A Variation on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
The world is everything that is the case
The world makes real the sound of things
That means there is a world and things speak it
But all of their speaking is done in secret
Because sound is sense, and real is hidden
The mouth is the thing for our speaking secret
And where there is a mouth, there must be a face
The world is every thing that is the face
The world’s case is the face of being
An angel of parallel selves, it listens largely in secret
Seeks to touch itself in the dark like a person
Being likes to touch itself like every moment
And the word serves to resuscitate the dream
Imagine desire deferred? But time cannot oppose thought
So time was the beginning of my survival
Time was a substitute for hell
The self is a syndrome to conduct out of deprivation
I swore I could stare at the shadow without shame
But it hurts to beg for an afternoon of voice
It hurts to be green-eyed at the sleepy starlight
Translation mimics complications inherent in linearity
Yet there's something here that's even freakier than fear
It may be that working on our freedom isn't free
We lose our minds in peace
Nothing dies, and hardly anything is realized
Hijacked
I am speaking like a citizen now when I say
hysteria is the kind of magnitude that pulsates
gentle knees threatening indifference
pleading for you to come home again
into an ambiguous consciousness
like a listening stretched thin
almost like the game of seduction
who would think joy is an imagined presence
don’t suppose paranoia’s never sung a single
lovely note, what would it mean we don’t
choose our teachers, they call to us from
the dead libidinally, blood suddenly tasteless
sky the shape of a shepherd what a pity
there is no silence in a grain of rice
who told you that, who said that to talk
for twenty minutes makes you solid
who beautifies the stench of our dead body
dancing wordlessly to the sight of two cows
who believes joy as a destroyed presence
or is there just no time to keep the company
I am, or do I still long for the incurable
thread?
Hajri Aga is a writer from New York. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Brooklyn Poets, who also featured her in a Poet of the Week interview. She is a graduate of the Brooklyn Poets Mentorship Program and an MFA candidate at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.