If we pretend criminality is a paradigm of connections
unsanctioned by institutional power
and therefore unimaginable by law-abiding people
in their function as citizens, and so if I say that
I think we could think
about the trans-national in a way matched
as precisely as possible to how we feel
about being trans-sexual, or any contemporary
form of consciousness being
trans-racial, you could call it, or me,
overwrought but I wouldn’t call it
that, I mean, overwrought in the sense
of that moment when nothing means anything
and anything turns its mask inside-out
to reveal something just beyond the limit
of vivid and particular, I mean,
something of soft-loam and sunset
that signals something else just below
the horizon of itself, I mean, like
the schoolteacher in Marrakesh saying
to Roland Barthes “‘I’ll do anything
you like,’ eyes full of kindness and complicity,”
and Barthes explains that by this
the schoolteacher meant to say “‘I will
fuck you, and nothing else,’” I mean,
so the particular means invisible
to vision when vision means what
one does with one’s fingers
when they can’t be seen by anyone
as if operating, anyone, I mean,
behind a heavy velvet cloak, a drape,
anyone being the edge of fringe
that sweeps the floor of everyone
exactly and precisely in that
unmarked and insensate moment,
at times also called overwrought,
when anything means one thing and nothing else
and “acting as if ” means “don’t fuck with me”
unless you’ll admit complicity, I mean,
will accept responsibility for the way I let
the bad guy win every once in a while,
I mean for injuries, past and future,
even ones from the place I was born
before I was born, I mean
wounds I inflict upon myself and those I love.
And though I feel very uneasy,
not simply to say conscious—or for our present
purposes criminal—in saying this, no less
to you, I should say that I’m saying this while standing
in the long shadows of things I thought
were injuries until I realized shadows
themselves, very often, are the injuries and the things—
many of which aren’t things at all but people
acting as if—the people themselves had made my life
what it is by saving my life from the illusion,
I mean, if illusion means soft-loam and sunset
signals below the horizon, I mean made life alive by saving
my life from the illusion that it was mine,
I mean, the illusion that it was made, lawfully, of shadows it cast by itself.
from Let it Be BrokeFind more by Ed Pavlic at the library
Copyright © 2020 Ed Pavlic
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.