Steven Seidenberg

One clings to trivialities—to one’s trifling indiscretions—not to abjure the consequential, but to confront it. Nothing so deflating as the pettiness of absence—of what one had presumed would prove the majesty of the void…

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Everything must appear, this is the rule. That my confession scans as counter to the crime that it confesses—that it may seem contradictory to train this wighted hump of vain inducements to a voice that seeks to escort its transhumant host into a boundless null—is a defect that can’t vindicate the vigor of denial, or ostensible repair. That I have not run riot over such appeals is miraculous; that I will soon return to the defense of my position—the position of no one, I remind you, of a bubble in the sea—need neither be confirmed nor castigated by reproof. Everything must appear…

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Fill me up with boredom—the boredom of emptiness—I am at home. Soon our exile from truth will seem our exile from illusion…

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It is painful to realize that surfaces corrode, that moist beds molder while one sleeps, that one has nothing, nothing and no one, remembers no one—that no one remembers anything or anyone beyond the circumscription of one’s cobbled reach. But don’t fret; no need to search the world over for one brief moment of deliverance from the rule of loss. Don’t fret; such anguish will not expiate one’s servitude to decadence—which is its own reward…

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Sometimes I feel as if I have exceeded this dominion of exigency, this gapeless viscera of hollows, but the means by which that cataract of semblances awakes the gulping pharynx from the customary din of creeds endorsed but hardly followed is not what one who otherwise takes passage through each day as some presentiment of outcomes would have thought it—a progression or decline of any measured sort at all…

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Listen for the cunning clone of seity in reference; no singular discerned as such is able to exceed its brink, its liminal paresis for a laminated essence. Feel the lurching portent pin your inert ells like insect wings upon the ashen pulp of rancid sward and mottled canvas, bracketing the calculus of entropy in onion skin, the suppliance of every hull invented as a dermis. Understand that everything’s different, that the door is always open for the exile from betterment, the apathetic seer staring languidly across the bane of barriers erected by the blind…

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There are two states of existence—the diseased and the ecstatic—and one is never free of either, one is always stuck between…

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You need not feel you need not feel the pain of every victim as the sin of your own comfort; you too have lives to tolerate, a retinue of revenants to countermand—to down. But the truth is that your next attempt to sacrifice the privilege of indifference to the concordat of squalor is nothing—means nothing; that no pain is severe enough to remedy the trespass or remit the peal of plaudits that accompanies your funerary traipse across the vale. You may not sense the burlesque periphrasis of your agonies, the merciless redundancy in every prick and twinge; you may not know that all you do to compensate the suffering of others—the most rigorous avowal of retractions and amendments —is both deftless and abortive, but it is…

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I would have given you everything—everything—and walked away like a beggar. I would have been happy to give everything to you…to only you…had you remained…had you pushed through…

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If being is equivocal—without discrete advantage; if there is nothing to commend the situation of the exile to the marshaled imprecations of the stars…If longing is a game of gates made level by the promise of amusements still to happen, and so despite this revel in the torpor of subjunctive rant, this bracket of acquaintance lathered into blinding thrall…If no one thinks of nothing, if—your present liege excepted—there is reason to redeem the profanation of your humbled squint, your desecrated scale, then…Perhaps it is a benefice to have been, and…

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Blind orb, muted heart. A shroud of frost conceals the conclave murdered in the summer. Rot and scald. Return to plot, to probe with ludic antigens and deliquescent fingers. One day—redemption from all conquest, though the spoil is dissembled. This is—a sanctuary from the squall, a door left open…

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Images of loss dissolve replete sanctifications. One feels one can do anything; the sovereignty of lonely hours. A sentient thrust, a wind blows through—the turgid chaparral divides to let the carriage pass. Who’s approaching? Not you. You’re already here, you’ve stood your ground, unlike the rest. One feels one can do anything…

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I wait for this impenitent contumely to be taken for confession, to be swallowed whole. I wait to follow you unseen into the addled frenzy of this pulsing breach, this throng of wounds. There are moments when I find myself almost returned to patience, to feasibility, against all odds—and then it’s over, it’s done. If there were something of the static in the order of succession I might endeavor to describe it, thus…

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A limpid cage of tedium, this ravaged girth, this wont of rule. Nothing is excluded but—transition, which is all that means. One must endure as something—as the absence of no thing—in order to dispense the dream of oneness from alterity. Half waking, half in sleep, the world is always filled with cankered pokes and grubby stanchions. Every drunken hiccup seems a masterpiece of plastic art, a scudding retrogression from dyspepsia to gnosis. What have you to do? The doctors come—they go away more often. The doctors say your nerves are fine—but you make them nervous. A poultice, then a groping palm…which you am I? Who tells the world the difference…

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And thus, there is no end to it—so that the end appears the point of infinite persistence, the failure of continuing what cannot yet be finished, what only expands further the further one moves through it, requiring a fidelity to the rigors of digression for the clearest view. In brief, I shall tell nothing about you, nothing at all, not because we have deceived one another, but for knowing that no harm could ever come from such a telling, that only by returning to your absence—the redundancy of returning to your absence—could one hope to discern anything beyond its mean distortion, unbound from the compulsive sleight of stepping off, or coming down…

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Again the walls devise escape; this is perhaps their last chance to achieve a common ending, to prefer collapse. It’s tiresome, only meeting at the crossroads. One would like to touch the lips, to feel the hair stand on the nape. One would like to grieve again, to be no more mistaken for the leavings of a sudden swell, a world caved in…