Brushes With The Dark Law

 (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  But my pronouns, shifty and out-of-date, also hunger to touch wood, to smell the living rot of the forest, and to exit the math and codes that monetize our loss of the material world.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.