ode to silence

there is so much to be said in silence ... all the bright lights of conscious thinking vieled in a white space of communication


"i don't want you to be a hypocrite."

"i don't want her to know who i am."

fear, love, denial, hatred, regret, mecriless is that space of noise without words ...

the road sank in darkness in front of us, the yellow dividing dashes repeat themselves ad nauseum, defining a path, reciting a verse, a known variable, over and over, like that constant announcement of self in the ceremonial lines of "hi, who are you?"

ritual disassociation ... i know it well ...

gliding down country roads in a silver saturn, patterned to fit all who need no path of specificity, only practical, gas-modest comfort riding ... i despise the clean, curving lines of the interior space of my mother's chosen transporation bullet ... so like a woman caged in that oh-so-cliche bent-back way, photo-montage exposure, breast, rib, waist, thigh, as if surface detail were all there was.

and it is really ...

here anyway ... and here is all you'll ever be as much as you'd want to be somewhere, here is reality check 101 and it's vague and indefinite as silence and it ought to be ...

we spoke of africa, one of my many tangents from why i disliked "batman begins" and its backbone of hazy eastern philosophy, how the leaders of the ANC, the African National Council, whom i had draped in heroism and mystique and liberal ideology had failed me ... and only because i had believed in their rhetoric, their ability to change and construct and manipulate reality and subjugation with mere words and symbolic deeds ... my rhetoric professor had given me their marching speeches and i had swallowed whole their phallic strength of piercing those that had pierced them ... they seemed more like a mafia now ... many subordinates were claiming to have been used as pawns and scapegoats and were very critical of the ANC's proposed mission ... to free south africa from itself

abuses of power brought us to china and the labor trade ... how china owned america, how its low regard for workers' rights in the outsourcing of manufacturing was causing america's corporations to gain new powers over unions of american workers ... was causing our demands for benefits to seem childish in the wake of their own humanitarian indifference ...

and my bother, oh so much taller than me now, his chin so much stronger ... he responded with an observation on individualism in america, how it was destroying us, even families were becoming islands onto themselves, communities only a tool to be used to gain more separation from each other ... "we look like we're working together, don't we?" ... and my mother chimed in with an ancedote of how chinese would be the new world powers because they stuck together and had so much respect and loyalty to family ...

i stopped. furious. sudden impulse to bang my head against the wind shield like so many unfortunate birds caught dead in midflight by some whizzing modern bullet of society, some abomination of a moving, celestial body ... i looked at my brother and choked out, "how can you talk of the destruction of family when you can't even visit your father, who lives an hour away?"

and silence engulfed us ... silence deafened us and we drove away from ourselves in seconds of oblivion ... what does it mean for philosophy to be personal? what everyone does on a daily basis MEANS something ... even here, so far away, so dark, so disassociated from whatever it was we were meant to be ...

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once i mistook your mumbling language for poetry, i said did you describe "a wooden sea, is that what you said, a wooden sea? you are a wooden sea, walking on planks of rigid plant death."

no, you have it all wrong, i said "don't see? don't see? where do you come from anyway?"