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

