Why Don’t They Just Say What They Mean?

 

Unless the words were put down in that order in that way it could not do the thing it does to those to whom it does it.

Because the words were put down thus it does nothing to you.

Your move.

F*ing Computers

 

In trying to make our lives simpler, computers have made them hopelessly more complex. What used to be simple, straightforward, intuitive processes now require us to solve a rubrics cube a day to figure out how to store, edit, find, save, and retrieve files. Where is that thing I was working on this morning? I now have ten paths to it, half of which take me nowhere near it, three of which take me to some alternative universe version of it, two of which disappear when I try to click on them. I never know if I do get a file open if this is the one I wanted, the latest version, the best version. It's one of the versions the computer saved for me without my permission when I was thinking about options. The lost bits exist still in the ether. Now I have to train myself in the proper recovery method. I've lost my actual train of thought because I have to inhabit the amateur computer scientist section of my brain for twenty minutes and even to the thing that I dread most in the world: search the HELP menu in a desperate and fruitless attempt to get help. I put in search terms, carefully using the actual terms the computer used with me to tell me what my problem was. But the words a computer uses to talk to you are never the words the computer will allow you to use to talk to it. “You need to verify your username and password.” Ok. Since there’s no useful information there, I go to help, “How do I verify my username and password.” One of two things will happen: “Your query yielded no results.” Or “here are the 10,239 things you might be asking about, including a recipe for blueberry anchovy muffins.”

If I ever to get to the old version of the document without the 20 hours of work I’d already added to it but which, starting from, I’ll save at least 20 hours re-editing that would have been wasted looking for the version I actually wanted to work on I may start working on it again. But before I can do that, I have to offer myself up to a Buddhist monastery.

You Great Unknowns

 

WE know Emily today not because she had great talent

that’s a given

but because she had great luck.

She wrote a letter to the one person who would help her.

We know Kafka today because his best friend betrayed him.

I could go on.

 

The observation is not that we came so close to not knowing these visionaries

but that we don’t know the ones who wrote the wrong letter or had loyal friends.

 

How very many sages remain unknown to history?

We can’t answer that.

When all is finally over, earth exhausted by its native evil

and God gathers God’s own into God’s kingdom

will you finally get your reward, you great unknowns,

or will there be so many of us that we remain

anonymous?

Enlightened Religion, half a thought

 

From the Enlightenment and its science has emerged the historically crazy idea that religion should be rejected because its stories aren’t true. To what extent has anyone ever believed the stories of Zeus or Brahma were true, or in what sense? And what about Moses and Jesus and Mohammed? Surely people believed that the stories about these figures were true? How can you worship the Western God revealed via these figures if you don’t believe the accounts of their lives are true?

But no one asked about the truth of these stories until after the concept of Enlightenment Truth emerged. Of course the followers of Judaism, Christianity and Islam believed the stories of their founders and principal figures. But the claim that those stories were true in our modern sense of true—historically accurate, recorded and told exactly as they happened—could not be claimed for them until that concept of truth developed. Once that standard was applied to stories, the stories of course unraveled. But not because they were not true. They fell apart when held to a standard was applied to them that was unknown to the people who first told them or read or heard them.

And now we claim very widely that religion is false because the stories are false because they don’t conform to this alien standard of truth. It’s like judging nursery rhymes because they don't conform to the rules of calculus. And even those who today try to save religion from the Enlightenment critique generally doom themselves by using the structure of Enlightenment thought. And they are judged as crazy or confused (which of course they are but no more confused than those they oppose) because they can’t see the plain fact that ancient stories don’t stand up to Enlightenment standards of truth. The imperfect and so-so Enlightenment. But what these well-meaning critics of secular thought are in my view really responding to is something else. They too only have the Modern vocabulary in which to express themselves, so they express themselves badly. The sense they have however that the real is something other than what the critics of religion tell us it is is too strong to die on the altar of Enlightenment. They know that something is missing in the Enlightenment critique of pre-Enlightenment thought. But they don’t have any idea how to say what that is. So they listen to all that science has to say; they never question the absurdity of going to the scientist to ask questions about God, and they go away thinking “that must be wrong.” If they only press the question in the vocabulary of the scientist far enough, they’ll see it fall apart. We’re just not there yet.

