Just the ash.

I wrote a poem for the first time in a long time. I am unsure of what I wish it to express. A poem like that is for me unprecedented--everything I have ever written has had a very directed meaning, sometimes several meanings, one or several explicit, and one severely implicit. How pretentious it is to admit that aloud. How pretentious it is to point out pretension.

So this poem. I do not know if it is a thought coming from me, a real thought, or if it is me imagining myself as having this thought, but not actually having it. It is somewhat like the way I might travel through a past conversation in my head, but reorder my words and expressions and invent reactions to those parts of the exchanges that never actually happened.

When a person writes, saying "this is coming from me," they might be saying me or they might be expressing an idea through their me, but an idea that exists separate from themselves. And when does anyone ever know? For it is a difficult thing to divide oneself like that, to strip off a piece of being that exists through meaning. It is no comfort to spread out a map of one's self after it has been folded and tucked in their back pocket for ages, to discover that their whole landscape has been creased and separated by the straightest fold lines.

By passing through its opposite.

Now, then, all we are is becoming. It is what we do.

If I get out of hand and say "think about right now" it is, as soon as the words are completed, already gone. And if you want to think about that vanished present as something that is past and accepted, such an attempt is over before beginning, for the moment is too busy whirling out and away for you to catch hold of it. We have no choice but to endlessly become. Time turns us into mystical ballistics of a collective transfiguration.

So what should we ask of but how to catch up to ourselves. The moments whistling in my ears are an imagined fabric. How a sudden breeze has moved on as soon as it arrived, and how a thought laughs past before my eyes, I can never speak fast enough. You might say I am warm but once you do I have already grown colder. If you put your hand on me now, I can not present myself as current. All you touch is a shed skin, or a prophet whose words can never come in time.

Limbs knocked off in transit.

I have here, standing in my memory, statues vaunting upon great gleaming podiums. They stand tall in their poses. Immortalized figures cast from pure marble slabs of sweeping whiteness. They are the product of old histories turned to ancient mythology, their stories coalescing into one single stance and one unmoving expression. A stock for those ghosts is for each the selected theme from a brimming array of activities and faces, things organic now not living. I have a collection of all the faces that I know. And those that I have not seen for too long have turned to myths, sculptures curving upwards but caught. Now their shoulders carry stillness, now their clothing resists the winds. With these I hear no voices from their bending mouths and in a met gaze I feel no pulsing thoughts. However bright the beings stay as they gather themselves away from ages, I miss that motion, the dance between tides before things washed away.