The assumption of your words a dedication, and one that came early. Your decision not to speak – barn raised the ribs of you in me, tied off at the tongue’s root like a bail and stopper, a cork welch that sealed you in.
Aflame; unrepentant at once and facing down any comer. Right or wrong but at least determined. Insistent – constant. A means to turn and re-use, to recall and call. Head-on, rare to come at a thing sideways. Known, remote. Use of a dialectic to prepare – to listen – to cut across and to best. Plausible denials of positions prepared in advance, perfect recall of what was said – maybe not by whom. No logographer’s skill but pure ethos, each possible betrayal tied to the character from the off.
Kilter, skelter – hellbent on the form of the proposition. Triumphant in the lame discovered. A brow-bating? Certainly wiped, adversarial or gladiatorial pose, honour amongst thieves – to live outside the law you must be honest.
For us, too – we established our tone as a wind bail hum through the glass – we allowed our own whine to sound through individual gripe or a mistake. The soured things – no lack of spirit muted us, we have been vocal daughters of Jerusalem – each in our own way dumbed by words, and as for the word.
Call the sound of things or their surprise something that we will come to own, or to control – if we meet head on, like a bone-break (blue break) – call that thing a greenstick fracture, bent more than shattered, and pining for itself. Marred, or a cross shouldered at the wrong time – the wrong cross shouldered. That colour-blocked room backed us as we began to unravel and still in some shock at the likeness. Not art, more meat – and a way to move beyond what was known as at dawn we rose and began again. Fire out words like this staccato machine – a kind or silence broken. Vow, pact set against the bone and reworked as soon as the time allowed for it.
It is words, after all, after we are done with them, that will hold us up and carry us up the hill. Cranial machinations that will align one with the next. And, in the end, we face our own T-test daily.
