Give In

Give in. The softest moment, the delicate crux of what is bound to birth pain, is when the water first embraces you. You can feel the tension of the water, that thin line that we think we can see when looking sideways at our glass. I was always captivated by the way water hugged my skin. Small colonies of something so close to you, so close to you and yet not you. Fascinated, I bowed into the water, completely falling into something that was awaiting me, awaiting to hold me. I used to ask my mother about it incessantly. She would smile and say something adults say when they know all their answers will run out. That moment, the unique summation of the fall that had preceded it, is my moment. When the thin film of the water closes around your mouth and nose and eyes, that softest moment when you are not drowning but knowing that you are going to drown. You can feel the panic that will hold you, but you are not in its embrace yet.

Give in. This is what they tell you with their two minutes YouTube videos talking about NEW, new-science new-thought new-politics new-mind, NEW. And they tell you these things that you have always known and spoken about and they take them for their own. You've been trying so long, I've been trying so long, to make people see the OLD, to gaze back towards a place that cannot be solved, and take it as their lab, take it as their easel, take it as their pen and paper and tears as ink. And now the new-fonts glaringly scream and the logo is well designed, and the speaker is well dressed but not too well dressed, and he's just enough geeky to be appealing to the NEW but not geeky enough to be his own person, to be his own flesh, to show any signs of ever having entered the lab, or picked up the easel or used his tears as ink.

Give in. There are moments when even the ocean is a floor and I can sense that only running will turn it back to water, only running will give it a semblance of the horrid, beautiful things I used to love. It has solidified; broken and then gathered again by a cruel hand, an unseeing hand that only knows how to scoop, scoop and devour, scoop and devour. Nothing is achieved by running of course, since the field itself is the back of the hand, the boundaries towards which you run are only the dirty irises of the face that directs the hand, the sickly orifices which give vision to a thing which was never meant to see but craves only sight. I tried, I tried to scoop the ocean and use it to clean the irises, to turn the dirt into mud and then wipe it off.

Give in. I am running now, looking for a hole, a break in the surface that has formed over the one place I really hate and really love, the one place where there is both a madness and an ending, the one place where there is both a sanity and a beginning, the one place where I can feed on the not-words. Burn the words, seize the emotions, forget the swarm and the cobble stones and the giant eye flickering in the light of the fatal wound I myself inflicted on the sky, the fatal wound that I myself gashed across my own ribs, my own throat, my own heart, my own lungs, my own, swollen, devolved, rotten, collapsed brow that once housed my mind. The eye, the same eye that moves the hand that scoops, it was my own eye. That's why I had to tear it out, you see? And as if you didn't have enough words that basically told you nothing about what I am doing here, this is all the blood that still drips, that is still dripped, that is drawn and leeched and lanced and sucked from that original wound.

Give in. I look for the hole. I long for that sweet moment before my face hits the water. It is all expectation. I was told this by the nightmare of many men: "But who is that man who lies submerged? Perhaps that swimmer is both sinner and saint, until he is revealed unto the eyes of man".

I do not believe in either sinners or saints or men but I dobelieve in eyes and swimming and being submerged and lying. Most of all I believe in lying. Dying.

Give in.