Wednesday, February 25, 2015 // The Statement
6B
W
e’ve been together for years.
You are, in a way, just a sofa,
and I am mostly a raven, a door-
knob, a lunatic. I don’t seek vindication for
this, I know I just am, and you, for this long
moment, are. In terms of accessibility, you’ve
always been the best, and courted many and
offered your services freely to a whimsical
republic, those people who enter and exit
and spend much shorter moments around
us, and sometimes they grope me, but seem-
ingly more often you, them; you offer me no
protection apart from some small aspect of
distraction, and you do not look disgustedly
on me when man-handled but remain illus-
trious in your position, watching; for your
attention is everywhere, and though I swing
and revolve and am maneuvered, any move-
ment by you would catch all the attention
of those fragment-moment-minded maneu-
verers in this room—they do not realize the
piece is in your handle of your long-sitting,
your lack of deformity over time, your
patience; what I mean to say is I think you’re
not well-enough-appreciated.
And the space between us rattles and
grows, and I’ve squeaked and been lubricat-
ed and you’ve only just begun. And the space
between us reduces and could shimmer, or
maybe I only imagine so. Your light yellow-
stained satin body glows like soft lightning;
your parallel body is a forced symmetry that
affords itself with the realization that a mask
is a blink—a realization I remember hap-
pening, that knocked me off my seat, post-
alighting at the window-sill, and took away
all my anger from you. Who has the right to
show such perfection? There is no balance of
this sort in nature. Perhaps during the basic
explosion there was some. Why should there
be here, was my question? I admit I felt some
sort of godly perfection when I came from
the inner-gilded, though outwardly brown
furnace. Or was this the whimsy of inexpe-
rience? For though I’ve flown from there to
there daily a-time, I’ve only done so. But I’ve
never forgotten. I’ve never even fallen asleep
in surgery.
The realization that the mask is tempo-
rary, and truth will never be found, but may
happen in experience at moments of divine
insight, like crashing, orgasm, or at the edge
of sleep. When we don’t know what is hap-
pening but might. That the divinity within
you truly may be found greatly within your
constituents at the end when all is so un-
pressured that the split re-happens again
in totality. Everything is allowed to break
apart; and if anything were ever anything or
even imagined, it can and must be real there
in the recombination of all parts and motives
that become the great thing—including us,
including us two together, for the briefest
of any moment, when light and void become
irrelative, and inseparable. No longer two
sides of a page, they are the flame that burns
it, dynamic, an end of god and balance, a cho-
ral glissando at the end of time. Until then,
we masquerade, and it could be that nobody
notices.
Though I’ve seen you every second since
I came to be in this room. Can I say it? That
I’m jealous of the asses of those humans
who bleat around rubbing appendages
on things, who rub things and each other
down, (sometimes on you!) and move and
run their mouths off with their bleating,
who sometimes spill. I hate them. I’m jeal-
ous of their asses. Had they the respect for
you they should they would lick (lick!) you,
though I’m glad that they never did. I want
to be set atop you. I want to roll underneath.
I am promised physical exasperation, I have
always been potential, pent up, with a spring
down my back and wings that won’t stop to
flutter and won’t pretend to until unstopped
universal flight. Were it a fool who wished
he were an ass? I am both; also a raven and
a doorknob.
Also I am here on this side-table, for they
took me down when they left, placed my
body here so close to yours, inches, even,
from touching for the first time. And we have
been this way for years, though you’ve been
unkindly tarpaulin’d and I collect dust with
my skirts in the air open; and I lay as if crest-
fallen, prostrate, crucified, wings and beak
agape. And I am crestfallen; the room has
not been lit for some time. The last—when I
was moved—I was taken down with screws
and carried in a man’s back pocket. The door
hasn’t closed since. He travelled in the room,
adjusting and removing the final things,
blanketing the chairs, the table, and then
he came to you, and sighed. He turned to
sit and lowered himself, me first, so close to
you I could feel something that just buzzed
between us, a sign of electricity that I’m sure
would have killed the man upon collision,
something that pushed away all dust and left
just the you and the me in the glob of cre-
ation of the first dawn, the planar spread of
pulsing final, we two segments on a line and
me alone and you alone in me and just this
man who nobody could recognize, bring-
ing we two finally to we! And he whispering
“Lenore” and watching me. He removed me
from his pocket, placing me open chested on
the small table near you, mouth gasping in
horror, distance from you horrible. And then
he sat on you. And then he covered you up.
It is believed that nothing can ever be
touched. Just, it’s your electrons bounc-
ing against other electrons, or magnetized
against each other or something, and the
atoms in your fingers never touch the atoms
in another’s fingers, like a doorknob can
never touch a couch, even were they to ever
be finally against one another. Your fingers
can never touch a pencil, or a keyboard. Simi-
lar to how a voice can never speak a thought
except for using a language, how there could
be no perfect communication but touch, were
touch true, except in memory, the expand-
ing original, or the end that breaks. How the
words are broken thought, learned or given,
accepted because what are you ever without
them, and it’s beautiful, and it’s like some
sort of technological beast designed and who
walks you, and loses pieces in walking, and
how every moment you are creating in your
choice to even move or not, operating in the
realm of imitation and novelty, everything as
possible as any other thing, where imagina-
tion is revealed to be just belief in everything
as it’s all true, like the love between a door
handle and a couch. All necessarily plausible,
because what can you ever sense that never
existed, and what whatnot extant.
It’s bad, and like I’m laying similar to open
near but never to touch you and horrible, or
normal.
DISTANCE
Wesley Holkeboer, LSA junior
ILLUSTRATION BY MAGGIE MILLER