scraps

[evieshka]

What happens when all the things that were silent become unendurably loud, and all the things I listened to have gone inexplicably silent?

It’s not a riddle. I’m asking what’s next.

I’m asking what I am if not the ink on my fingers and the shitty radio on a Monday morning, and the foxes screaming in the middle of the night, and the whispers from the woods, and the knowing.

And I’m asking who it is I’m supposed to ask these things when all my gods are gone.





October 2019

It’s October, so we’re changing the lights.

I’m watching the neighbors swap one bulb for another, listening for the electric hum.

I don’t move.

There’s a crunch of broken glass.

If you don’t do the work like everyone else, we slip into darkness, someone tells me.

We’re already there, I say.

Like a flipped switch, I see a light come on.

So now what?

I turn up the music. The bass thumps the dark, formless pounding at the wall. A rattle of drums and whine of steel, threatening the not-nothing waiting for us to sleep.

Now we wait. We’ve got nothing but time.

Someone sits. Their shadow touches mine, becomes a nonsense shape against the dark.

What do we wait for?

Fire. That’s how you light the dark.





Vanishing Point


If I can’t be a mother of children I guess what I’ll do is give birth to legions of anxieties

Armies of thoughts that March the neural pathways and create a track for future generations to follow unthinking in the way future generations will do (unfair and accusatory generalizations made about future generations in the way past generations will do)

the point is the rut and the anxiety that caused it.

I am

Unable to pass from the comfort of the established process without effort

without occasion

What am I really if not my own vanishing point?

What is the opposite of a convergence of lines meeting in the distance, and what is the inverse of distant and convergent?

I am

Source and scattered

(the point is and isn't me, which is becoming a problem)

I am not the pathologically complex order of Da Vinci; I am Jackson Pollock stubbing out his cigarette and pissing on canvas. (I’m the canvas.)

(What does it say about my mental health that I don’t even rank myself as equal to Jackson Pollock’s urine in this analogy?) (I’d asterisk this if I cared about form. But it’s my derailment of thought and my fragment of self and now it’s yours, too.) (Jackson Pollack didn't care about form, either, you know.)

(Then again.) (Pollock’s piss is worthless until it hits canvas. Piss for thought.)

So I’m a Pollock canvas.

So I am a can of spray paint dropped from a great height onto a Tuesday afternoon city sidewalk and deemed street art.

The thing is. The thing is, I can’t abort anxieties, and no artist consults with their canvas before committing an invasion called Art. I am an unwilling mother and the afterbirth of inspiration. The accidental opus.

All birth is nonconsensual, but call it a gift. Gratify your creator with thanks for your existence. Praise the artist, the mother, the maker who forces their creative spark upon you and coerces you to.

Live.

Live, and like it.



That’s exhausting.

Do you see the point within you where your own desires begin to distort and fragment?

Your vanishing point.

I’m talking about you here, but I’m asking about me. It’s not that I can’t distinguish between the two, but I’m empathizing with me on your behalf.

I don’t think you can, or I’m hyperextending.

Or I’m receding from empathy with myself.

You know what I mean? If you really fix your eye on the distant convergence of lines of empathy and thought and the only body I'm obliged to carry every moment of every day until I reach the space beyond the horizon, can you see the dot Da Vinci tried so hard to describe?

Can you see me, or have I