But that will never happen. The whole structure of Enlightenment thought ultimately excludes God. And simultaneously excludes religion. God is not an object in the universe, not an object at all. God therefore does not have objective existence. A structure of thought that claims only what is objective is real declares God unreal. And at the same time it declares religion false—which is a radically different step. God does not have to be objectively real—does not have to “exist”—for religion to be an essential part of the human experience.

And I mean essential in a collective not an individual sense, though that may be true as well. It may be that humanity cannot persist without religion. Enlightenment thought repeatedly argues the evil of religion. It was Nietzsche who finally tore the lid off this one. Religion is the source of endless evil, personal and civil, wars and murders and intolerance and prejudice and oppression. War is the great human evil that we’re finally on the verge of eradicating; though Nietzsche’s dates may have been overly optimistic, the trajectory is clear.

The counter argument is easy enough to make, though it would take me off track to make it here. I will only point out that religion did not create nuclear war or gas chambers or mustard gas. It is not responsible for global warming or gun violence or capitalism. Freeing ourselves from religion has not made us a more peaceful species. The claim that if we just continue to push our Enlightenment thinking until it truly sticks is like the argument of the gun lobby that tells us that only way to solve the gun problem is to sell more guns. The same forces that have always used religion to support violence now use the Enlightenment. The true priests of the Enlightenment say they are perverting this thought, that they are illegitimate. Sure. The priests of religious thought said the same thing. And they were right. But then they had the regulating power of religion to counterbalance the violence. We lack that today more than ever before. And it does not appear that the regulating power of Modernism or Scientism or Enlightenment will ever be sufficient to stop the train of ignorance, greed, and violence. If the end is near, it’s not because of religion. It may be because we wouldn’t allow religion to save us from it.

All the old stories are true according to the standards of truth set up for them. And that standard of truth is no less valid than the scientific and quasi-scientific standards that we use today to affirm and condemn all claims. But what is the claim to truth religions make? What difference does it make that we have lost this mythic realm of truth?

The germs of our modern, Enlightenment, scientific notion of truth can be traced far back, as far back as you want to go. They are in Augustine’s critique of astrology and Manicheism. They are an essential ingredient in the shift from what we today call paganism to monotheism, even in Islam’s critique of Christianity as it is manifest in the Qur’an. But that plant grew and the other was weeded.

Much of the most important thought of the 20^th Century supported the notion that the human species exists like any other species. In rural Maine they keep a close eye on the dogs at certain times of year because they know that if they smell deer, they’ll gather from one back yard to another and spontaneously form themselves into a pack and start killing the hunters’ prizes. Humans are like this. Hitler did not rise out of nowhere nor did Donald Trump or the Right Wing populist, nationalist nonsense sweeping the world today. It would be irresponsible to oversimplify the analysis of why and how this happened. I contend that the intellectual rejection of religion is an essential factor. 

 

The Library of Alexandria

If you believe that poems

are objects inherent in language

like other kinds of objects inherent

in something something like language--

already there, I mean,

which is a meaning inherent in the word

object that I felt the need to pull out

and place before you

like an object

I pulled out of language—

what other possibilities are created by your image

or metaphor? What translates?

First of all that you could have been the one to write this great poem.

Anyone sufficiently tuned could have grabbed these words out of language’s net

and arranged them thus. That all the wealth and fame this great poem will have achieved

before the inevitable end of its life could have been yours that will now be mine.

And that all the wealth and fame I’ll get that could have been yours was not

earned, unless you think those stray quarters you pick out of the dirt that fell from the pockets of people who didn’t deserve them are earned.

And that the library of Alexandria wasn’t really lost.  

Sestina: Weren't We One

1

Light diffusing icicles in rain

minor melody dripping in plain sight

mist effusion, this arresting pain

felt-for meaning in an empty rite

incense of memory, forgotten, clotted air

in this mockery of spring, this rotten-blossomed pear.

2

O, those days, we thought we were a pair.

Two true gods in love, over love to reign.

Witness this: even true divinity can err.

Consider this: the text of any poem you could cite,

the text of any lines that you could write:

attention getting stones to rock a windowpane.

3

And in the splattered sound, something but to pay, and

even if there’s nothing’s there, still I am the payer.

No need to ask: is it wrong or is it right.

Nothing slows from pulling on that rein.

