The Devastation of Language [Psycho-Surreal Memoirs]

102
“Do you sonder?” the moon asks the sun, casting soft shadow across the city.
The sun doesn’t respond. The sun doesn't speak English and is disinterested anyway,
The moon drips into the writer’s coffee, strings its reflection through the girl’s hair as she falls backwards in the water. The moon does not eat.

103
Language is the great lie.
Isn’t it funny that I have to tell you that, using language?
How did language originate, as a form brought out of happiness and fear, as an exclamation during sex? During violence, a shuddering groan?
Through language I can fuse your thoughts to an idea, to a symbol. Through language, I can create worlds of falsehoods.
Truth is stuck in between language like marrow in the bones, a hidden, rich mass we can feel but not quite see.
We often try to minimize the devastating effect that language has in our life by creating rules for how we use that language to influence others. Don’t use absolutist terms. Don’t criticize others with harsh words, couch criticism in kindness. Negative words breed negative thoughts. Positivity is the way to happiness. Use the Oxford comma to prevent murder.

Why do you think there are prodigious composers and mathematicians, at young ages, but not prodigy writers? Why is every sentence I write a clawing, clumsy gasp for breath?

Maybe because language is not integral to understanding, but to manipulation?

Language is like fumbling in the dark, on a night with no stars, and the writer is soft teeth and hard limbs, searching for the way out. Language is brushing my hand against your face and trying to feel out the color of your eyes blind. It is the penultimate moment before the galaxy explodes, withered flowers, ecdysis, the snapped connection between vision and thought. Nobody will ever write a perfect sentence, because the inherent nature of words is imperfection.

And I like it like that.

104

Writing poetry, for me, is sort’ve like wrestling with a bear of smoke. It’s sort’ve like a metaphor that I’ve long forgotten the meaning of. Poetry to me has always been about trying to find a quick shortcut to expressing myself, as I can write a poem in less than an hour but a short story could take me up to three weeks. Instead poetry became mired in an ugly kind of mind control. I feel as if with poetry, which has always been a more direct attachment to my emotions and experiences, I’ve attempted to alter the way that I feel about my current situation. This can be seen by dramatic shifts in tone, forced upswings, and declarative statements.
The bear of smoke passes through my hands, crawls down my throat and chokes me.
I construct myself as a victim and others as demons. I write poems for NAMELESS, I write poems to feel anger when normally I’d only feel a deep shame. I wrote poems that started arguments or that were unread, forgotten in door jambs. It’s like I’m accessing a different part of my brain when I write poetry, a more primitive, unrefined part. A part of me that still wants wish-fulfillment as a coping mechanism, that wants to fight monsters with swords and quick wit. A young Autumn Christian, separate from the fiction-writer and the journalist and the girl who drinks too much.

THE FIRST LOVE POEM I EVER WROTE
Because a god should not fuck her prophet. Because I believe
In abiogenesis more than I believe in myself. Because I had
Gore in my fingernails while I cried on the bathroom floor, and you
Rocked me to sick Heldigare’s lullaby as the nearby bathtub
Filled with the blood of my enemies.

And I said, with my hair stuck black to the floor, drool
Wet on the back of my hand,
You must love me more than you love yourself.
You must love me more than you love yourself.
You must love me more than you love yourself.

You began to scream when you tried to clean off
All the blood. You said, maybe they’re right to call
You a monster, savage child, Kali disease. I stood
In the backyard in a bathrobe where the hawks land
On my shoulders, the snakes writhe and fall dead
Into the pool. I said, if I cannot make you happy,
How do you expect me to save this world like
They wrote in their books, turn their houses into
Ash and the fields to gold. A god should not
Fuck her prophet.

And in this wasteland you are by my side when
I put the mask over my head, when I slaughter
Everyone I hate on this altar of bones and ring
My mouth with blood. Maybe I am a monster.
Didn’t you know this was all for you. They convulse
With their heads against the bones, their fingers purple
And mouths stained. I will save you from your sins,
I said, holding you close enough to crush your ribs,
But you know,

You must love me more than you love yourself.
You must love me more than you love yourself.
You must love me more than you love yourself.

And across the woods where the sun plunges
Down heavy in the trees you help me bury
The bodies. Your fingers are shaking. I said,
I don’t know who I am anymore without you.
You can’t touch the bodies with your bare hands.
Their heads are falling apart in my arms. You
Don’t really believe I’m a monster, do you, I asked,
You don’t really believe that. You looked back
Through the trees at me, where I stood with two
Red hands, with a bruised stuck struck head, and you said,
You are what you want to be.

You are what you want to be.

I remembered printing this poem out with a CD that I burned for Brandon, probably spending more hours on the playlist than the poem itself. I shook and hid my hands as he unfolded the piece of paper and read the poem outloud. I didn’t expect him to read it outloud, and wasn’t prepared for the emotional reaction that I’d experience. So I slumped down into the car, shaking, one hand pressed against the car door. When he finished he didn’t say much, just took the CD and put it in his car player.
I distinctly remembering not wanting to write a love poem, but a poem that revealed myself to be what I thought I really was - a monster, desperate for love but unable to control her base impulses. I never really believed in seduction based upon lies, and I wanted to show him who I was, without the gloss of a poem about,
But perhaps I’d only tapped into Brandon’s psyche and dredged up the thing he wanted to hear most, and that still bothers me. It’s why I’m loathe to write poetry for people now, because no matter how I phrase it, it feels like seduction. And I don’t want to seduce with cheap words. I want to reveal.

