Click to read Ray’s previous installments.
Human Value
It is the right to crystallize
people you find lacking worth.
You gum your faculties. I am
not as sharp as a diamond and
will not let you shape me
or carve some eternal chant
into my soul. My soul is a piece
of bone, rubbed in sand and dirt.
Do not use me for entertainment,
stealing and penetrating my land.
I am too much for you to exclude.
I am not from the living light. Yet,
you wish my presence; you use it
for non-purpose. I am not human
to you, a plastic rhinestone discovery
which you promptly throw away.
I am not allowed my false death.
Let you not keep me & let me take
what you wanted to steal from me,
that which you never wanted except
to erase, me. The minerals are plush
with value, treason against whatever
luxury you find satisfying, in flouncing
my sadness. I skirt your dominion and
weighted leverage in act of myself,
committal non-commitment to flesh
and in Victorian reason. Treasonous.
Let my physiology defy choice, is not
hyperbolic biology of worlds that end.
It is ending. The unknown is not a lie.
Resuscitation of mysticism from
the simile of self-abnegation. Repeat
to me the refrain refracting myself
from being anything like your soul-
wounded diatribe. I am no diamond.
Material Conclusions
What remains of anatomy
is its disposition to hurt.
I suppose some of us only
talk about what they do not
know. I suppose some of us
speak in rallying force
against what they do not know.
I am clouted with other’s
memories of the system as
it was during the war.
What remains of anatomy
is its disposition to hurt.
My body carries the history
of a system wanting me
to be non-material. Except
all scars are material, all
memory is material, all war
is material, and Trump is
material. I decide to make
my protests material and
daub limelight on the fact
that all anatomy has the
potential to hurt and to
hurt is material. Abstractly
you can call what can’t be
articulated the soul, though
eventually you will fill
the soul with words, siphon
meaning from the words,
until you must find another.
Postlapsarian Conclusions
These are my postlapsarian
conclusions: an alcoholic’s
confessional. I wouldn’t be
if I weren’t. But I am, so it
goes. Please flip to page 43.
If you are still here I warn
that you will find this trite
and will probably want to end
the system at hand. I guess
that is the point. Don’t pity
me and my final conclusions
about society: something worth
escaping. After my harsh fall
there was nothing left but to
choose between an abusive
relationship, a traitor’s life,
and spiritual death. It isn’t
as if I even believe in spirit
or soul. Perhaps that is now
something I’ve lost, something
God deemed fit to take from
me. Do not pity me. You are
worth more than that; and so,
after my best friend committed
suicide, I, too, took a vow
of abstinence. Not unlike my
vow of celibacy from the year
before. There is no rapist
involved, this time; but then,
are you to say he took from me
so as to bring me to the light?
Goddamn him and his weak
pity. It is him I set myself to
break, a spirit so fallen it can
only write a diary of negation.
Tritanomalous Conclusions
I don’t see shades of yellow. No
metaphor. My cornea crisp, sunflakes,
made dull from ochreday. It’s late.
I remember being five-years-old.
The blonde girls would correctly
name the Crayola coloring wax,
crayons. Sunflower, icterine, ochre,
saffron, dandelion, naming them
Loyola, the saints beside themselves
in scruples, marching from plurality.
All these silly littles, these sallied ones.
I shall be yellow carnation, then, said
one, I shall be gold resin, then, in set
doublebloom, tang of twin stars slain
unseeable by my eye. All the same.
I lack the wit to tell the creatures
how the wax will melt, how it will
smell. It is tangy, blooms in mustard
of the inevitable celestial hamburger.
The clay, they are all the same.
Do I deny that yellow stars exist?
I do. Ah! Too bold. Let me again.
You’d never know from looking
at me that I count myself as them.
What is the greatest horror known
to humankind? It is the laughter of
some ruffled dress, faking, laughing
in her own singled-out duress, set.
I lost myself in harmony, dance, hues
and yellow hues that scrape the eyes.
Ray Osborn [a Creative Writing MFA at Syracuse University] is sick of writing these autobiographies of the soul stuck in hell, for lack of a better word. In general, Ray is interested in not talking about one’s self and, if you must know, Ray’s work focuses on ekphrasis, elegy, and visibility.