The Voice

The voice is in there from the outset of your life 
but you don't really hear it until you're about maybe 
eighteen-years-old. 

Something between a friend and a tutor, it tells you to desire 
and crave success, to be vigilante against disgrace 
and perhaps to defend the defenseless. 

The voice favors solid objects, drafts rules for their 
correct applications, redrafts them when necessary 
and when it is independently able. 

And it interacts with madness although sanely rejects 
madness as an ally. Instead the voice keeps separate 
ledgers: one for theories, one for results. 

It isn't your soul, but it isn't far-off either. 
It's an amorphous continent that shrinks and grows 
with conditions, with nature, hanging garments of 
the day upon the arms-legs-body of you. 

The ancestral companion, speaker of many languages, 
library of things to be seen and things that have been witnessed, 
carpenter designing a house that will be the legacy of you. 




**** 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

1. The Death of Nathan Rueben (Vulnerability)

1. The Death of Nathan Rueben (Vulnerability)  They moved into the state of Michigan in pairs, in groups of three or larger or significantly larger (less than 5% total of their estimated number arriving by themselves) from the earliest hours of the day of the event, arriving in personal transportation as varied as 2021 Forde Cavaliers and Polaris Sonatas to 1999 Harkomhans and similarly antiquated vehicles and more than a few (less than a thousand) bicycles, motorcycles and choppers traversing the border with busses and with trains from places as far-removed as Utah and Arizona and as local as Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, arriving with such staggering consistency as to suggest Rueben's funeral not only contained a psychological weight for each of them in their hearts, in their souls, but that every man, woman and child to the last were implanted with some indominable, irresistible magnet that demanded without exception for their presence and regardless of political or philosophical ...
Read more

Cashier Hassle

Inside my 2nd least-favorite gas station,  for the moment, I just need a pack of cigarettes.  But this overexcited foreigner  is determined  to get on my "good side."  He keeps asking me how work  is going  like I've brought it up before  or he and I have things in common  or he's not one of countless people  doomscrolling my browser history.  I get my cigarettes (and all the  change this time!) and while  this moron presses his empty  luck through regurgitated small  talk, I tell him how unconvinced  I am and remember to go  somewhere else next time.   **** 
Read more

The Only Bad Thing That Ever Happened (complete)

Image
  1.  Feet slung into the air of the living room, bones drunk on equanimity, beer gracefully in hand, God knew something he didn't say. His furry mouth, sweat soaked, the breath like chewed green grapes, and his eyes closed, he would have practically no earthly basis of reason why his life then was to become undone then. Clear-drunk, the high that seems to ease not merely the possibility of damage received, but the fact it had ever been. Warm confidence and purpose in his happy gut, gentle love streaming through his veins, arteries, nerves. Every cell within purged of the trespasses and defilements that he'd been charged with during the centuries and millennia of his strange, agile, balanced and unbalanced existence.  The Great City steamed in the abbreviated winter, sparsely occupied subways more like runaway dogs unguided in their destinations than transporters of any sort of person at all.  The television in God's living room played an ad "paid...
Read more