The ground below the window, see the site

Of all this dripping sorrow ere

4

brown unbudding branches are the all the heir

gets; the basses of the air groan out in pain

whatever litany of dripping words you may recite—

unless the heated blade of song can pare

the dripping ice back into rain

or modulate the melody as would a gilded wright

5   

to make the magic of the song that can the time aright,

inscribed in drops upon the fabric air.

If all things end, so ends the fleeting reign:

so let the melting music swell a paean 

and let the rotten blossom yield a pear.

Compensatory wisdom, flowering insight

6

some phrasal consolation to recite

some recollected truth within the rotten rite

like a child’s lost lesson from the dead old père.

If sorrow is the death of love, the heir’s

Inheritance must be pain.

So let the dead tree live in all this rain.

 

Envoie

Melting ice’s tears, the smell of blooming pear

within the sigh to know the rite of pain:

Let go the rein in incense sounding air.

 

Mimesis

Every indi-

vidual yawned, laughed, looked up,

at the sky.

Review of "Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark"

 I read the Cecelia Watson's book over spring break—you could get through it in a sitting; it’s pretty short and easy to read—and I came to the conclusion, which was never mentioned or entertained in the book, but for which the book did give evidence, that the paradigm of “rules” is misguided. It’s foreign to how language actually works. It’s clumsy and Occam would have hated it. Instead, I want to promote the idea of “expectations.” Then we don’t ask “whose rules?” but “whose expectations?” We put “am” not “are” after “I” in almost all cases because the people who(m) we expect to read us expect us to do that. We’re not following a rule. We’re meeting an expectation. That means that there literally are no rules. What we call rules are descriptions of the expectations of a certain audience under certain conditions. This frees every act of composition up to be and do what it needs in order to meet or defy those expectations, to manipulate the reader based on their expectations. Exactly how language actually works.

A Through Thought

 As I understand your infinite God, he knows and sees and has complete power over all and every etc.

Okay, then. What can an infinite imagination imagine? For starters--everything. 

And what is it like for an infinite imagination to imagine a thing? How is imagining a thing different from creating that thing? If God imagines a thing, does it therefore thereby exist as a thing? I can't see how it can't. To an infinite and free imagination, I'd be as real as I am whether I existed in myself, outside that imagination, or just in it. 

I'd like to set aside the question then of why or whether God actually created me, whether I actually exist as anything other than a thought in the imagination of this God. How could I know? I can't even reasonably speculate--about that.

But I can about this: If I'm right that I am as real to God in his imagination as I could possibly be outside it, some things follow. God knows not just everything I ever did or will do but everything I didn't do and every branch that act would have taken if I'd done it. Every single time any one thing could have gone another way, in God's imagination it went that way, and all the other women I would have married and all the other children I would have had and all their lives.

But this infinite God is much much bigger than that. He knows what lives every stillborn baby would have lived if it had been born alive, and all the paths. And all the aborted babies. And his knowledge is as real to him as if they had lived. 

And all the babies that would have been created if each individual sperm that didn't fertilize the egg in that ejaculation had got there first. And all those lives. And all the lives that would have been created if you'd had sex on Tuesday of that week instead of Wednesday, or an hour later or earlier, and all the infinity of possibilities. Remember, this God is infinite beyond the library of Babel. 

In God's mind every sperm ever created has joined with every egg ever created and has created every baby that could have been created and all the lives they could have lived and all their forking paths.

And not just that. God knows with equal assurance every sperm that could have been created, every permutation of DNA, even the ones that never lead to live birth, in sperm and egg. Every baby that was never actually possible and how they could have interacted with all the other people in every conceivable permutation. 

It would take trillions of universes to play these things out in reality. 

There may indeed be trillions of universes. 

In fact there are, inside God's imagination or in what we like to call "reality" or "physical reality." The difference is immaterial.

Every heartbreak. Every love. Every time anyone of them was cut from a baseball team.  

It's What It's

We can say
It is what it is

But we can't say

It is what it's.

Or

It's what it's.

We an say

What it is it is.

But we can't say

What it's it's.

Or

What it is it's.

What the rule it?

Occam Has No Conductor

It starts as noise—chaos (call it)

bruit. Then, in the sonic miasma, a note

hard, loud, singularly indistinguishable

from the cacophony. And then another

giving shape to what has come before—

a loud dim din of melody. As long as you live there

will always be noise. And in the noise

melody, infinite overlapping

like symphonies on so many together turning turntables.

