my otherness sticks with me no matter where I go : never loan out your rainy day : how many bodies are we : how many selves : how many worlds : where does this sorrow come from : where did we learn it ::
years ago when asked if my lover thought like a man I could not reply : the question made no sense : the answer lies on the ocean floor : the world, a ripple effect like old glass : the wind, I chase it like I chase conclusions : :
I am in danger of becoming a cautionary tale : the number of walls surrounding me is variable : I have failed to become a plaster saint : I have failed to become a woman : my hard-won silence comes from beyond the body : life is soup, not sandwich : skin becomes the pain of old injuries : tread the world into blend & blur : when I die I will become a map : it’s easy enough to change this body : hard to choose what to become next in the bardo of recycling : I love : that is the single unshakable core of me : I decide where I begin & end : our ears are full of mice : we put our faith in collection baskets : paste our legends to refrigerator doors : our genitals shift in their skin : on the corner of want & loss I drop my books in a repeated loop of slapstick : I cradle my balls as though the tremors could shake them loose : my skin damp with panic : my penis strains against my palm : there is no name for this love nor the body it becomes : forget everything you ever learned about ownership : that orange mesh that contains nothing but doubt ::
how to edit life : I do it all the time : chelate myself into another man : I take my sex in hand, the weight of it, like the weight of my heart locked down by perception : in the blank earth sleeping diamond resist names : & the question you were born with escapes : I am without hand, puffballs, or handbooks, without a comforting aura of predictability : without imitators : so don’t call me, I prefer not to fill up with sand : or moss : sand blows through the house, snake-backs across the boards : :
sometimes I want to drive down a deserted road to find the hidden ruins at the end & move in : like bees : or stars, following in the rearview : pushing the motor in the heart to click & hum in hope : my name is the door to the shed left open : my name is fire just like yours : sorry doesn’t do hostile takeovers : the forest will eventually find you : forty species of mold will eventually find you as well : life is about change : its walls are groaning with air & need : a hiccup could bring it all down : 365 day, all in the service of change : life in a derelict structure requires the structure to adapt : to resist : people love their migrations : they feel their immobility validated by the movement of other creatures : what is different in me when seen : when watched, clocked, monitored, yet not seen ::
old cowboy stories about footprints and horseshoes don’t make sense anymore : there’s a railway bridge along this spit I can’t cross : where you can hear broken pages, rats from the past, horses on the stairs & everything’s so loud ::
& what has life given me : a path and a lichen-wrapped stone : questions to answer : the trail of a process invisible to outsiders : I prefer sodomy to piety : build me a body inarguable : a slick torso like a book : I am the man weeping with the pain of everyday erasure & negation : the casual cruelty of she : the man demanding to be : waiting for a bless you ::
F
Fiercely Tender: The Simple Complex World of Michael Ondaatje’s Novels
Shortly afterwards in that novel we encounter a celebration of the body, grime and all, unimpeded by this abstraction called mind. While writing the body might seem not altogether unusual, my point is that you cannot simply assume its naturalness. Language, even fictional language, is so much of a mentally...
