I moved to the window facing the sun. Bending to the left, I could take the thing on. Considering my situation had led me here, to this seat, to this lens. Omniscience didn’t sit right; others sit in the narrator’s chair, directing the action. They talk about seeing things unfold in an intuitive, surprising way, but I don’t want that kind of control. Omnipotence is a curse; if you exist, Monotheism Man, I’m sorry for your plight. You have the worst job of all of them, paid in desperate yearning and misdirected tithes. For a long time, all I could get across was poetry. Rhyme schemes and conspiracies to hide the reality were the way of the nature. I watched these little birds sing their short songs and I was glad. Glad to be holding the strings, tentatively playing. Now is the time to go for it, though. The late afternoon coffee tastes like refreshment before the milk, like a trough after. Lap, lap, lap. What is keeping me from doing a few on two wheels? The sense that something is happening where I am. My eyes are telling me to watch; of course they are. This pair controls the animal farm, wielding disproportionate power over a gaggle of species, only hearing honking. I listen none too carefully. I wield the cliches that drive trains to jump off the tracks. Wouldn’t you rather be in a ditch than eternally returning to the same two steel beams, nailed to the ground on planks? My ears would rather. Reason dictates clarity, rhyme dictates fit, and the story demands a frame. These abstractions are tyrants, sometimes allied sometimes at war. My fingers don’t want any part of it. They get sore when worked too hard, unhappy when not used enough. And uninterested in politics. I can relate, or at least my eyes can. The pair that insists on so much, loving to be closed when they feel done with a given day. Ears don’t get the luxury, so the rest of the crew has to conspire to close things up.
Sometimes I go to sleep with an intention: dream of a problem, solve it, and wake up ready to implement. It’s foolish and it always works. The problem is mostly forgotten by morning, a fully implemented solution. Shimmering green leaves are asleep and not cursed with eyes. That’s why people love fires: revenge upon the things that suffer only revenges, not to have to see. I read about writing and see fragments of myself. I think these writers would be perturbed. I failed to finish my coffee before 4pm and chug down the last of it, in time to stimulate a bit more scribbling, so to speak. I speak of it because each letter is formed in exactly the same way, counter to the logic of scribbling. Scribbling gives one plausible deniability: that was actually a “u” not an “i”, so it was not egotistical. That’s my defense. When it’s written as if it were about everyone, how could one receive the blame of all for pretending to be The One? This is the priestly way out: I am but a representative of it all, trust me that it’s not for me. I do not trust these purveyors of The One’s magic, for historical and philosophical reasons that you already relate to. Does that bring us close together? When I “second person” you? Or do you feel alienated by my presumptuousness? If I were paying more attention to your reaction, rather if you were not reading a monologue, we could talk about it. That’s the thing about writing. It’s the act of listening only to oneself and the things that come in through it. Though, isn’t that the act of hearing and conversing too? I don’t know how to hear without using the parts of myself. That’s what the mystics mean by the unity of all things. Such a profound phrase must be italicized. It’s the only way, the way of nature. It’s scribbled in a way, but with fervor and accuracy. As if by the hand of The One. I lean to the left and once again am in the path of the sun. This time I will go to it, as if called, though I know that one doesn’t have fingers or eyes or ears.
Roman Ryan 