The joy not of life but in it.

Not the wonder of the universe,

Not the miracle of mind,

Not the blessing of the church 

But the blessings in the church.

Love in a field of indifference.

You say there’s nothing new here. That’s so.

These words still sound within the old vocabulary, within the old old language

and so you miss them if you listen too too hard.

The opposite of the rattle in the hum of the car.

Tinnitus on top of everything else.

If I suggest that God did not create the universe 

but was created by it and lives here 

have I excluded myself from all religion?

Such a God no one needs.

Such a God explains nothing.

Maybe Occam has another job for God.

Religion is an industry but

in that industry a melody

the managers didn’t put there

and can’t hear. Hear the shrill whistle

issuing order into sounds

confused. The diamond in the carbon deposit.

The possibility that the noise itself is a melody I can’t entertain. 

Zap all the symphonies ever made into outerspace.

Let aliens hear them. And let one clever one among them posit

a conductor. 

Now listen.

I Think

I think. I think

I think. Am I

thinking? I think

I am. I think I am

thinking, thinking I

am I. Thinking,

I am I. Thinking

I am I? I think. Thinking

I am, I am I, I think.

I think I think. Am I?

Leibniz and Voltaire reconciled at last

It occurred to me last night that Leibniz and Voltaire aren’t really so far apart. Leibniz claimed that “Of all possible worlds an infinite and all-powerful God would create the best.” That best world would follow the “principle of plenitude,” according to which it would contain “the maximum richness of variety of modes of being.” Voltaire looking around at our dark, spacious, flawful universe asked, rhetorically, via Candide, “If this is the best, what are the others like?” Well, if, according to the principles of Leibniz God would create the best of all possible worlds, according to the principle of plentitude, he’d create all the other ones as well. If so, we may just be living in what Candide called “One of the worst.” Reward yourself with another coffee.

After the Well Goes Dry

 

Digging a dry well deeper’s not a crime.

Hey, it’s your funeral. Everything that can be said

About the dead’s been said at least a million times.

Your chances of striking water are quite low.

If time itself is dying it’s its time.

 

But then again, who knows, there may be moisture yet

Below the empty coffin bed to fill a garden hose.

Stranger things have happened, muddy clothes

Washed in blood river come out clean. I’ve seen

 

A dead man on a concrete sleeve

After the paramedic crew’s thrown up their arms

Pull desperate balls of air into his lungs and breathe.

 

It’s true. If you ask yourself, and think quite deeply on it,

It may not even be too late to write a sonnet.

The Problem with Evolution

The problem with the "theory of evolution" is not that it's false. Being a scientific theory, a conclusion based on upon a certain methodology that structures a certain type of narrative to the exclusion of all other narratives--being, as I say, a scientific theory, it is as true as it can be given the information available and the structure allowable. The problem is that it is bad story telling. It purports to be a true--not a scientific but an actually true--account, i.e. narrative, story--of how things happen and how things have happened. We are story-charged beings. We live on story. We see and experience ourselves and our world and everything in it via story. And this story sucks. It lacks a goal. It lacks even a trajectory beyond eventual extinction, which it gets when coupled with the cosmological story that starts with an event--whether or not that event is still called the Big Bang or gets a better name and more precise description. It allows for no point and no values, nothing worth living for or doing. Nothing. Even hedonism gives us something to want, some way of marking and evaluating progress. Science disavows any relationship to value or meaning even while it serves, more than it serves anything, as the elemental structure of the grand narrative of our time, and that not for a single culture but for the whole earth. Nothing is more certain to destroy humanity than bad story telling. 

NOW

the

O

of

now

the frozen past’s chaotic stasis

threaded through

the opening to all

that will have been

Nietzsche and Borges and Murphy: Fiction and the Empty Universe

Neil deGrasse Tyson declares the number of possible persons by the number of possible combinations of DNA. This would make twins and clones the same person. In fact the number of possible persons is infinite. 

