1. I don’t belong anywhere, for Anywhere is a most inhospitable place. I went there once, twice, three times, and each time Anywhere raised its banners against me, gathered its bludgeons, forced me out. The field of Anywhere withered and died at my approach; no blooms, no bulbs, no new spring green to welcome my arrival. You cannot be a citizen of Anywhere, sternly, your papers to Anywhere are not in order. You took harness, leather, rope, carabiners, belay, even friends, even kin to help monitor your ascent; yet the Anywhere rock crumbled, you could hold no issue there.
2. I belong nowhere, for Nowhere is the first principality of loss and encumbrance. Go Nowhere with all your belongings, all that was inherited and all that you stole, filling your pockets with loose change, lipsticks, IDs, your personal belongings, that attest to your real existence in the real world of graveyards and cages. Nowhere is the right-where of your belonging. There you might remain, in thrall to the likeness of you, multiplied a million-fold, a multiple of mothers in the mirror, mother beyond mother beyond mother, the mother you sought to become, in order to fill the field of Nowhere with your appartenance, your apparition, your appetites. Multiply and be fruitful Nowhere; build yourself a house of eyes.
3. I un-belong. I un-belong therefore I survive.
Second life. Belongs to you.
What remains unnamed, undamaged, preserved, unbroken. Remains unbroken. What causes only a solicitous kind of pain. To get inside that pain, to not glorify it. To get inside that pain, to not think that it is above any other – to know that it is above all others – to know that to remain inside it is admittance into an underground world – to not admit sadness, to bar its entry, to allow to enter only the silence that speaks. To be together in the silence that speaks. To wish for something to remain unharmed. Undo the possibility of harm. To repair the harms of old. Not to practice harm. To give up the practice of inflicting harm, to give up the practice of silence, to repair. To give up the childish wish to break. To give up the childhood that was never a childhood. To give in to what the silence has to say. To protect it with your life. To protect your life. To banish the wish for harm. For self-harm. The secret that was always there.
Secret/second life.
Was always.
Anticipated you.
Site of repair.
Thought you could not —
she buttressed you
I can’t —
solace,
dangerous edge, as if to
slice you off. A piece of you
cut loose —
what would you become,
and what of the piece,
its loneliness, now you are
no longer young. Always–there–
plenitude, your reparation–
separation
the psychic field
you must inhabit. What you dreamt of, as a child, when everything seemed
already
broken. The wish for something
unbroken. Little beings, safe from harm. Little beings,
safe at last. What you wished for when you said
you.
A matter for the hands.
Touch, and what is
most essential and cannot be given up for the life of you despite and because of
the fact that you will not survive this having a body.
Inside, and creates the space without. Without love there is no secret.
Without the second life, no
love. Where no one penetrates.
Second life. I awaken in an apartment in Pusan. The sea with its strong smell of salt. The sky is an endless and peripheral blue. I prepare your coffee. We are loose and endless in the sheets. Variations.
Variations. The second life imagined — it grows as we are sleeping, it grows too large. It exceeds the capacities of its container. I cannot stay. I tried to stay within the first life, to make of it a delicate nest, plucked through with many holes for breathing — although breathing is a gust that follows wherever the breathless thought may wander. I tried to stay but the second life exerted its keenest call.
Variations. Half-intact means one never arrives at what desire wishes to clutch, and hold. The first life comprises half–measures and remonstrations, the injunction against — how much it would take to fill the cup. I stayed as long as I was able. Beyond my ability: a sight-line too far, too dim, too indistinct for any less–than–capacious vision.
Variations. No one is to blame for everyone fucked up, over and over, and badly. We writhed within the constraints of empire and resisted its cruel formulations; but to live you must have the body on your side, and to win over the body you must be restored to your senses. If I say the hand on me was a benediction toward the second life, you will say I have no religion. But to deny God you must first say his name, and once his impossible name is spoken, he is.
Variations. I can’t apologize for when the second life overcame me. However I regret the heart many–chambered. Through its corridors I could only remain unknown to myself until I met myself again, with clarity and haste, wrapped in the unmistakable skin of the second life.
Variations. It is unimaginable, unthinkable — you have done the unimaginable, the unthinkable.
I can’t imagine —
Yes, precisely — there, it cannot be imagined. There, it cannot be thought.
I disappeared into the second life in order to imagine it.
*
Second life, flexes its muscular heart, viscous stretch beyond what can be
imagined. I can’t imagine means
You live there already.
*
Outside the window of the room I share with my sisters X and Y a myrtle blooms,
and in the morning I rush outside to collect its errant petals.