Before language learned to stand upright,
there was this
a low enduring ache,
circling the marrow of being
without inquiry or relief.
I have misplaced my beginning.
What remains is a residue of hours,
clotted with memory,
slow to dissolve in the mouth of time.
The soul if such a thing persists
has grown thin from listening.
Too many silences were spoken into it,
and now it answers only in weight.
There are thoughts that do not wish to be understood.
They kneel in corners of the mind,
murmuring in obsolete verbs,
grieving things that never occurred
yet were fully mourned.
I am unwell in existence.
Not wounded
worn.
As stone is worn by the devotion of water,
so have days rehearsed their erasures upon me.
Hope is an abandoned theology.
Its scriptures are illegible,
its promises eaten by damp and age.
I touch them only to confirm
they are no longer warm.
What survives is a discipline of endurance,
monastic, joyless, exact.
I continue not because I believe,
but because cessation would require
a clarity I do not possess.
If this is a life,
it is written in the margins
ink thinned with ash,
sentences trailing off
where the hand could no longer decide
whether to bless or to curse the page.