The Computer Lab And Other Rooms of The Mind

You looked very hard at them and said: have you ever felt your ribs? Your cheek bones? touching each place as you said its name, slipping over the curve of bone. 

Some of them are looking up somatization and others the money that isn't there when disaster strikes the third world. Mostly though, they stare at shoes, their lips moving towards the screen to taste the rubber. 

I heard your steps, so I hid, he says, now returned to the classroom by the escort of his conscience and rebellion - it being too simple to run away when you don't want to sit in the yawning chairs nor stare into the mouth of your teacher, which is moving like V's going south. He would rather present himself the reformed Raskolnikov and practice his eyelashes on you. He wants retired petulance, not a fugitive life in the hallway. He wants open arms and doting forgiveness. You feel like God entering Eden. I already know what you did; why do you hide? You say to him in the silences between your words. 

Some are researching the metastasization of desire and you feel the breast over your heart skittishly as you assume your love has spun itself into strings of death that weave through your flesh. But you are all too sensitive and you taste the illness when you stare into the screen, and so you look that up too, the depth of our desire for the knowledge of  our own end. Everything is a mirror you say and Narcissus did drown. Be careful my ducklings. 

There are other higher things in the room with you that you don't know how to describe, but you see a woman with long hair and sad eyes standing on a cliff. She is not sad for herself. Her hair blows back, all this way to you, and sometimes, it catches in your mouth and you know what it is to break. A sentence fragment they said to themselves to better understand, to turn over the idea in their hands, is something broken. A piece of something. 

You are all fragments of a greater whole that was planned and as you are swept together by the great hand that cleans all, you hear the drag against stones. Some of you are clay, some glass. You clink and chime. There is music in the breaking, the gathering. 

And you have spoken now of the bones and the singing, and you have learned both from many hands and also that you should no longer say what has been said since language broke into being, but love is an old thing and no less buoyant for the cracks. Who are you to say when words die? Who are you to bury them?