Silence(s)

Silence(s)

Pierre Ouellet a lifeworldtext e-book - 2021

Silence(s)

By Pierre Ouellet

A lifeworldtext e-book - 2021

A WORLD WITHOUT

I close my eyes not so much to stop the world as to still my heart within it so that for a single beat I may again live in sync to your final moment present yet curiously absent as your silent end of being opens to the world in a child’s exclamation of wonder and the undoubtable great fear of a gaping still unknowable eternal pause in the emergency unit under harsh light on a hard scrubbed shinny surface you lie (already absent) yet still subjected to now futile human intervention more protocol and gesture slowly emptied of urgency in the defeat of chemistry gone horribly wrong

he was a paradigm of autobiographical folklore drawn to the vanishing point of meaningless clairvoyance sightlines concentrated, intentional yet strangely askew his innersight focused beyond symbol or sign by a semiotics of twitching genetics and old fashion haruspication blood and entrails reveal what only they can speak and show burnt offerings obvious yet plausibly invisible while tracing through the innumerable convergences of daily survival one side cancelling out the other and all that is left of past glory is an ever-rising complacency regarding pure thought and the implicit trust in the endless possibilities set in motion by death

absolutely bereft empty void after nothing beyond the depredation of the senses and the darknight of the soul starved for affections and unable incapable once again of remembering feeltouchortaste even less the sight of desire lost for centuries in the silent disapproving gaze of monastic decrees warning of eternal loss and damnation translucent archetypes scavenging gargoyles finally summoned by the primordial soft flowerless ground of just remorse opening an invisible veil, bruised easily infiltrated his pumping body where the workings of blasphemy germinated, then consecrated intemperate ceremonies in customary rhythms of simple uncomplicated yet always precarious prayer

I remember holding his hands – I think – small moist and salty like pet clams infinitely uncomfortable yet so right palpitating and fluttering like turtle doves that might fly away at any moment unprovoked in a shiver of anxiety and self-doubt if/once left alone, unattended unsupported unheeded unfelt fearing the sinking communal racket of togetherness, hope and faith which must eventually often/always dissolve this peaceful self-consciousness into some epiphanic acts of loneliness and epigraphic grief from which the practices of mourning must consequently follow into the abyss of non-being no more; this irreversible chasm of loss deals a near fatal stab to the heart/soul of all personal lifeworld ambitions as it delivers unto truth and reconciliation a wound that can never heal in the promise of life through death and self through other an irreducible knowing in intimate memory of presence in absence and the amnesty and forgiveness

we must now bestow forever on our disconsolate histories as we somehow believe them to have occurred.

he appeared un-appeasable yet remained somehow nonchalantly poetic about his fate ensnared as he was in the moist pursuit of his own personal intimate history of thought; meticulously laboriously methodically he followed the threadbare map etched on his palm at birth a Thanatos of deceptive adventures and illegitimate pursuits drawn by long absences from self and the quiet misunderstanding and deep spiritual emptiness etched by the pain within onto a destiny of self-loathing institutional guilt and painstakingly imagined shame ultimately codified into the deathly promises of his casually anticipated eternal silence so many misdeeds stunned into mindlessness by the source of all indifference a punctured heart an accident of birth a tragic failure in judgment

this enigmatic and hysterical stuttering of light riddled hence inside and outside by the furious humming of swarming thought the heavy sweet musk of lust in the air the snap of flesh against flesh a muffled cry of orgasmic release informs all human obligation or desire pain is sincerely and generously offered to assuage the failure of the wanton things waiting to be undone a minor tremor of the spirit is remembered as the long-forgotten moment that unleashed all that followed a system nothing can’t surprise, anymore, an abominable collusion which consumes instantly - the wild landscape of concrete and glass by offering the pervasive evasive solitude of inert inactive ignorance subdued colors like accents from anywhere and nowhere in rented atmospheres where all is forgotten, sooner than later

the bones of death that existence wasn't able to carry off into the shadows of words have been spun into sentences and contentious meaning(s) in the belief that a world should (and even must) witness so many echoes, enslaved to a single voice, ensnared buried deep in dust and rust and stone and hunger a starved loneliness without heart or soul in its chest somewhere beyond appetite like a private compulsion rendered unto obsession by the nervous automation of desire intangibly set in oblivious form

I once had to teach my father to want to eat again by offering him the foods he once feasted on so that he might remember his old pleasure anew in the intimate nexus of desire and anticipation precariously drawn between need and want

rhythms of life thinned and stretched into long solitary notes surface congestions of attitude and conceit present in the colorless and odorless essentials of identifiable presences like the smell of electricity in the air, after a storm all existence ever more articulated to formula and algorithm and the search for recognition driven by the internalized construction of self-serving publicity and economic excess a complete rewriting of the ledger of existential profit and loss asset to liability will soon occur (we hope) are you feeling rich and wealthy now and how much of this do I really want or much less need?

