A Cento Poem

White Hope

At first, inside looked endless.

I have been a cut up for years.

This was assertive silence,

emphatic blankness.

It was a world that didn’t

readily admit

the existence

of other worlds.

Something ambiguous,

like the coughing fits that tear one to pieces

but transform one into a tragic hero.

Not a place of fluids, organs, muscles,

tendons and bones

all in a constant, precarious

and living tension with each other,

but a vacant, hollow, whited chamber,

scraped clean, cleared of any evidence

of the grotesque embarrassments of an actual life.

We make our houses into museums

or temples filled with votive offerings.

No smells, no noises, no clour;

no changing from one state to another

and the uncertainty that comes with it;

no exchanges with the outside world

and the doubt and the dirt that goes with that;

no eating, no drinking, no pissing,

no shitting, no sucking, no fucking,

no nothing.

I want to see what color the world is.

Look at all that bright colour.

Colour is dangerous.

Color amounts to crime.

Color is another word for deceit.

War loves bright colors too.

Not perceiving what is visibly there:

psychoanalysts call this negative hallucination.

And where does that leave us?

Fallen.

It is a fall into a world of consciousness and self, or rather

a fall from super-consciousness

into individual consciousness,

but it is a fall into self-made with

the explicit purpose of losing the self in desire.

The individual is wanting in judgment.

The old writer caresses these pictures.

I think of words as being alive like animals.

They don’t like to be kept in pages.

Cut the pages and let the words out.

White Hope.

Devilish black.

A color to paint the feeling of hope.