The Imagination of Despair
1
In a warmly dark room with three windows that give out onto an infinite hive of canopies, I sit watching candleshadow arpeggiate across the wooden floor. Ants are building a two-way route from a breadcrumb, which sits atop an empty notebook on my desk, to a crack at the bottom of the door frame of the closet. I barely have enough energy to move my head, but if I do, I look at the leaves that cycle constantly in a soft wind outside. Clustered together, all of the trees seem to move as a single unit. The moon shines a bright silver-blue that sharpens the wind and the leaves. I slowly twist my head back to its natural resting position. Ants move in and out of the shadow of the flame.
I’ve been sitting here for so long I can feel the labored breath of the windows. The ceiling fan motors slowly, as if it wants to stop, yet continues on with an unconscious desire that flows against its will. The couch is slumped and despondent. A dozen nearly empty water bottles sit in different parts of the room, pensive as if guarding their final swigs of backwash. All of the objects in the room have gained animacy, but a reluctant one. Only the ants move with rigor and brutality.
I sit in despair, my head like a block of cement rebarred onto an alien body. As ants scurry in and out of my vision, moments of life seem to vanish as if they never even existed in the first place, like the extinction of species yet to be discovered.
2
How is that despair has no form, no body, yet compasses and encompasses every space?
I seem to have acute awareness of every sound, every insurrection of the eyelid.
The canopies sway and tremor outside.
There seems to be some fracture in the self, in the very heart of existence itself. And this is where I encounter the regime of pure silence. Not the silence of a forest in a spring afternoon, but the silence of a black hole. Silence as the absence of sound — a fate not even a ghoul could undertake.
And yet, out of pure curiosity, I want to know what is spit out of the tail of a blackhole. To know what magical chaos arises in this anterior darkness.
I want let the despair weigh me down totally — up until this point, I’ve been rejecting its final push, as if I’ve been in a coma and living out of a feeding tube. I let despair press my slab of head down, so that it feels as if it is in the center of my chest. It sinks lower, and I’m looking up through my umbilical cord. It drops even further, all the way to the floor, where I can hear the light tapping of the ants’ feet. Three of them crawl toward me to inspect. As they get closer, I see that they are not ants, but three tiny feminine demigods who wear ant exoskeletons as armor. They march around my head, sneak up through my hair, then press a button that ejects a platform out of the back of my skull. Then they hop on and ride in and gives themselves entry to some kind of turret in the upper part of my spine. Their collective voice is more metallic oscillation than voice:
3
“You’ve wasted your life away muzzled, your voice buried at the bottom of your neck. Do you feel the gigantic lump rotting there? That entire planet of screams waiting to be birthed? Begging to be loosed like a cloud of cicadas over the sorry tribulations of your life? We’ve assessed the somber architectures of your body. How you walk, how you sit, how you speak. You move through life as if trapped in an invisible straight jacket, the rules of which you obey at every moment, never budging beyond its illusionary borders. And what do you have to show for this timidity, but some icicles of semen that hang in the sewer over beds of human guano?
Here are your earliest poems, freshly retrieved from the chamber pot where we took turns shitting on them. Lines that do not contain a healthy dose of poison do not intrigue us! These are the remnants of some puppeteered discourse, engineered with elegant rhetoric, composed by one who’s only talents are in trained decomposition. This is mere trafficking in words and ideas. This is an impotent pumping of the rickshaw of poetry across the wasteland of a decaying empire.
Now you sit here a sullen creature, neither of the ground nor the air, just a middling little middle creature — in other words a human.
And what is human to us now? When we repeat the word over and over again, it sounds like nothing more than “man” getting sucked down a vacuum.
We’re finished with your empty image of the self. We’re going to force you to swim for years in a stinking bog, where you’ll pay witness to your own wretchedness.
Upon return, you’re going to get drenched in a thousand different forms of rain, then get caught in the upward blizzards of the mind & body,
witness all manner of cataclysm and apocalypse,
light paths of fire through your own house,
get sick of living and try to eat your own hand and then find a sort of perseverance in its regurgitated ugliness,
get sick of living again and find better music in the farts of flowers than could ever be ossified onto a page,
then liberate ephemeral scrawls from your discarded selves,
& wander relentlessly above the event horizon of the ocean.
You’ll get lost in the glorious and terrifying mental landscapes of life —
and best of all, none of this requires any doing on your part. Becoming is not a question of doing. We’re taking care of that:
We’re sacrificing Kyle Walsh.”
Kyle Walsh is a writer and musician residing in Sebastopol, California. Their work has appeared in Dryland, The Penn Review, and 8 Poems, and is forthcoming in Blood Orange Review. They play drums in psychedelic and indie bands in the Bay Area.