New Depths

Poetry is born out of excess, pleasure, leisure.  It is a romantic mistake to think that it is borne out of suffering—it is borne out of the distance from suffering that leisure brings.  What can be wrought out of excesses of suffering so vast as to be incomprehensible ?

I, garrulous, loud, excessive; long to become mute.  I have become concave, been scraped out by pain no sentences can escape me that are not brittle spindles of anti-yearning. 

I want to visit this suffering upon others a thousandfold, but I can’t even speak it.  It snaps and crackles out of my zipped mouth like dehydrated lightning. I speak not nothing, but a vacuum.  Less than nothing.   

I—a dust-ridden scholar—can only know and impart this: The names of the thousand states that are worse than death.  You will wish your unbirth. Names of people made stupid and ugly by suffering, mute as rocks. Lists of things that are lower than dirt.  One hundred shades of grey too insignificant to be named. The sounds made by an animal at each degree of rotation past maximum capacity. Stretched about to break.   

Delirium—usually fertile (productive) gone too long, inverts into a new sterility, a dulling after long excitation of the senses.