Thursday, December 13, 2007

I can see it in your eyes. If it weren't for this I would have stopped trying long time ago, to communicate with you in this halfway language which is so difficult for both of us, which exhausts the throat and fills the mouth with sand; if it weren't for this I would have gone away, gone back. It's this knowledge of death, which we share, where we overlap. Death is our common ground. Together, on it, we can walk forward.

By now you must have guessed: I come from another planet. But I will never say to you, take me to your leaders. Even I - unused to your ways though I am - would never make that mistake. We ourselves have such beings among us, made of cogs, pieces of paper, small disks of shiny metal, scraps of coloured cloth. I do not need to encounter more of.

Instead I will say, take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths.

These are worth it. These are what I have come for.



~"Homelanding" in Good Bones by Margaret Atwood.

.shan. [1:28 AM]

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Whether to speak or not: the question that comes up again when you think you've said too much, again. Another clutch of nouns, a fistful: look how they pick them over, the shoppers for words, pinching here and there to see if they're bruised yet. Verbs are no better, they wind them up, let them go, scrabbling over the table, wind them up again too tight and the spring breaks. You can't take another poem of spring, not with the wound-up vowels, not with the bruised word green in it, not yours, not with ants crawling all over it, not this infestation. It's a market, flyspecked; how do you wash a language? There's the beginning of a bad smell, you can hear the growls, something's being eaten, once too often. Your mouth feels rotten.

Why involve yourself? You'd do better to sit off to the side, on the sidewalk under the awning, hands over your mouth, your ears, your eyes, with a cup in front of you into which people will or will not drop pennies. They think you can't talk, they're sorry for you, but. But you're waiting for the word, the one that will finally be right. A compound, the generation of life, mud and light.

~"Mute" in Murder in the Dark by Margaret Atwood.

.shan. [7:44 PM]

In any case, that's me in the dark. I have designs on you. I'm plotting my sinister crime, my hands are reaching for your neck or perhaps, by mistake, your thigh. You can hear my footsteps approaching, I wear boots and carry a knife, or maybe it's a pearl-handled revolver, in any case I wear boots with very soft soles, you can see the cinematic glow of my cigarette, waxing and waning in the fog of the room, the street, the room, even though I don't smoke. Just remember this, when the scream at last has ended and you've turned on the lights: by rules of the game, I must always lie.

Now: do you believe me?

~Murder in the Dark by Margaret Atwood.

.shan. [7:33 PM]