For whom do we speak? To whom? Through whom? By whose authority, if there is any? And when we do speak—whisper, scream, lament, whimper, mutter under our gasping breaths—what is its location? Is it a marginal voice sealed in the center of its universe? Is it a cacophony of chanting, making waves to drown out so many cycles of destruction? Or perhaps it is simply name-calling: your name that sits nervously in my not always so safe mouth, which today speaks of your ability to make the sun rise. For you are the redeemer, an honest and strong bearer of light, a creative silk angel, the early riser, the nice one who helps us traipse alongside the impossible dreams woven by fairies hiding deep in the many dark forests. Yes, I speak of you, sun child, calling in many revelations in this continuous baptism of fire. And so this is why we walk together: we are feeling the landscape with our bare feet, tasting its goodness—even when we do so tentatively. We are soaking ourselves in the melancholy of this parched place, even as it sits at the peripheries of a reservoir—that other re-construction for satiating our hungry selves, that other recourse to resources that we cannot begin to speak of: an endless list of the maimed, the tamed, the game we feed on that also cannot scream their own names, which are never, ever, ever safe in our mouths. For we frame all free existence into many neat white lines (cut up) to be inhaled, simply snorted into our HIGH, haze of forgetting.