The inner voices rasps in a nearly silent whisper “enough…enough…

What…when … how… is enough…?”

lips moisten in wonder and shock pupils dilate skin tightens as hair follicles vibrate anticipation dread and fear of loss drawing pity from nowhere the misplaced awareness of misguided empathy whispers the solitary sigh of creation into the glass ear of eternity thus allowing the solitary sensation of primal innocence to become riddled unto uncertainty in the unequivocal solitary sensation of a primordial existence prior to consciousness as the inevitable structuring effect of knowledge games dissipates into a silence punctuated by the language of complicated silence and difficult absence(s)

sounds, numb and hushed like smoke, drift thick into a million collisions as the air opens and closes to conscious awareness and numb vacant non-thought ends most suddenly in countless anonymities this is a dank, misty place of stale air and moisture where light stands in columns a stage set against chemical skies to encourage the overdetermined coffin of dead relations so they might explore this frail device called life veined conversations, arthritic and gnarled by the pulsating tendrils of machinesounds while devotional anguish and guilt reminds us of how we long for ceremony casting sound onto the stones of silence in asyncopated rhythm blurred murmurs drifting in the sacramental offering of devotion and faith bereft of final hope

the sturdy rigging of the ribs hung on trees as crosses remembers the perishable leathery beauty of torsos and forgotten prayers like the sound of paper tearing an echo, trapped forever in the non-space of fevered infirmity so many light constructions that once framed the slow procession of the skies have now hardened and settled into the rigor mortis of aggressive shadows and a sea of eternal urban noise sifts its inchoate murmurings through the hallways and lamp poles as songs reclaim the memories of infants and elders. once dusk came softly stretching vellum across the landscape while a young man listened to the distant inner thunder of savage tunes his smile, thick as porridge his eyes blank and empty as pure endless nothing

A WORLD WITHIN

here the chances of immortality are practically nil the lottery is no longer random statistical – actuarial it has been turned into an elegiastic poem of loss a ponzi scheme of failed reward and retribution accrued weakness unto failure the narrative of numbers once so clear and convincing has forever more been tamed to the vision and the will of null-sum operators faceless managers of benign meaningless existence always beholding to a version of terminally self-serving alterity cloaked in the faux-reflected narcissism of beneficent profitable self-interest

after the bell, the ground is always swept bare of all previously necessary color erasing the daily acquisitive efforts the bartering of personal profit and collective loss noted and forgotten beyond the edge of this floor, or field, or shoreline, or cliff beyond the view from this window the expectation of rebirth is swept away clean until tomorrow by the additive distance of insignificant trauma felt as the weight of fatigue or unbearable depression these unspoken dreams of progress enlightenment and personal freedom now strapped to the electric chair of our collective end proposed as progress and change and blame grown tired and confused by ever growing unimaginative and ever desperate approaches to ecstasy it is now time to embrace the unbalanced momentum of the white night delirious and featureless beyond recall so that memory itself might be erased, dissolved falling unfailingly into the nothingness of past blinded ambition and venal emotion

we are ordained thereafter to follow the barely perceptible pulses of afterlife thrust wildly through indifferent skies before we can settle far below the event-horizons of destiny and fate more fiercely aware however through shocked and stippled nerves of the painful movements of others living substantively splintered trances while exaggerating the modesty of their means in harsh spasms of recycled beauty streamed in stories that we must tell each other again and again without pause nor patience nor rest

the irreparable infinite movement of time loaded with shadows ready to burst is synchronized in silent rhythm with the intemperate beating pattern of my heart as I sit for the original ritual before this unbounded expanse of dawn momentarily breached in memorable places by objects without answers and the shadows of broken things cast from in-penetrable positions, collapsing inwards, full of soundless noiseless energy and ambition this sudden noiseless rendering of spirit exasperated by winter’s indifference throbs just below my skin still stubbornly pulsing the prophesies of phantoms incantations through dislocated or impeached shreds of sound

crystalline voices the thunderous fetid breath of decaying vegetation patches of light gathered over deep tropical depressions and rivers the colour of primeval mud most beautiful is that which does not yet and never can nor should exist hardly anticipated yet somehow welcome space swells like an ocean or a thunderstorm in the dry season one singular stream of light pierces the beautiful absence of now revealing a pre-world of endless impossibilities tethered to the nakedly ambitious polar space of extreme longing and mindful adventure.

