“Verso 47”
A question of voice left me floundering for words, and it is not that I have not found convenient vernaculars to describe the how and the when, only that I am stuck in the gaps between what is needed and what I keep attempting, and it is not that I need those gaps filled, only that they overflow sometimes, uprooting hard-won fluencies to find what life exists at other levels.
When sleeping I collected the end of breathing.
Yes. It is this that arrested me. Paused me. Interrupted me. These are not all the same me. That it held all the words for grief. I read somewhere that those we love die when we have left the room, either physically or in our imagination, and that this is their final gift to us. I still have not yet found the courage to read the books about grief. I scavenge what I remember from those earlier bibliographies.
(Is this about voice? About grief? Yes.)
Stop. Why? You and your endless lists, why? I don’t fully know why.
The books say that all writers should keep journals on them to record the whispers that arrive on silent and noisy breezes, those glimpses of worlds waiting to be worded. I tried this. I no longer do. Sometimes, at the end of a period—a day, a week, a month, several years—I will note what has remained, what has repeated, what insists on itself, what impresses. Nags? Yes. Some things demand attention. And still, I run from others. No. Not yet. Maybe never.
Alphabets were used up and used up and and lay flat and slumped, and disheveled of their normal shapes.
Repetition does not create vernaculars. And now I’d have to look up the meaning of words I once used multiple times a day. Let us call this kindness.
Gukira 