[ToC]

 

SO SCISSORS SO WORDS SO SWORDS

Jake Syersak

So toward is a myth if toward linear be. So here I am in Florida, watching the laundry spin in the dryer at the laundromat, all the while remembering. Still. So back is the sound a mind makes thinking of the incongruous nature of now is am. While I is am & am is then: an am I was, was-ing. So I is the language of was, was-ing; the sound of was, was-ing; the action of was, was-ing. A funneling mesocyclonic whirlpool of a head devouring its tail. In media res, I remember the Oregonian backwoods. Smells of chicken blood in the distance. Cobwebs—a blast thereof invisible—an oily film, coalescing with a wind. I remember, what beautiful summer laundry there was, thereof, now was-ing, ing-ing into the inkling of a knot that ties my current comparison of a ruined arachnid web, purloined & pearlized by the detergent of sun & dew, to a curlicue of a t-shirt flayed about by water until it resembles a Oaxacan sugar skull, webbed out in full visage:

                        bid adieu to the web
                              pearlized by dew.

There the result of east echoing west toward the present bend of the roundabout original east is obvious in all its fearful symmetry. Fearful as scissor-tongued scissors. Swords so words so scissors. I'm talking in circles, in was & ing; inside how one incisor says ink, scissored. The road paint of a one-way may dare a car but cannot make or beckon the life inside a way away.

This is your language of think.

 


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This poem is a fragment of a longer meditative sequence on time and other facets of everyday life that, while largely amorphous, ethereal, and intangible, manage somehow to exert absolute power over the human form. It's a small part of a continuous effort to map mental direction in mental language, and I would certainly have to credit Lyn Hejinian's My Life as a powerful and continuous influence on this project.