Alphabet of Softness

the electrostaticity of nylon tights
metal touching the enamel of teeth
the smell of something boiling
the ticking mechanics of a clock
the vague impulse to pluck your chin hairs
the absence of seasonality
insidious neatness
the distracting burn of eye contact
withholding the shape of truth to soften a sharp blow
smiling when the throat ached for scream
the velocity of shame
forcing stillness when you needed to rock
feigning curiosity while quietly shutting down
squashing the expanding foam of your imagination because the gap between its highest reach
and the ground under your feet has become too large to perceive.

I 

You will need somewhere quiet enough to listen. The noise is small but the noise is there. I can’t describe it – for a line can only be drawn around something still enough to capture. 

Beneath the surface of your lake a pressure has been forming. Because yours is a body that swells to hold all rain. I could look into your eyes and declare them gentle. Still plain of a face. But beneath your calm, sublimated currents race. 

Bury any more ripples and those subterranean rivers will seek release as sharp current, ripping through your tissues. You buried the fire in your belly but its smoke will find a way to rise in signal. 

Maybe think of what it feels like to burp. A pocket of air pressing its gassy body against the lining of your stomach. It feels the dark damp container of your digestive system and dreams of something different. 

This burp might not know about sunshine, how warm rays would feel on its molecular cheeks. Pushing up the slippery length of your esophagus, it moves simply in search of release, seeking space without pressure. 

It wants to expand so much it dissipates. It wants to stretch so wide that it breaks apart the line of its name – becomes indistinguishable from air. When the burp emerges, when it rolls off of

your lips and feels the heat of sun on its cheeks, that’s when the dream is fleshed with dimension. 

II 

The noise is small but the noise is there. 

There is a place I can take you – somewhere just quiet enough to listen. 

It’s a place with no sound, no concrete, no structures, no words, no pages of books, only soft unstable ground. 

It was once a vibrant marshland – made desertified scrubland. Vitality stolen – natural capacities to regenerate, exceeded by greed. A threshold was crossed and its soil became sand. 

You could think of yourself as a series of patterns. Take a pencil, finger or stick. Sketch the movements of your thoughts and tap the edge of this picture, listen to the cadence as the lines vibrate; 

(It is the shallow sound that only something hollow could make) 

Your flesh is a living archive of the environment that raised you – a string of amino-acid-lipid-glucose chains – which over all this time have congealed as response to conditions. It wasn’t your choosing but now it lives within you as a burden to lift. 

Look inside. A small mento is growing at the base of your brain – all that wanted expression – instead held in repression – calcified – into something with the efficacy – of explosion – waiting to cross a threshold – for the conditions that tip – buried molecules – into blood – dissolving with ferocity – as if full fat coke. 

Picture it – the foam, exceeding containment – the current, terraforming the banks of – your calm – plain / face. Call it a dream, of expanding dimensions. 

III 

The noise is small but the noise is there. Here in this place – just quiet enough to listen. You lift your limbs, to find the muscles are slack. Memory of looser movement lost. 

There is a vastness beyond the ring-fenced pen of your body. Yet even in a desert expanse you start by imposing limits on your span. Arms, back and legs bend in their acculturation to enclosure.

You begin by treading small squares in the sand. The weight of a cage pressing out its patterns, even in the presence of all this empty space. 

Run fingers along the length of your skin. Feel for knots of tension. Pinch a rigid cell between fingers. Squeeze – to pop it out. Looking through a microscope and you’ll see. A tiny wooden obelisk. 

These tiny wooden obelisks, pressing against your walls. Four long sides and a pointed pyramid roof, pinching your membranes. Holding forms once fluid; fixed and taught. 

Run fingers along the length of your skin. Feel for every Should and Must and Have To – that settled in your flesh – for how their fibres lock together – and build through repetition. 

Every Should, Must and Have To – covert incantations sculpting bodies into exhibitions of expectation. 

Every Should, Must and Have To – packaging of words, delivering the deadened substance of dogma to your cells. 

Every Should, Must and Have To – a concrete poured – drip by drip – into the soft uncertainty of your limbs. 

And now here you are. An architecture of angularity. The master of mimicry, exiled from the class of intuition – extinguishing instinct to the point of extinction – something now so diminished its surfacing registers foreign within your internal, monoculture’d, ecology. 

IIII 

The noise is small but the noise is there. 

When I say, listen, I mean what kind of movement might let the buried things speak? 

A stolen language stole from you, vitality. New alphabets will be found not by rehashing sounds of the words you know, but by seeking every untold shape your body can make. 

Here, on warm sand re-learn the lucidity of your limbs. Regain a sense of undulation. Seek cacophonies of unsynchronised movements, shriek me melodies of unmasked-ness. 

Move to the sound of – every silence made when there was something you’d wanted to say – hissing release. Spin for the centrifugal force that presses things outwards, away – shed every little no falsely spoken as a yes, and every yes you spoke that was felt first as a no. 

Shake flap spin stamp to feel the linearity of your learned equations slip off flat plains into the gush of your surfacing river.

Crack open the layers of papier mache – wrapped tight around your bones – that smothered your wilds into the shape of an industrially-molded gingerbread girl. 

Instead wear shoes of molten silicon, whose tread will set in direct relation to the terrain on which you step. 

For living bones are red, pliable, they are the source from which your blood cells grow. 

This time, the patterns you make will be buoyed by little pockets of oxygen drawn directly through your nostrils. They’ll be something to float with. Something to breathe hot air into what becomes hard-ridged, with. 

Let your alphabet be cast in the negative space between every stuck instinct. Run fingers along the length of your skin. Feel for knots of tension. 

Peel a hard straight line off an obelisk’s back, wiggle it between your fingers until the undulating rhythm makes it bend. This is how the hollow pattern will be fleshed with dimension. How it will shift from its yearning to make of the world – sense, instead, to want of the world – sensation. 

The line becomes a wave – the wave becomes a rhythm – the rhythm becomes a dance – the dance becomes an alphabet. 

Your alphabet 

An alphabet of softness speaking through your limbs. 

Here in this place, just quiet enough to listen.