rehearsed and imaginary famines and uprisings of the spirit personal daily slights and well-rehearsed oppositional discourses of differences are rarely spellbound by the glow of ancient hallucinations because tactful contempt diffuses – negates – erases and forgets the glimmering translucent crucible of History itself deep in the body polity, dissolving momentary will and future vision into ennuie and indifference that gorge the desperate giant membranes of ritualized past failures and collective guilt with desire and its shadow greed all is neatly explained – contained narrated and organized in wikipedian entries designed purposefully - solely to obediently underpin and replicate the self-serving dominant illusions of our time’ a radical confusion post everything – fake everything stream everything moment glimpsed in the splinter of eternity that is your lifetime and mine

beyond the garish light of atonal obviousness the ear will always imagine a steely rustle so that it might capture scratching flat fingers on a sheet of rusted iron night elsewhere later a yellow wave of sun dis-appears on a white stucco wall in a splash of modern shadows dissonant granular chords of white wind progressing away from the proposed transparency of retrospective misgiving towards some stillborn illusion of understanding as reconciliation forests breathe heavy rumors pushed forth in swarms of pixels aspiring to a destiny of imagery finally freed of itself void of symbolism and intrinsic meaning at last filled with the faith of utter absolute despair.

these cells of spliced suns luxuriate as copper infused rays of mineral glitter ceaselessly recombined in the honesty and faith of endless nameless eternities we have become explorers, pushing away daily, like a flotilla from the shore of everyday existence drawn towards loss and the vacant promise of redemption by a loving invention however remote or faint like a verdant shoreline glimpsed or imagined in the distance done with imagination and courage

unassailable unstudied insolence and unshakeable ignorance bred stealth-fully into generations of unconscious victims by deeply compromised educational rituals and entrenched systems of political abuse and neglect have finally riven the fundamental decency paradigm of collective existence at its core stripping away all promised dreamscapes of personal emancipation while dissolving the centuries-old promissory declarations of enlightened freedoms personal independence and collective truth-seeking on the fluorescent horizon of the now scorched collective landscape the neon dream-sun flows whole into the blast furnace of eternity enriched by its own exuberant wastefulness as the nuclear shards of reflected atomic sunlight consume the fossil fuels of oblivious profit until they are - at last - refined out of existence by indifference/compromise/apathy and the willfully deceptive politics of fear and loathing and sheer baffling stupidity

so few will escape yet all will bear the absent imprint of semiotic negation traced at the limit of impossible meaning as the terminal sentence for all that lives on this speck of cosmic dust hurled ad infinitum though space is finally rendered without further chance of appeal so now must begin the stark and dire meditation on the tragic consequence of such a wasteful fatal loss

the tree in the orchard, is the color of old hours reaching up to timelessness bent and gnarled split in the middle by long ago lightning as the private history of family and a longing now long forgotten from which as if willed by fate itself it grew nearby wind is prancing on the ridge, behaving like a gypsy confident in her status as an essential expression of being she belongs to all and none brief and indecisive partly remembered so that she may soon be forgotten as all knowledge is meant to be

yellow sands press up into the meadow an edging definition now instant, invincible in memory, coming back to haunt the middle of someplace between then and now lest we remain silent silent so that others may utter a moment that yawns and fills with the consolation of chaos and forgetting a breath so deep that it will render the soul unto its primordial self and release an eternity of ruin and misery throughout the gasping heavens of mediocrity futility and abject subservience images are now glimpsed – perhaps even dreamt through a prism of cleverly performed sufferings the forged compromising documents replete with discordant marginalia through which we glimpse the shadow world of others still trying to believe in something a faithful gesture

a habit even a nervous spasm like a myth torn apart in the infinity of absolute loss the winds clothes the overfull atmosphere with shredded snatches of sound that reach us barely as wisps of inchoate speech acts and animal sounds gently imagined perhaps or softly hallucinated as they barely touch the darkening nightair, now crying, pleading and calling the surge of thunder folded within lashes forward – above the ridge elsewhere beyond mountains of broken sky torn into ripped sheets of steel and streams of pewter air the promises of disaster and survival both wagering in full risk as they dissolve into each other as all fierce lovers must and do.

