General Semantics

You want me to deny magic. Of course, it sounds pretty easy, but once you have actually seen it. Once it has been proven without a doubt it gets harder to pretend it doesn't exist. Well, I don't know if I should call it magic, general semantics gives it a term. It's actually identified as "object level" or something we know but can't verbalize. We experience objects of perception for which there is no way to verbalize. You want me to not see the space that is there, the gap that is between us. It's not air and it's not denial. It's just there. I'm not as good at self-delusion as I used to be. It makes me want to try a drug habit or dream therapy. This reality we created, well it's sort of unreal. Words are supposed to help us own things, we name our children, we name our duties, Adam named the animals, god named the water. Voices center at both creation and madness. It's the magic of loss, it's the magic of madness. The last words I didn't speak, when you were holding my hand. Our hands looked beautiful together. They belonged together, but that is the folly of the object level perception. I try an sweep it away, but it has to substance, no mass and therefore cannot be moved. It can only be.

Stillborn

Nothing could bring it to life. It had hands, an eye, a belly, a few toes, all the parts necessary for life. The heart never developed quite right. I worked into it with my fingertips, shaping slick chambers and connecting valves. We were making our attempt at being gods. I breathed and sang songs into the little thing, because it held promise. Promise is always something when you have nothing, and all beginnings have nothing. We mourn separately. We can’t compose rainbows of regret. We have no rituals of atonement. Now you see, I cannot stay here and be humiliated by you anymore. I cannot make it live. I will not be loved in pieces for it, but rather I need to be loved as a whole. We can love the failed life in pieces, we can build it a sepulchre. You have come to the wrong place. No one is perfect. I am not sorry.

Epitaph

You have read upon my countenance the marks of bad qualities, which were not existent but they were assumed to exist and so they were born. With you I was modest yet I was accused of slyness. I grew secretive. I profoundly felt both good and evil. Yet you did not caress me, you insulted me. I grew vindictive. I was gloomy at times, and you became more merry and talkative. I felt myself higher than you. I was rated lower and I grew envious. I was prepared to love you and yet not be understood. I learned to hate. My colourless youth flowed by in conflict with myself and you, so fearing ridicule I buried my best feelings in the depths of my heart. There they died. I spoke the truth, and I was not believed. I began to deceive. Having acquired a thorough knowledge of the world and the springs of society, I grew skilled in the science of life and I saw how you without any skill were happy, enjoying gratuitously the advantages which I so unweariedly sought. Despair was born within my breast, not that despair which is cured at the muzzle of a pistol, but the cold, powerless despair concealed beneath the mask of amiability and a good-natured smile. I became a moral cripple. One half of my soul ceased to exist; it dried up, evaporated, died, and I cut it off and cast it from me. The other half moved and lived at the service of all; but it remained unobserved because you refused to acknowledge that the half which had perished had ever existed. But now, the memory of it has been awakened within me by your empty promises and this is its epitaph.