Father, confessor...
To what end do you listen? For what purpose are you here, hanging, on every word? (only to forget them: a handshake, a closing door, my confessions escaping in the wake of the wind... You said to me once, "Your very presence pulls all of the oxygen out of the air.") I am a ravenous flame, and you are the vacuum that would silence me.
You have reassured me, more than once, that what is said here is confidential. But it is this secrecy that unnerves me. I do not wish to obscure anything. I am transparent, fallen glass. I am the gravity that calls me back to sand. And I crave, more than anything, a witness who--in his fascination--will recall all of this to some faceless other after I am dead.
To be one composition--musical, written, visual--that explains everything. Ambivalence, desire, overcoming fear...
But your attention span is such that you could chronicle nothing, not even remembering my name in your silence, when sitting in a mutinous circle around some future campfire.
The genesis of these issues lies in the family's exodus from dusty midwestern hamlets for the lush undertow of California's central valley. Still singing, clutching Bibles, these pilgrims advanced across the road in hesitant steps. The laws of Leviticus inform them, inform them of their failures, their shame, their sins. The gyrating music from inside the club is blocked out (a little) by the policemen converging on the corner...T carried off in cuffs. He yells back to me--a bright orange blob dissolving in the sun at the far end of the corridor, "Dude, did you do raw to me?" But he is gone, absorbed into the corpulent light. Now the crowds numbers swell. Joshua judges Ruth. They will speak intermittently over the weekend...fighting at times... ...but first Samuel says his piece.
To what end do you listen? For what purpose are you here, hanging, on every word? (only to forget them: a handshake, a closing door, my confessions escaping in the wake of the wind... You said to me once, "Your very presence pulls all of the oxygen out of the air.") I am a ravenous flame, and you are the vacuum that would silence me.
You have reassured me, more than once, that what is said here is confidential. But it is this secrecy that unnerves me. I do not wish to obscure anything. I am transparent, fallen glass. I am the gravity that calls me back to sand. And I crave, more than anything, a witness who--in his fascination--will recall all of this to some faceless other after I am dead.
To be one composition--musical, written, visual--that explains everything. Ambivalence, desire, overcoming fear...
But your attention span is such that you could chronicle nothing, not even remembering my name in your silence, when sitting in a mutinous circle around some future campfire.
The genesis of these issues lies in the family's exodus from dusty midwestern hamlets for the lush undertow of California's central valley. Still singing, clutching Bibles, these pilgrims advanced across the road in hesitant steps. The laws of Leviticus inform them, inform them of their failures, their shame, their sins. The gyrating music from inside the club is blocked out (a little) by the policemen converging on the corner...T carried off in cuffs. He yells back to me--a bright orange blob dissolving in the sun at the far end of the corridor, "Dude, did you do raw to me?" But he is gone, absorbed into the corpulent light. Now the crowds numbers swell. Joshua judges Ruth. They will speak intermittently over the weekend...fighting at times... ...but first Samuel says his piece.
