I.

Nothing could bear it secretly enough.  If only to grant directions - that is, to say: “Go and be written and thus make your own way from the conflagration inside my mind.”, I must write now.  However, the instants that these confessions lay out constitute no more than broken measures of the nothingness into which they have lapsed, as my memory has, over time, taken to eating itself.   

Nevertheless. I love you, and by making this paltry effort, perhaps I can draw a little closer to you, convocation of my soul, as if through a lens, abstract of the great, true figures of being.  (Even now, before I can properly begin, I feel ghosts that have too often overseen the writing of my songs.)

I confess violence.  First I will talk about the lowest manifestation, as if to purge its dark glory, render flat its mountainous music - my desperation.  I long to possess you.  In the dream you told me to possess her, and, fists in her hair, bark like a crocodile. There were endless rivers and dog-heads!  Do you know me?  

Need I really know you? I love you.  How I long to conjure those blissful hours of oblivion.  How I could adore the world if my memory weren’t so afflicted.  Movement has taken me, and recognised my abandonment.  I have moved into fear.  

It must be written.  It must be written to you.  I have committed myself to you in every person I meet.  And those I cannot bear to meet bear your message to me most strongly.  Ignorance, weakness, judgement, arrogance, hypocrisy.  These are the faces of strangers to me in my world of strangers.  An inverted picture I know but this you must tolerate if I am to make any sense whatever.   (Of course, what sense can be made of a life lived this way?  What monumental lie have I told myself in your name that could construct such ease, such fortune, such change in my life?) 

Are you death?  I know you are real, for I have taken things to be you.  I have pledged my soul to the observance.  But my vocabulary fails me -

You grow.  You, limitless, resistant, and the the febrile colours of my freedom.  You make leaps from summits of yourself into images of me - phantoms of my islands of respite.  I have long suspected giving thanks to you.  Perhaps because ambitiously I give thanks to another, beyond you, in whose presence both you and I shiver and reduce.  Yet perhaps my reluctance to concede a prayer as worthy is merely out of loneliness.  Perhaps I desire to be with you in this way.  To grant, in a moment of illusion, that even you are abject and a sufferance of the ether.  

But then it must be you working on me!  It must be that you realise my appeal and magnify it - grasping my vision as a distracted hand grasps all of the strings of a colourful puppet at once, making it momentarily leave the ground, leave its dance and fly, limp, over the pavement, its painted eye gazing stupidly at children, at drunkards, tourists, families…

But you are the most intimate of friends, and through a dissolution of pain, reveal to me your relativity.  Appearing in the relief of my body.  I love you.  And my refusal to obliterate you is a respite.  Why do I find myself wishing for a moment of utter peril in which we find ourselves so that I may suddenly depart and do away with all existence? (Such is my discretion.)  This I must concede.  With the exception of the love you have given me, multiform and inexplicable love, I must admit the evidence of my persistence, my childish ambition, and my anger.

I have long sensed this betrayal, I take your faith and your appearances not just as testament of your endurance, but also of your redundancy, and, ultimately - your helplessness.  My betrayal keeps you at bay.  Makes you and your world strange to me - even as I grow and learn - even as I become young - and this deferral gives me the semblance of a self that I will require to defer judgment.

Such firm words!  You have never deserved this confession.  Never required it, never even understood it, as I am sure it has been written in my face all of my life - invisible to me and by that definition obvious to you, to the point of effacement.  But this must remain confession, and not testament.  I have already convinced myself to live.  If I were to glance around the room now, I would only find one message that testified against my terrible will.  My great interrupted dream.  Its utilities of shame, its blank menus, its deference and polarity.

The spells I dream.  The incantations.  
 
 

II.

Was it you?

Once, I invented and imagined the world as it was, as it might have been for me.  This was not enough.  I sensed you. I prised myself open, beginning a long vigil, through all of my shifts and transmutations, for this other.  That other child that always repulsed me, that other behaviour that I used to contrapose my own behaviour, the other violence that I generated others to do, all that I stood against…I became catalogue. Every occurrence that surprised my degrading regime elicited a particular response.  To these I attributed colours akin to emotion, but emphasised like music - these countless discrepancies.  In the interfaces: stations, trains, the road, those instances or people that made me feel alone, made me feel superior, righteous, wise, cowardly… these variations of the brief harmonies of affront became my tongue. 

