.’ Sukenick

Looking for something, questing, a limited number of sheets left. Experience and its scorching wake, trying to tell it all. Potential somewhere lying incarnate, but locked up. On the other side of my tossed coin, the sparkling wonders of becoming and the hope of a smooth journey. I am, of course, generalising and I hope I’ve got the tone: a weary sagacity, bristling with the universal truth, odd flourishes of poetry, strewn metaphor. There I go again. I am a character at once the letters upon the page and the one holding the pen. Can you trust me? ‘Me’? Stop right there. You are working with fixed ideas, fixed concepts. As if an identity is fixed, packaged like some cheap tat, rollocking down the production line. You may try to fix me sprawling upon a pin, but no thank you, I am free to determine that ‘me’ every present at my disposal. Some say I bear the barcode of my country, religion, or shade of skin. I am no piece of land, fervid prayer or pigment, although these things contribute, are the palette upon which my colours are mixed. Some say I am helpless to avoid these things, that I am unable to think outside the box in which they wish to contain me, pah! If I say that my selves are grains thrown against the wind, as intricate and eternal as the whorl on a snail’s shell, cracked paintings rearranging their components, and yet one must imagine ‘me’ a happy Sisyphus, have I caught the right tone, the supplemental allusion that glues together the pieces?

We are crying for shape when liquid is beauty. I have this tattooed on my forearm. Incidentally, it is the reason I am here.

Are you with me, dear detective, or are you still hankering for a name to set a crown upon the slurry of words? I am writing here, the dull tom tom call of my name intermittently disturbing the reverie, where words are but stones to stopper the mouth. Where language is dust collecting around the monuments in the city. The people use words as they’re told to, milling around on their iron tracks, doing what they’re told. I suppose I am an underground voice, and I certainly don’t get much light these days, only a fragile splinter of a beam enters through the bars which I catch with a prism I have hung there. I use words differently, I have come to understand. To me they are myself, the permutations of being that I scratch into the disappearing leaves of my notebook. Words howl into tranquillity. They burrow into the dusk as you watch sunsets explode on the surface of the sea, alone, tears scoring their tracks down your face. Precious beats in the blood. I let the words read me. They are parabolic, skittering in the sky, the horizons, enjoying a brief life there, certain to be pulled back down. With my words, I tumbleweed through the human mud, let the pavements of the urban street-scrawls walk me, give up beacons to a storm-tossed heart, finding a way home, going home again, carrying it with me in destitution, a nameless individual, silent.

Simon Reilly