Borges added to Nietzsche’s notion of Eternal Return a Library in which all texts return infinitely, but with variation. But if the library is infinite, all texts also return infinitely without variation. All commas are forever where they belong. And if the universe is structured like the library, then not just all texts but all lives return eternally with and without variation. Every mistake you ever make you make eternally. But you also avoid it eternally. Everyone you ever could have married, you marry. Every life you could have lived, you live. Every mistake you could make, you make. Every mistake you could avoid, you avoid. Everything that can happen happens, happens forever in infinite repetition. And this helps us understand the great emptiness of the universe, an argument against the existence of God. Most of the universe is empty. Most of the library is nonsense. Pockets of meaning are infinite and infinitely rare at the same time, at every time, at all times and in all times. That’s the structure of the library. But it also means that the books we write which are fictions here are realities elsewhere, providing they are possible anywhere. Is there a universe in which flying carpets are real? If there is, there are flying carpets there and Persians who fly on them. If not, not. But Silas Lapham exists with his paint in a universe somewhere. And somewhere he doesn’t gamble on the stock market and somewhere he does.

Rushdie's God

 I am a particular fan of Salman Rushdie. Of his published words, the few I have not (yet) read are like the water that's left in your cupped hands when all the rest has passed through. Not much. I have taught an entire graduate seminar on his works--though that was long ago, before most of the ones we now have were written. I've gone to India to present a paper on his sense of history, which was soon after published in a book that came out of the conference. I did this in the days when I wasn't quite sure it was safe to travel to India to talk about Rushdie. (Turns out I had nothing to worry about.) If nothing else of Rushdie lasts, it's hard to imagine the Midnight's Children will not be read as long as there are people who read novels. 

That's not to say that I think Rushdie is universally brilliant and not even sometimes rated higher, I won't say "than he deserves" but, as I would rate him. He's a novelist. He's not a philosopher. And he's not theologian either. I'm neither of those things myself, so there's my grain of salt.

I, like Rushdie, like to talk about God. I don't like to talk about God the way Rushdie does. Rushdie is not just a devotee of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, but is (or in one case was) also a personal friend of theirs. It's the tradition of no less a mind than Bertrand Russell. And like them, he isn't just an atheist--I have no problem with atheists--but contemptuous not just of religion (I understand even when I don't share that response to religion), but also faith in general, to theism in general. As such, he equates believe in God with magical thinking, with believing in fairy tales and Santa Claus. Something only children and small minded adults can take seriously. 

On the question of whether God exists, I will not take any stand. On the question of whether this characterization of belief makes sense, I will. 

In Languages of Truth Rushdie offers a standard atheists "history" of religion (he cannot distinguish between belief in God and adherence to religion). Ignorant, pre-scientific people, needing to understand and control what they could not understand or control, felt the wind and invented an invisible blower of the wind to whom they could appeal when the wanted the wind to stop and who, if he did not stop the wind, hated or blamed them, in any case required some response from them if they still wanted the wind to stop. (I'm not quoting because the idea is so simple and so standard that it doesn't even matter if I embellish or understate; it comes to the same thing.)

God did not create us in his image, he tells us, we created God in our image. 

Rushdie may be right about all of that. That's not the question. He also may be wrong. Offering no evidence between "common sense," which is an extraordinarily slippery sort of evidence, no one reading Rushdie has in fact any reason to accept his version of history, his story, or, to put it in the terms it best deserves, his myth. There's an essential difference between a plausible explanation and an established fact. Rushdie wants to put his eggs in the basket of science, but then he offers a hypothesis as a conclusion. He has told the story many times of how he lost his faith as child--around the age of 14 if I remember correctly. A lot of children do. I don't see any evidence that his thinking on the question has advanced since then. Almost no one's ever does. (C. S. Lewis is an exception to that trend, not that I don't have problems with the version of faith advocated there as well. But whatever one might say about Lewis, his faith is well thought out, not the shrug-off of Rushdie.) I don't think anyone needs to take too seriously the undeveloped atheism or the theism of a fourteen-year old.  

The point that I wish to make is this: Rushdie replaces a faith in myth with a myth in which he expects us to place our faith. A myth of origins. A simple reversal of the old idea about God's image. How does Rushdie know we created God in our image? Here he does not delve. It's too obvious to need to delve. 

The problem with saying that faith is unreasonable, fairy-taley, jibber jabber, is the number of reasonable people who maintain that it isn't, not just amateur theologians like C.S. Lewis, but actual philosophers like Rene Girard and Paul Ricoeur. And the problem with the idea that we created God in our image is that the claim is always based on the unverifiable notion that God if God existed would never create the universe in which we live. It's unjust. It's too tolerant of evil. Our reason tells us that it is unreasonable for an omniscient, all loving God to make such a shit show universe. 

