Obscurity
They are frivolous and noncommittal,
humorous or morbid.
Literary works strewn about and torn askew,
left hanging like sideshow posters,
promoting something —
something that may be horrific or beautiful,
laughable or depressing.
Their torn edges and weathered surfaces
resemble something.
If I consider my meanings to be the window,
the portal through which someone might glimpse my soul,
then my words are the curtains.
They obscure and distract,
sometimes with rhyme, sometimes vagueness,
protecting the fragile psyche from overt scrutiny,
while within, I know the origin and the catalyst
that brought them to life.
Even in my most absurd moments, I am thinking.
My thoughts are lost within the words, though.
Swallowed, engulfed,
and the meaning is disgraced.
An entire thought destroyed
in the process of translation.
I’ve written before about a goldfish’s death.
About leaving the body
and observing the ravages of time.
I laced it with morbid humor and weak rhymes
to accent the ridiculousness of the topic.
Where did the words birth from, though?
What womb produces a child
of such a nonsensical manner?
I was recalling a death of a family member in poverty.
There is no gravestone,
no statuette marking her grave.
My mind wandered as it often does,
doing its simplistic dance across synapses,
and I wondered why we even honor the dead in such a way.
Why do we mark our deaths
with stone and metal monuments?
I don’t want a monument when I pass,
some cold stone forcing someone
to remember who I was, and what I was.
If my life is not enough to leave a memory behind,
why should my death be the reminder I leave?
I would rather lie on the floor,
like that fictional goldfish,
and let my scales turn to dust,
my bones lost in the carpet fibers,
and be remembered for why I lived
rather than how I died.
So I began to write,
and the bastard child of my mind
evolved into a silly poem about a dead goldfish
left to dissolve on my floor
until there was nothing left.
The thoughts were lost.
The purpose of my original thoughts.
Dead and scaleless words emerged,
the meaning left to dissolve in my mind
until there was no meaning left.
In everything written,
the words are the tattered remains,
fragmented simplifications of what I actually thought,
lost in their own translation and tattered,
and left alone with their weathered surfaces
and torn edges,
obscuring what’s underneath.