The Demon

For sixteen years I lived on the mountain
before the demon came.

She said, ‘did you know that I can give the sun to you to squeeze?
That I can make the moon open its mouth and spit its teeth out for you.
And that if you peel away the skin above your elbows
I’ll fill you up with gold.’

But I’ve read the classics.
I’ve seen Faust break his head in a baby’s crib.
The price of getting what you want
is getting hell. It’s sitting on the side of the road
nursing a ghoul and losing your job to a
younger woman.

The demon and I sat down to tea,
earl grey and bergamot from a dead husband’s cups.
‘Have you ever read Jean Genet? Beauty from pain.’
I said, I know where this is going. I don’t believe
in poets who die in jail.

My hands can’t grasp the cup.
She reaches across the table and
I cut my hand on her mouth.

I can see nothing but her eyes
and inside is fire, braised with
juice that’s dripping from my
fingers.

I can’t remember the last time
I ran across the mountain to lie down
in summer grass. The last time I saw
moonlight, like honeycomb to be harvested.
Her saying, I love. I love. A child’s face.

She said, ‘Have you ever read Jean Genet?
Beauty from pain.’

And the sun coming through the curtains
is bleeding her skin, rattling the cups.
She smiles. I love. I love.

The table floats. Or maybe,
I do.

The first poem I wrote for several years after someone who I thought loved me told me that my poetry wasn’t as good as my prose and I should focus on my prose. While he is correct, my prose is better than poetry, he didn’t understand the symbiosis of the two in my work or even why I wrote poetry in the first place. I wrote “The Demon” at the beginning of 2013, and it took me about three days of agonizing, crying, and finally pushing myself to finish writing it with my eyes closed and my brain shut down.
I’d been in an artistic slump around this time, depressed in Seattle, trying to cope with the cold and the new environment and my new job. At the time, I didn’t even know the source of my misery, and desperately grasped onto whatever would make me happy. I think this is a very human thing for me to have done. So I turned to poetry to try to write myself into a better state of mind - by conjuring a demon that tells me happiness is not to be found in the usual places.
I mean, I’m pretty sure she’s right, at least in regards to me. I just haven’t been able to find out exactly what that is, and I doubt poetry is going to reveal it to me.

2.4.2013

A cannibal led me to your waiting room.
Led me to your plush couch. You’re smiling
like they taught you. I’m dizzy from
cerulean walls, pictures of sea shells. Artfully, carefully
placed.

I tell you the list of symptoms: “There are shadows
that spit on me while I sleep. There are Ancient Greeks
who accost me on the street and gnaw on my arms.
I’m anxious and depressed and dizzy and angry and
do you know where I can get some cocaine?”

You’re not smiling.

You give me a checklist on a white sheet of paper.
“The cure is simple. Sunlight and exercise.
Tell yourself that you deserve to live.
Take a bubble bath and stop eating so much chocolate
or on second thought,
eat more chocolate. ”

When the session is over the cannibal
picks me up and throws me over his shoulder.
He takes me to the park and eats my leg for lunch.

He takes me to the grocery store. It’s always raining,
so I buy simulated sunlight. Vitamin D. A new shampoo.
I will check everything off the list and
stop calling my drug dealers.

I am lying on the bathroom floor while he growls in the entryway.
I am buying shirts on my phone to hide my cigarette burns.

When the cannibal throws me on the bed and leaves,
I try to whisper:

I am loved.
I deserve to live.

But what comes out of my mouth is
a black bubble.

It blooms into a mountain
where the trees have burned and the roads
are ash.

I will climb the mountain in a wheelchair of burnt cedar,
I will find you sitting on a couch on fire,
all the papers burning. Your skin is the color of
heated metal.
Your smile was waiting for me.
“Have you eaten enough today? Why can’t
you love yourself? Where are your legs?”

I want to speak,
“I have done everything you’ve asked of me,”
but I can only pull you into me
to spit gaping metal out of my throat
and blow ash into your blood.

I started giving my poems dates instead of titles, which let me tell you, is hell for my organization system when I’m trying to find a particular poem in my Google Drive. This poem was written shortly after “The Demon”, and I started achieving a kind of rhythm, writing a new poem every few days or so before I got so completely depressed that I stopped entirely.
I’d recently acquired a psychiatrist, who also acted as my therapist, and I was unable to articulate the frustration that I felt about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, the uselessness of certain actions. I tried to explain it in visuals - that the black core of me could not be filled with proper exercise and nutrition, that no matter how well I took care of myself or how much I exercised or meditated, I could not chase away the demonic, yawning core of helplessness and anger and damage.
I guess I just really hate therapy. I hate the smiling, placidity of it. And it hasn’t failed me for a lack of trying. I hate pushing myself to some kind of rudimentary

I was going to analyze more and recreate a sort of narrative through the poetry I’d written in the last two years, but I’m tired of looking at my poetry, let’s move on to something else.

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Note: This is part of my Psycho-Surreal Memoirs Series. You can find more by looking through my feed. They're designed to be able to be read in any order.

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