Kyle Muntz - Voices

"No one ever stops falling," he said. "All life is nothing but just a really, really long fall."

"Then I’ll remember for you," I said, "If I can, though really, I’m not very good with memory, like people say, and I’m not very good with secrets either.

A whirlwind sprang up beside me. Pathways sprang up. I felt like I’d been here before. I felt like I’d seen him before. This place was nothing but strangeness.

"Thanks for the favor," I said. "Maybe someday I’ll need it."

"You will."

"I will?"

Why?

"I don’t know if you’ll believe this," he said, "but she wasn’t alone." “If you want,” I said, “I could get her to talk to you. Maybe.”

Markus shook his head, but he was smiling inside. He slapped himself in the face. He gurgled, strangely, and choked on inhalation, thinking of her. This was his gracious, goodliness of romance, his beacon of want, and lust, and fear. I knew, of course, that most likely she would reject him (had in fact rejected him already, so many times, by being there, by being), but there are times in life (like this) that I do my best to be (something) like a friend.

"No," he said, "you couldn’t… no." But inside he was saying yes, because she was his voracious angel, and he wanted her, from a distance.

"Are you sure?"

No he wasn’t. Of course he wasn’t sure. He felt like he was impeding on the distance he knew. I felt for him. I wonder if he understood how far away she really was, a guest in her own self. Ashley, subliminal, was a piece of plastic with fresh, heavy breasts and extremely inviting skin. She’d told me so in person. I was willing to lie for her.

::::::::::::::::::::

Very painfully

she rejected him, stabbing with blades of apathy, atop an undertone of disgust. He wouldn’t talk about it (I don’t think I wanted him to), but he told me he didn’t

think he would ever be able to look at her again, in this life. She was his licentious

vat of acid. She destroyed him.

"Sometimes," I said to her, "you aren’t very nice."

"No one ever said I had to be."

"If I could," I said, "I would paint you."

"Naked?"

"Possibly."

"You can," Ashley said, "if you want."

"I don’t think it would work," I said. "I wouldn’t be able to find the right colors." "That’s fine."

"Or I could reinterpret you," I said, "as a triangle."

::::::::::::::::::::

I went on a journey in the forest, not where I’m going. The angles were strange there, not concentric, not setting like themselves. They bent in manners that defied the geometric, bisecting, dissecting, discarding. Triangulating beams lit the night above, glowing odd blue colors. Electricity shot from a gash in the earth. The trees bent, fearful. They were this place, but this was place was something else, not them; skewed inklings quartered the borders of dimension, time and place in destruction. I took steps. This was not a good place to declare everlasting love, nor was it a proper time to write a poem. I had a pen in my pocket but it wasn’t important enough to remember. I had my camera but it might not have paid attention.

::::::::::::::::::::

Light bulbs

flaring quiescent

in the deepest darkest void gaseous clouds reaching out

and I fell

down to the center of the universe

past lakes of hydrogen amitosis and translucent bellied nebuloid creatures softly scrounging

in this deepest darkness

at that place where matter cut off and the stars all outside destroying together shone

in synchrony

together. Still with them I fell

to learn a lesson

to teach myself what it meant to see

in secrets, whole realms of diffident belief. Still falling

I came

whiteness

to a gigantic,

the point of division and revolution around which all creation life and being made circles. And no, it wasn’t

enough just to

be here I wanted

to really

BE

HERE

in the gargantuan

sense, spreading out,

garrulously, from a real, provable point, and onto an absolute kind of the critical. It was selfish I know but who I am (who am I) to granulate virtue? Life makes me no promises, but very frequently it makes

choices to

take things away with and without

approval, as though

I had a right to give any, taking one true grasp of reality

and biting

off a piece larger than the world.

And there I am, cut off from myself, from

life, from beauty, from whatever individualized form of mitosis. I’m not

a cellular structure, but neither am I

an amoeba, living in my own telephone world, at trigger point, swallowing daily a whole carton’s worth

of raw eggs. Not all of us

are meant to be martyrs, and

even fewer are granted

escape from ghostliness. It’s not that I’m selfish, even though I am, but the older I get, the more of

the world

I see (very small, one personalized city, destructive), I want to see less and less; always

coming through

that useless window

that is me, eyes and face, hands in the mirror. No sound

followed me there:

nexus of quietude, silent, spinning axis of language. The abstract was meaningless

here, if it distanced itself

from me. The artistic, the unsound. I’ve got no right to make claims on creation, unsound, unspoken.

In contradiction, I spoke loudly in the silence, speaking to myself alone.

There were no voices for me here, no words on the walls.

If existence can be said

to be bound, certainly the concept escaped me. I held my breath, adrift beneath

the surface of an immense ocean, mirroring the sky

as all creation mirrors the external, hiding, by means of reflection, its secret of the internal, the silent and true.

I spoke to myself with many voices, and dampened my voice on speaking. I had no

concept of loneliness.

Galaxies of color accented a fluctuating, formless kind of vision.

::::::::::::::::::::

"If you wanted," I said, "

I could reinterpret you as language."

(If you wanted, she said, I could make you

even more

of a liar.)

::::::::::::::::::::

I looked carefully in the mirror.

And it was true, I saw.

A hazing outline, the color of skin. It blurred. I splashed water, crisp and clear,

both and neither. I blinked. I thought for a moment of memory.

It wavered.

vision/split.

There were two(2) of me.

V

In s

i

n

k

i

n

g

I am

an engraving

on the side

of an old,

beat up, car

This is the part where I let you in on a big, big secret, if I can be said to have secrets at all, the outpour that is me, cubist misrepresentation, trace of imagery. It happened so long ago I can’t be said to be going in order, but, in all things, I am absolutely untrustworthy.

Sometimes,

I can almost rely on myself to preserve

structure,

but I'm still playing games

with words..

If I were to have a conversation with Pythagoras I would tell him we were all language, even numerically, inasmuch as all that represents is a language in itself. Very likely, in true historical form,

he would look to murder me.

::::::::::::::::::::

Markus wrung his hands. Markus shook. He didn’t want to play video games, and he didn’t want to play guitar. No differences cared for him, as the world would have us believe. In the other room, his mother was watching television loudly, as she screamed. She watched with hands clinging (tightly) to the seat, so (tightly) her knuckles went white. The blood could barely squirt through. Vicarious, pathetic, her wasted chorus of representation: any minute now, she would most likely begin to vacuum.