Write Around

Write around it. Not about it. Show. Don’t tell. But can you show someone who isn’t looking? If you told them, would they listen anyway?

The things that we can’t bear to speak and the weight that we bear as we don’t. It’s never enough. YOU are never enough. The indelicate dance in our imaginations to a tuneless and unmeasured clamour. Unconducted. Uncoordinated chaos forced into an approximation of thought. Bottled dragons to be slain or feared or kept or worshipped. It’s never enough. YOU are never enough.

The hopes, the dreams, the schemes in-between. What can you show for them? What does that tell you? Are you lookingareyoulistening? A fool never fought the flaming flying effigy of feeling. Leave that to the knights. The sirs. The lance their lot, they lost their land as the darkness grew clawing back the light, unbottling the things that were never really contained anyway.

An emptiness. A void. Avoiding the words, the very things to topple the king, that dark monarch who sits emboldened and apathetic in the throne as the kingdom falls around him not through the rampage of a beast but the murmuration of uncountable fallen starlings resurrected to bluntly nudge thunk reshape the landscape hewn from the xenoscape within. The sotto voce declarations of value, saying over and over and over and overandoverandoverandoverandover again that it’s never enough. YOU are never enough.

Or maybe you are. Or were. Or would be but. Or will be when. Conditional tenses give the sense that in another world you can’t quite lay sight on you could be you and that would be enough. Not a crime, failure, or disappointment. Nor a hero, mind. No knights, sir. Enough. The parts of you that hurt and hide fixed and free to be seen, for there they look when you show and listen when you tell.

It’s nice to hope, to dream, to scheme in-between. But it’s never enough. So write around it. Not about. Show. Don’t.