You!
No, not you, sit down,
I have other plans for you.
They are long, far-ranging,
and complicated.
You!
On your feet,
You’re slipping and you’re slow.
But you’re perceptive,
you pretend not to but
you pay attention,
Like when I answer without rancor
or pretense of moral outrage,
from having judged, and balanced needs
against best probable outcomes,
Direct and honest like instinct.
I saw you get that,
That’s what I fancy about you.
I’m not out to fuck you,
in any sense of the word,
that would be disastrous,
in any sense of the word.
Author: Franklyn Monk
I & language & being
How I manage to stay on my feet durning performances is by clinging to the wall.
I pull myself up, handhold by handhold.
Words crumble and fall around me. I look for a path and follow its logical progression.
It’s scary, but there’s always another word where you need it.
Sometimes you have to make do and grab at the next best, and the next, and hope,
that when you slip,
you can grab another word and ride it to safety.
Myself, then, is a path of words that manifests in performance. Myself is maintained word by word, for as long as there are words.
But what is myself in wordless times? In silence and solitude, I pace and drink coffee and commune with dogs. Myself blindly balances on a single foot and finds that, by strumming or muting invisible lines of tension, pain can be, not averted, but channeled, partially, elsewhere in the void. Myself is a silhouette in a blue sky, tensing and relaxing without words.
You remember
Main Content
The cold measured cuts
of your nightmares are real.
It’s true.
When you could no longer torture
yourself, you turned the blade on me.
I went down in the surprise round.
You waited for me to come to
and flipped me over,
and made me watch
your blade’s slow agony
sweep and slice and spin
through your deadly whispers.
You took breaks with girlish laughter,
And unrestrained joy.
They’re always so short.
When you return you
catch my eyes
and bow low
slowly
sweeping the blade.
And you raise
slower still,
holding my gaze
and lurch
pinpoint,
a clean kill.
That happened.
You did that.
It’s true.
You tortured
And you killed
Deliberately.
You pretend the charnel ground doesn’t exist;
It’s unsightly and filled with dark secrets.
Endnotes
Note
I may have jumped the gun in this one. It's changing fast. Faster than readers can cope with—they'll be various versions of this floating around now.
It came about because I want to write the bubble bath series, but to make it worth while I'll need to spread it out so I can better test the code.
Then I got excited by a couple lines, and couldn't not scribble and scribble.
And then technical issues happened, and I was faced with publishing or loosing. So yeah, a lot of things came together causing this premature birth. It's gonna be hit and miss for a while.
I'm still trying to figure out if it's a poem or a story or a letter from the frontline.
The Perfect Song
This is the perfect song. I know this because I have already spent twenty hours listening to it, and there’s no end in sight.
Cohen’s deadpan delivery is perfect for this kind of engagement, for the long and repeating and always learning more.
Nothing wasted and nothing missed. Nothing longed for or skipped. It’s low key and deliberate. Measured and delivered with the calmness and wisdom of resignation.
Upcoming…
Amazing what bubble-baths reveal. What truths they’ll allow you to accept.
In one I re-realized I haven’t looked at my series code in a while.
So I took notes, and I will soon be releasing a series of poems about bubble-baths. I’m calling it amirite.
I will then be able to assess the state of the series code that has been untouched for up to three revisions.