READIN

by Jeremy Osner

But why not just sit silent a moment
without words.
But why not pay close attention
to the timing of your statements.
But why not count backwards
to onehundred from seventythree
but using letters
not digits.
But why not deem yourself
unworthy
of being taken seriously
and play the fool. Alas, poor Yorick
I knew him, Horatio. A man's
got to know his limitations

Briggs. But why not switch
forever back and forth between the two.
But why not alienate
the very people
whose support you most depend on. Send them
back to me, I'll try to make you whole.
But why not tell me then
you can't have forgotten already again
come on. But why not
listen
just a minute
to the street now as we walk
its shifting melodies and humming
swarms of insects in the grass
and on the trees.
But why not try to relate
this ambient cloud of noise
creative destruction
of silence
to the ideas you've been trying
to get across, so why not listen
to the moral core
of the cicadas' ceaseless roar.
But why not listen to the cicadas' roar
and the thin shrill whine
of creeping hearing loss
beyond language in mazes
and repetition.
But why not tangle yourself delighted
in these strictures and obstructions
and obligations
make concrete these abstractions
forge an idiom
one you alone will ever
understand. But why not admit
you just don't know
or at last
give a damn.

posted evening of Tuesday, November 12th, 2013

So it's time to go back there for a little while now and clarify these visions: strain them through the prism (colandric prism!) of your mind's transparence; zero in on what is there and what's not there. No radiant swarms of hallucinated vermin like you might have imagined, crawling across your lover's supine body; no Pink Floyd flowers or Grateful Dead lightshows, not without you paint the flowers for yourself, shine a light, listen to the music. Enjoy the music. The sound of silence ringing, pulsing in my ears, inspiring, oblivion, for what light can we recall before all this darkness? What candle so to speak in this wind, in this aether? All this nothingness clouding the face of reality must surely not be real. Must truly be imagined. The sound is not "of silence" but of its chaotic opposite, of noise and repetition. Cardinal reality and cardinal signification and its reflections in the deep still waters of consciousness. How beautiful is its nonexistent shadow.

posted evening of November 17th, 2013 by J

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