The language I want to speak will always save flowers from drowning. It’ll know what bones make up breath, who buries the cadaver of sound. It’ll know the names of all the dead baby birds. The language I want to speak will drop like eyes, like a sounding line into the depths. The language I want to speak likes to dance with wasted leaves while the catbirds complain in the privet.
It’s not that I’m looking for a new language or anything. Even though the one I’ve got tastes kind of funny. It can’t even alter my time card. The language I’ve been working with here is like an autopsy of bluebirds. The one I’ve been playing is a dirge of idylls and burning laurel, a hive of worries, a diaspora of tears. But the one I want will be a bullhorn for mimes, a shot glass for sibyls. I’m trying to grow that language on a trellis along the north wall. It’ll be called the Evangel’s Tongue. I don’t know if language is the right word for it, maybe Sunday of the Bogomils, if I’m allowed to be flashy. The language I want to speak will be cleverly arranged stones that can tell the time, that can make love to the time while the stream bubbles and the lapwings cry. It’ll be a language of dead letters but their souls will still haunts us. It’ll be a language of manhole hanging garden crypt reading the lines of God’s palm. You’ll always find your favorite bottle of St. Chinian in that cellar. The light’s really black there because after all it’s language not a prayer of whales, though it could be with a certain twist of the syntax.
The language I want to speak will be like bumper cars for the dead. It’ll grow lianas in the jungle gym. It has a wail like you’ve never heard before. There’s a flock of black storks fuming hospital in that wail. There’s a vomitus, a puking of earth in that wail, an excretion of shamans. The excretion crawls from the place where things start, the place of endings dripping with millennia of rotting minds. I want to talk to it but it’s already so wrapped up in our useless words like swaddling clothes, tangled in our gasping words like a funeral shroud.
The language I want to speak will always stop the presses, the system will always crash, reception will be lost, the lines’ll go down. We’ll probably have to talk to someone, look them in the face. We’ll probably have to roll with the kids in the backyard clover, feed the ragged calico peacock that roams the pampas out front. In the language I want to speak whales sing to the bluebirds. My friends won’t know what-the-fuck I’m saying only that the stock market crashed a little too close. My friends won’t know what-the-fuck I’m saying only that someone mixed the clowns with the lepers. If you look close through the cracks in that language you’ll see mystics playing dominoes. They want things to happen that won’t. They want to say things they can’t. Their language can’t bear it. It’s ruptured under the strain. It wants to rent itself a tomb. It wants to find the first womb. It wants to build a bomb big enough to say one last thing.
- Why Write? 17: Tracy Thomas - June 14, 2013
- It Means Bread - April 16, 2013
- Red and Yellow Kill a Fellow - January 8, 2013
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