Don’t You Desire to Lift the Veil? {spoken word poetry}
My dear lonely magicians, poets and artists, a thought such as this, which has the ultimate destructive power, which annihilates all distinction and reason into a singularity of nonsense, which melts heaven and hell into one of the same, which, in having no comparison, no ups nor downs, no rights nor wrongs, which stays unaware of even itself ad infinitum, must be where the stench of your gravest anxiety dwells. Such depth of depression is the bitter, flaming-brimstone flavor of the true nihilist.
But even this awful stench sweetens, halves, in your sharing it with minds, who offer you their, your homely comforts. Gravity unifies disparate fragments into societies and even sometimes communities in which digestion works well enough.
Still, there is the common cold, the bug, the virus, the heaving of weight to rip our muscles, to keep our immune system strong and healthy and, of course, the wisdom of the worms that remind us of our mortality.
There’s a tear in every word. What is it we desire if not to be heard, if not to be invited to the feast? There is only one desire, to cleanse oneself of meaninglessness, from the endless darkness of nihilism that is even stripped of its own shadow.
Shadows, paint them strong, you artists, let us know right from wrong. For you, too, although dressed in ghostly cloth, although waving ambiguities with your mysterious magic wand, miss so dearly solidity of self. To be and not to be, that was never the question. It was never about filling the entire field with fences to sit on.
Tear for tear, word for word and step for step, we move towards recovery, towards joyful meaningfulness, towards the full-stop where we can rest a while. Prisoners paint riversides, flowers and ladybirds, butterflies and honeybees to cover the whiteness of their cell walls.
Dear magicians, poets and artists, all thoughts, yours, these or otherwise, being fixed and constructed in the dualism of light and dark, are unable to recognize the inert foulness of the absolute. But to dismiss all contrast, to fill the entirety of ugliness with the entirety of beauty and beauty with ugliness paints but the blank canvas of absurdity.
Even your hands have fingers that desire pointing, that desire making a point. Even you want to know night from day and when it’s time to sleep and be awake.
The magician is also an engineer. Not at the same time, of course, for there’s also the curtain to consider. Yet, it is his desire, just as much as yours, to, one day, reveal his secrets and turn the mysteries of heaven into a mechanical hell. Don’t you also desire to lift the veil for the sake of company?
Yet, it’s a terrible fate for the poet when the borders have been entirely opened, when everyone talks in riddles, when all become poets. Alas, one dreams of peace with one’s finger on the trigger.
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Michael Victor Jackson lives in a hostel with his seven-year-old son, George. The odd smile now and again keeps him alive. He wonders what you want to know. Here’s what he does.