the initial curves of the air encourage imagination in a familiar frenzy of motion and shadow just under the eaves where night lives and dreams grieve just outside at the corners of all fear in unknowable lust for eternal forgetfulness sleep is deeper than the darkest nonlight on the roof sound again enacts a scurrying attempt to escape fate or destiny and moves quickly to the edges into tormented silence as the breathing nightworld once again reclaims its pre-ordained right to dream

in this land where something has been postponed morning light flutters like a hesitant applause slowly remembering the need to imagine that one is worthy of being loved again and again…

with wild-eyed amazement the dusk soaks in the heartless and indifferent spirits from the black fields and dark forests everywhere; the restless and roaming dead are now carried in our eyes for this convocation of mourning and loss, amassed for now in the strangulating distance between immensity and oblivion everything gradually vanishes in the receding imperfection of the silent night

the ambitious yet strict coolness of invisible isolation thrives in hives of subdued tones and shades of flickering evanescent corpuscular light perfectly propositioned by the admirable stillness of an uneventful landscape an image cultivated solely for the numbness that it spreads beyond the bruised windowpanes where so many things in this rented atmosphere fail to imagine yet flutter nonetheless and cling to light from beyond a single pace away from nowhere

the once-evil silver breath of night sets the nowtarnished dawn ashimmer with rolling fog and the last nocturnal murmurs of yesterday echoes of immense still unrequited desire, like sunrise illuminate blurred wounded forms, awaiting their turn to exist as faltering shadows in the mist of pre-mythic thought and consciousness spout like desert sands of light or dark thrusts of frozen anger the vanishing shadows of the wind dominate with depthless laments of frozen air full of agony and the tumult of dark places as more unfulfilled prophesies consume the motionless and faceless people a bewildered and thirsty multitude lost in the heart of self-torment set to perish in the agony of overflowing anguish through the eternal childishness of our mortal mis-understandings.

brine from the sea, the forever pregnant water, offers a dark and indistinct copy of the sky, where we dig, fragmenting the night into salty clouds of silence and the breath of eternal return a cadence of forever licking footprints in the sand always a faithful pet tethered to forever now and then and there the stormy streaked mirror of the sky once again sated, translucent like a singular novel spiked cell mere instants before replication advances in the tumbling truth of ramshackle molecular darkness offering the unknowable unknowing primordial moment of creation at its most present in the fold of negation and death itself

THE WORLD

imperious voices once demanded carefree and calming rituals and weightless, endless crystalized explanations beyond which former meaning knew no significance nor held any lasting power appropriately, all was invisible then now intense sensations hurled from the abysmal exile of resonant shifts shimmer in these unintentional harmonies, and taut disciplined dissonance, played outside the registers of longing or desire, excites whims of random recollection unwilling or perhaps still unable somehow to appear, yet nonetheless perfectly incredible like a surprise or deathly trauma this is our invitation to follow the healing green aura beyond the loud and ostentatious art of public living full of hearsay, yet empty like a television talk show or a live streamed podcast of self-serving inventions

so that we might soon resume our careful professions imposing once again strenuous and rigorous demonstrations to the natural perception of present knowledge in order to eventually and completely eradicate the superfluous and utterly fantastic aspirations of our once imagined lives

the innumerable forms of hideous uncurved life within – jagged – sharp – severely relentless now ask to be compensated for smoldering doubts and newly formed regrets SHAME laboriously extracted from the preciously preserved DNA of other times and places no self exists anymore under such thin secret smiles and derelict obligations we all must enter the narrow cage of repressed childhood anticipating reprehensible reprisals and brutal retributions too passionate and fervent to overlook or deny or ever forget we are told there exists a record - a ledger a balance sheet a summary decision prior to judgment and before act and fact a graven image to represent the world as it now exists somewhere between then and now here and there finally infinite and eternal

