[  ../ ] — [N/09.01.14] [ double bolted doors by sandy florian ] + [  N/09.01.20 ]

A bellow that is not a bucket. A bucket that is not a bone. There is wisdom in slipping into oceans. Into those wider organs horning. The way churches slip into twilight. Stone after stone. See the plaything on the mantel. I lean toward the paintings. See the baby fastened on the mast. I lean toward the window. See the sea, see the ship, see the ship’s low hull. See the winding of vowels by the function of the fist.

Ditto soliloquies fill your ears. All those twins in wigs disfigured. Wayward smiles on a wayward train. Ready for the runaway parade.

Ditto soliloquies by the bark of the brook. You, who have excavated my marrow, not poetically but with ambition, for your traditional obsession that hooks.

I feel like an ounce of water that underwater seeks another ounce. One ounce of ocean, underwater, landless, skyless, blank. Though I know that with my powers of concentration, I could bring myself to build myself a rowboat, singular in song, plural in wood. But I’m feeling a little wooden now, a little hollowed out. Like a reactionary door just opening and closing. While you live newly in your widening world, in a hugeness just beyond the horizon.

A fiend, a farce, a toady tale. Of passageways, of alleyways, agrarian fields and land. While I wend, I whisk, I row my boat. I, who never saw my father in all my life, floating on that fatal raft, that wrack of sea and scum. Wandering through my wandering illusions in search of winds that bind. Wanting to go home again. To break your merry bones again. To break the merry science of your brick-like trick.

I sing, I sting, I travel on. Without addition or subtraction, making hours double hours, making days those trebled weeks. By now, I hear, the dial strikes five, and prophecy like a parrot, peeps, beware the dog that barking barks, beware the dog that barking barks, with reason of the imagination being weak.

Am I myself? A mere anatomy, a mountebank, a threadbare juggler, and a fortune found. A needy hollow, a hollow tooth, and here my teeth that gnaws my bonds.

Am I myself? A mere anatomy, a mountebank, a threadbare juggler of a smaller fortune. You crack your horizon like you crack an egg to make my world a puddle. I recall nothing connectedly.

Of your ground, grow elm. On your elm, I’ll vine. Listen now. To the spilt vile of whispering ink. From now on it’s all open doorways. From now on, I’ll coil myself eel-like. From now on, I’ll only softly knock. From the inside out of your ship. There is a window that is not wide. And beyond it. A ship. But your laughter sprinkles atilt. Sideways saddling down the rattling ground. So like a snow bank, a blank, I take it upon myself to signify a solution. I make myself a promise to liberate nothing. Doubled in the muck and impervious to time. Because this is the closest I can get to unhinging the chain-linked days.

Wrinkled echo on the wrinkle steps, I wander through my wound with metronomic accuracy. A gull-like mutt, prancing in the pantry. See me ripple with your apple eyes extinguishing all the windows. Take you a walk to get the hermit talking. For in the end, it’s all never-ending. See here I, your outstretched memory, am trying to make a tongueless confession. With single words on which I turn. My mountain to the topaz past.

Because between boat and beam it was I who made a joke of it. Between aft and mast, it was I who made you weep. Between mast and scream, it was I who found the body. Face up and floating. Eyes doubled and frozen. Crowned like a small abduction and dunked between reefs. Don’t you recall? It was I who found the body. My twin, my ditto, my go-ahead side-kick. Decked out and ready again for the runaway parade.

And in the end, it’s all never-ending. In the end, it’s all stones and doorways. These are the griefs unspeakable. So I lean toward the duller drone. Introverted and inorganic. Between buffer and bender, I make myself a promise to announce a more casual catastrophe next time round.

There is a body who drinks from the seaside sea. The way birds tongue their babes at dawn. Owls owl by the edges of nights. None the doubled to ditto. There is a body. There is a body tragic in its muted past. Unhinging double’s calypso.

Sandy Florian is the author of Telescope, 32 Pedals & 47 Stops, The Tree of No, and Of Wonderland & Waste (forthcoming). She’s the current Writer in Residence at New College of Florida. You can visit her blog here.