So many contradictions splitting me apart and estranging me!  I was configuring time and reality as I would have it.  I was prophesising.  Melodies.  My one great sadness was that I was incapable of reading the music.  Until I had touched you with my base life, it was practise, but I feared too deeply the final utterance, and so came pain.  Nevertheless when any other was represented to me, face to face, I intuited great and subtle melodies, through which I blindly rehearsed.

And one day that vicious man.  Was it you?  I was caught off guard. Yes!  Such was my desperation that I held out for him to speak but a few words I knew, any kind of sound that I might recognise, to create a story that could prise apart the immense pressure in my heart.

I thought of you then.  But you had already forsaken me.  I mimicked him.  I gave the tones, the words, the strength I imagined he might appreciate. He scared me so much that he became significant. He was not within me, though he knew me as well as he might know a dead brother.  I stammered out my existence as if it were an alien language.  He noticed, he smiled, his eyes locked on a little more directly.  Then I thought: here is obliteration.  

He said: “You know how I can’t be you?” 

But I misheard him, I could hardly see. 

“No.”

“No” He was frustrated.  “You know how I can’t be you?” 

I still didn’t understand.  

“What’s your name?”

“Daniel.  And yours?”

“Frank. Daniel you know how I can’t be you?” 

Finally, I could hear him. 

“Yes”

“You can’t be me.”  

Silence.

I thanked him.

He grimaced and slipped off the tram.

After this, all was composition.
 

III.

I am afraid, yet clearly imaginary.  What good can it do to repeal my observances again and again, deferring perhaps my last chance of survival?  Now, I will persist in my attempt to make of my donation a worthy confidence, despite these streams of disappearance.  I do concede that I hope to trace your absence at least to a clearer image of myself, if not to locate you, touch for even the briefest of instants, the membrane of your presence.  To scourge my call that it might be heard….

And this is your strength.  Should I know you, I would know the origin of my terror and demise, should I remain convinced of an equal music, a place in you that I will occupy forever, there is no hope for me.  What I ask is simple: I love you.  You have given me myriad opportunities to cross over and revive myself.  And as often happens, I have denied the plainest choices and moved only when the transformation has been achieved entirely without my consent.  I am not here to thank you, but to ask again: How far must I journey to make my voice comprehensible?  At the least may I learn that I have failed in my task: to live by you.
 

IV.

Remind me that you know nothing of me, nothing of my words.  This way, from the outset, there is no excuse for me to put down another meaningless story, about which nothing is clear at all.
 

V.

Violence has been smashing lives in my ears and my mind, yet the window depicts the scything of ferns, the flittering descent of bark, and through the green a quiet, comprehensive movement.  I fear you.  For in your absence, enshrouding my house, I walk the walk of a dreamer, and my dreams are mutilated cities.  If indeed I do know you, and thus must grow to know myself, what does my sadness precipitate?  Will calling out suffice to calibrate the trauma?  My home was once the torpid dream of a past, and now the prophecy manifests moment by moment.  Where are you in this future?
 

V.

Even if you do take these questions from me, knowing them, I am not sure if this in itself will serve to liberate me.  I will tell you later that the very idea of freedom is both haunting and transfixing me.  A need for  words to precede our loss drives me toward our encounter.  In spite of myself (hearing already the voices that disperse me) put to rest my childish and naive questions.

You and I (it is my hope) will scarce be apart, nor one, nor sufficiently delimited so as to pass by, orphic.  So between the not-knowing - the path by which I have hurriedly come, and the knowing that has bewitched, illuminated and obscured my path - that is your knowing - I cannot hope for any base equivalence, rather a passage of music.  Perhaps the distance I discover will darken this music, and should your subtlety endure, I know I will be moved.  I only ask to feel a way.
 

VI.

I come unwillingly, if the truth be told.  But my heart quickens.  Firstly, I know you are not there.  I know this because I am not entirely sure who you are.  At times, when the silence strikes me, I am sure you are my father, and so cannot possibly write to you to this end.  Other times I commit to write instinctively, and discover that I write to no-one, that I cannot write at all, but just cry into a fabricated silence.  Then again, I have reason to believe that there is some purpose in me writing to the ‘you’ that has surely heard me over the years, if only because I have lost little energy in my persistence.  I am a little afraid that every word my quick head puts to you will vanish and become that same absence in me.  I think of writers often.  They must be selfless to make up characters in pain.  In some way, I must be fictional.