in silent rhythm with the intemperate beating/pattern of my heart I sit before the unbounded expanse of dawn momentarily breached in memorable places by objects without answers and the shadows of broken things cast from in-penetrable positions, collapsing inwards, full of soundless noiseless energy and ambition this sudden silent rendering of spirit throbs just below my skin still stubbornly pulsing the prophesies of phantoms incantations through dislocated or impeached shreds of sound exasperated by winter a dry and chilly yet ever amorous wind stretches over granite ideology once filled with climactic whisper and the sweet languid anatomy of inspiration now held hostage in the mirror spilling into us transfixed fluttering transfusions of vicious equanimity

surely such finality is worth something somewhere somehow to some-one the soft/trenchant electronic bitterness of that high-pitched warbling noise that we now experience as social media

here the chances of immortality are practically nil the lottery is no longer random statistical – actuarial it has been turned into an elegiastic poem of loss a ponzi scheme of failed reward and retribution accrued weakness unto failure the narrative of numbers once so clear and convincing has forever more been tamed to the vision and the will of null-sum operators faceless managers of benign meaningless existence always beholding to a version of terminally self-serving alterity cloaked in the faux-reflected narcissism of beneficent profitable self-interest after the bell, the ground is always swept bare of all previously necessary color erasing the daily acquisitive efforts the bartering of personal profit and collective loss noted and forgotten beyond the edge of this floor, or field, or shoreline, or cliff beyond the view from this window the expectation of rebirth is swept away clean until tomorrow by the additive distance of insignificant trauma felt as the weight of fatigue or unbearable depression

these unspoken dreams of progress enlightenment and personal freedom now strapped to the electric chair of our collective end proposed as progress and change and blame

the vulnerability of the mind and spirit once unassailable by laws and governments is now forever inscribed in trauma sweat and blood like so many imagined bolts of lightning at last allowed to expose the mongrel comforts of small gestures and everyday routines as the common-sense errors of this historicized existence become increasingly held as self- evident easrlier the exceptionalism of design and plot came out of nowhere anonymous, damning and bewildering questioning, intruding finally on all purpose like the sullen sudden stillness of an exchanged whisper or the mistaken intimacy of withdrawal, departure and a final abandonment protected at long last by the unused empty part of ourselves without preference or long-suffering passion removed from the miraculous and obsolete aging of forms; the heartless disadvantage of knowledge will still constantly pursue beginnings unto their illusory endings in the cold and dark continuum of weathered things comingling with mystery and darkness simply entered then resolved in the entranced abduction of a universe taken yet again in other forms as it is touched once more - as always – by chaos and deception and the confusion and constant humiliation of being with beings as self without self

rage and contempt hurled in stead of big ideas through the tumultuous din of astonishing and utterly unbelievable cable and internet noisy nonsense the darkgrey pixillated processions of pathetic ideas lurch forth, rattling expectations collapsing the veiled spaces of self-loathing as these surround the disastrous abyss of autonomic intellect and reflexive sensation in a vicious circle of perpetuated anxiety nonchalantly pretending to be at the center of all things human all the while the immutable violence of the treacherous night expressed with simple nonmusical mechanical sound reveals an alternate reality of stupid contemptuous things strewn, inside out, only to be grasped, fondled and violated with the speed of desire without pleasure remorse or guilt these astonishingly ugly mindless and continuous abominations find us utterly lost and defeated in the unseen and impalpable air of sequestered compulsive failures whose seething convolutions and other subversive tools created for this moment only

behind a stone-cold wall of ignorance, grief and loss by the numbing-soul shattering void unbearable to the senses in the still-born all-enveloping light of pre-conscious thought are rendered as the arousing valence of insight the mindless radiance of everyday utterance tender and pensive othering unto the perfect silence of silver stars the whistling winds of ash and the remainder of an accursed share of eternal doubt

gigantic motorized insects seem to rearrange the cosmic molecules with magnetic impulses and mellow yellow neon light steel glides on ice through fuzzy air, in an effervescent conversation about the para-cultural dis-order of existence itself once again we will initiate the proper procedure(s) for maximum rejection and repression of the deathworld as we assume yet another level of plausible deniability removed for now at least from all further attempts at historical revisionism this is the final chapter where we finally rewrite contiguous memory through an intricate harness of electrons set deep in the aleatory search engines and data streams of nascent social movement speed itself grows unstable like a fibrillating heart under the cold skin of a deranged political economy now at the service of self-hatred and greed.