That may be true. There is reason to assert that it is. But we have nothing like a reason to believe that it is. If we do, we do so on faith. That an infinite God would use human reason, with not just its lack of knowledge but its lack of apparatus, its thoroughly qualified finiteness, to make what we have to call from our perspective "decisions" about how to make a universe is not just an act of hubris but an act of willful blindness. It's plainly silly. Think of a toddler telling you how to fix your car or your government or global warming and multiply that difference infinitely and you have the difference between what religion calls the mind of God and what Rushdie calls the mind of God. 

There's no getting around this. It will sound like a cheap response to the Rushdie, Hitchens, Dawkins crowd. But it is in fact the more reasonable response. It is the line of thought that unlike theirs takes into account reason and science. It sets myth aside to confront the facts as we know them. 

A Word on Thomas Hardy

 

It seems the first thing one must say today is in response to Hardian pessimism: to the aversion I have to reading novels that beat up on their protagonists. Hardy pulls out fingernails and pushes needles slowly into eyes with what feels like self-loathing, sadistic, pleasure. 

These stories go beyond tragedy, which always has a cause, which always tells us that “it had to be” even when we respond, “it should not have to have been that way.” Hardy wants us to know, “it didn’t have to be that way.” In his works it may be an evil individual, and it may be the arbitrary rules of the social unit (that put so much pressure on who may have sex with whom in its most obvious example of the “it didn’t have to be that way” variety) or pure chance. When the gods condemn us, we just have to submit. When society punishes us for mere natural actions that give us happiness or pleasure at no one’s essential cost, we can change those rules. But when well meaning people doing good are ground down for their virtue, the most natural reaction is disgust followed by despair. That which cannot be altered or resisted or blamed offers no meaningful response. Hardy’s universe is one no one wants to live in. There’s no fixing it. There’s no reconciling oneself to it.

Hardy’s response is “but that’s the universe you do live in. I’m just showing it to you. I’m taking the veil off the bullshit presented to you as food by all previous literature (with the possible exception of King Lear). I’m not telling you what to do with this knowledge, because there’s nothing you can do with it. Accept it if you choose to live in truth; deny it if you choose to live in delusion.”

But is this the universe we actually live in? Of course there IS a force behind the arbitrary destruction of all of Hardy’s admirable heroes. Hardy himself. The manipulating author who keeps good at bay while he opens all the apertures to destruction. That doesn’t however reveal anything about the accuracy of the portrayal. Hardy is Tess’s Apollo. But Tess might have died as she did without any Apollo. People die by chance on their way to doing good every day.

What strikes me as in indication of something deeply false about Hardy’s novels is the reaction of readers. Some of us turn away in disgust. Some of us in satisfaction of a kind. Some cry at the tortured goodness. But no one, I imagine, puts them down out of boredom, at least no one who wouldn’t put down any novel out of boredom. (That’s to say, if anyone is bored by Hardy it’s not because of his plots or his characters but because they don’t have the wherewithal to read.) But boredom is the only proper response to a Hardy novel if Hardy’s representation is accurate. The very idea that something wrong has happened, that some deep injustice has been perpetrated, that there’s something wrong with this indifferent universe may be the effect of centuries of bad storytelling, indoctrination into the myth of meaning. But it may also be from the deeper sense that there is something wrong, something broken in this universe. If Hardy’s right, he shouldn’t have sold any novels. When you hold the mirror up to the reader who sees himself for the first time, there may be an initial shock. But once “that’s who I am” settles in, the shock, whatever intermediary stages of denial and sadness must be made through, comes eventually to resignation and indifference. And we have still not got to indifference.

 

Is

 

Even if I tell you, tell you plainly,

        in the simplest words,

You will not get it.

 

Even if you tell it back to me in new words you picked from the fruit-heavy branches of your word tree so that I understand my own meaning as though you were giving it new to me

You will not have it.

 

But it will sit with you when you lie trembling in your sweat-soaked bed.

It will hold your hand and lay a compress on your fevered head.

And when the fever breaks, many many years from now,

When my voice and name have been composted past shadow,

You will repeat these words again (or others like them) like a prayer, slowly, to yourself

as you strain your thighs to the mattress edge

and shift your weight

and stand up shaking on the cold hard floor.

Then you'll have it; you’ll have got it, you will know.