Write As You Are,
& maybe this is something like
Kurt Cobain possessing my soul,
but there’s no reason to hide
anymore. Whether it’s
past tense, present tense, future tense, intense, un-tense,
it doesn’t have to make sense
for anyone else. People make up
their own meanings. Symbols remain to be
symbols, but the difference between
what one or the other thinks
is quite astronomical,
even if there’s any sort
of overlapping. Traditionally,
the area for similarities on a Venn diagram
occupies the least amount of space,
a result of shared electrons
maybe. We have no Venn diagrams
chaining us together. It’s like in kindergarten
where we made logical connections
in saying as we were poking our friends with pencils
“I’m not touching you,” but the agitatee
provided in this scenario
lays down four much more
logical premises for her argument:
1. Your hand is
a physical appendage
of your body;
2. Your hand is
holding the pencil;
3. The pencil
(mentioned in premise 2)
is a temporary appendage
of your body;
4. The pencil is a part
of your body, temporarily;
5. Therefore, you are touching me
when the pencil touches me.
I digress—the point is
you’re not a pencil (I promise),
you’re not who you touch, &
you’re not a displacement
between you & something (or someone) else
(I promise once again),
for the only thing you can ever be
is yourself. I mean—am I
right? As you were.
Ebenezer in the Distance
“Forget me, forget me not—”
was the chant
every writer recited
until every rhetorical question proposed
had become sequestered,
grazed over with eyes like greyhounds
searching for
the inexplicable Truth.
A history exists
for the blind, rubbing against
textures for a meaning,
scoping the universe out of hiding,
and they were good,
of course, at locating the reservoir,
like cave-dwelling newts,
the people chained in a cave, blind to the unsuspected,
never knowing anything
about “The Phantom Tollbooth”
until an hour of reading
whatever braille
created the bumps in every road
becomes a vacation, maybe
a lifetime to explore
life lessons in a strange world,
inside the eccentric life.
Justified, hands like sycamores,
those slender, crooked fingers
crept upon the earth. Nothing binged
more effervescently
than the finger paint of words,
one learning to crawl
with a pencil, scrawling into
an Escher-drawn rubicon
profound in ways
quiet to what’s unsuspected:
delving, a fistful of clay
pronounced an ineffability, causing
a wound-shattering in
the Shield of Achilles, giving
a pataphysical interpretation of the antitheses
ruling the dominant left-wing
of a sightless perception,
attempting to storm the beach of Normalcy,
breaching the dorm of
a well scripted-out reality.
I can always remember.
I will always
engrave an ebenezer.
Rex Ybañez is a former children's librarian and grant writer now working as a copy editor for science curriculum at Accelerated Learning, Inc. Aside from work, he’s a literary alchemist—solve et coagula. He's been published by HARK Magazine, Young Adult Review Network (YARN), ARDOR Literary Magazine, DANSE MACABRE, Little River, and other print and online journals. Currently, he's finishing up a manuscript of poems to be published as his debut collection, titled Imaginarium.