(Published in the March 2023 issue of Nude Bruce Literary Journal)
My Pronouns Are Lying
My pronouns experience rigpa, recoil, take cover
as soon as possible, and write a poem like this, but not this.
My pronouns, stunned, roll around in the annals of
history, not exactly lost, but far from any place that is found. My pronouns form new versions, as is their
nature, to be transcendent, immanent and ungrammatical. Grammar tames but does not harness them. Avoiding
grammar, my pronouns make my myths.
For instance, my pronouns pretend they are the wax in
Icarus’ wings, more’s the pity for him, the gods, and the emptying skies. My pronouns walk under that sky, want to keep
it from loss, replicate it as a hedge against loss. But somewhere someone must have seen
something remarkable, a boy falling into the dark sea. Now my pronouns hold
places in sentences where collective agreement is not enough. Their failures make my pronouns the only map
of consciousness, the world looking at itself.
My pronouns are the aether, the rich soup of neutrinos
and theory, the dark and light of all possible universes. They shine with capaciousness
in their war against holograms, against simulations. My pronouns make the world
we know by the light they use. But my
pronouns, shifty and out-of-date, also hunger to touch wood, to smell the living
rot of the forest, and to exit the math and codes that monetize our loss of the
material world.
So, with their need for the real world without
constructs, my pronouns regroup, case the joint, duck for cover, and slip out
the back. In the back 40 of the desert
and floods, my pronouns find the lost jar where symmetrical particles hide
until it’s time to end time. They are wrapped in torn curtains.
My pronouns, long-winded but wiser for the wear, pack
up the DNA of what’s possible, and are exhausted by what’s not. My pronouns fold
themselves – origami, charts, clean linen, mudras, counterpoints, scrolls, neurotransmitters,
carry-on luggage, black holes – to close the argument. And every fold’s a lie.