increasingly rejected social-distancing has become a death embrace for the alien other (lethal as the infected blankets once sold at the frontier outposts of this land by soulless men in the name of manifest destiny and the great protestant ethic of godlike capital) and the evolving manifesto of post-truth history shrieks ever louder against reason and commonsense like hard acrid acid and the sulfurous spray of racial hatred and cultural terror which swells veins and gorges muscles of “patriotic” terrorists bathed in the violent radiance of fetal-alcoholic stupor and inbred evil-eyes calling for the perverted escalation of eugenic fury and the radical extermination of sentient knowledge seeking beings. sporadically a nasty little wind gusts carrying the bitter scent of semen and virginal regret across the breach of raging culture wars offering the tentative and timid promises of faint hope against such invisible malice of cruelty and spite a virus of the spirit

which must soon cease to spread amongst the most vulnerable as they die as they have lived sacrificed in bad faith for the profit of all who shall remain inoculated at last against all such mortal abuses of the life force so that they may finally seek eternal life in the caring and service of others as themselves.

anchored in pleasure, neatly buried beneath temporary particles of insight and ambition once more consecrated by renewal this erotic measure of power glimpses the implausible consciousness that drives the connective melancholy of these distant and futile attempts at brightness of spirit and lightness of heart; shifts of iceclean air spilled into the bone at the natural conjunction of unplanned mindlessness and tribal memory are crushed in a spell of violent intrusive ambition fueled by the dynamic terror of post-human passion hermetic and un-confessed splintered symbols of safety and calm, stolen from the impervious sky as so many sublime formulations of infinity cauterize our cunning libidinous obsessions through faltering monologues and sustained formulations of need and desire as premonitions of prior understanding recharge the past over concealed acknowledgements

a blind and savage identity appears unforeseen and unpredictable offering emotions deranged of their own accord by minuscule retrospective self-mutilations and unspeakable psychic estrangements forged in the forbidden bestiaries of soulless unfocussed evolution, like a warning felt across tranquil languid amorous flesh, ensnared in fits of fugitive darkness to be finally consumed within a particular beauty as the undeniable and delicious taste for life itself.

the thought of reconciliation finally shreds the course fabric of millennial antipathy silence shout unwanted unconscious recollections cultural reflexes emerge in recovered memory as False testament to the self-proclaimed impartiality of neo-liberal and enlightened progressive thought; nothing is above inconsideration no definition is imperiled beyond the certainty that this barren project can yield no fruit of knowing or being that might endure so that we might share and celebrate once more the cult of deferent difference while still ensnared in our casual radical indifference.

on this final decisive and unrelenting edge of curved air a slender nakedness of spirit glows the ultimate violation of existence itself between frozen sheets of anguished memory and smoldering ambers of unspeakable pain of body and spirit here/now no one escapes the acutely cauterizing laser vision of improvised promises and sequential betrayals these once cicatrized wounds scream their primal mutilated silence and sinister whirlwinds of seared imaginings both past and future-destroying resound through each private cellular crevice and social networks of depression as in Plato's cave an incessant echo of shapeless being forever beyond reach and comprehension all the while somnolent weathervanes hunched and nocturnal in the impeccable rectitude of their uncertain poise await the periodic rumble of streetcars distant to schedule and terminus moved by the chronotopic habitus of political promise

and geographic imperative travelling through the spreading cancer of urban chaos and confusion that has become our lives

we now live as disenfranchised and downcast immigrants on continents of concrete mystery and maimed illusions at long last outdone by lost philosophies and defeated existential arguments we were brave once, that we remember, filled with the enormous purpose of something now long forgotten as our narcissistic choices for immortality became slowly possessed by the hallucinatory, electric vision and unearthly images of fantastic falsehoods and flattering fiction seared on the wilderness of intimate introspection like body marking and vibrant tattoos. the magnetic resonance of curved skies is now immensely silent, but for a distant horizon of sporadically chattering birds as infinite as the scent of blood or the salt of tears piercing the mythological dawn with its taste and feel of old hours foretelling radical delirium, muted - motionless and impotent I wish...

we had reached the limits of the glory for which we yearned without making abject fools of ourselves and destroying everything and everyone

dough-white puffed knuckles stenciled tattoos inked in hatred, ignorance and self-loathing the braille of the lost who were born the bones of death that existence wasn't able to carry off into the shadows of words have been spun into sentences and contentious meaning(s) in the belief that a world should (and even must) witness so many echoes, enslaved to a single voice, ensnared buried deep in dust and rust and stone and hunger a starved loneliness without heart or soul in its chest somewhere beyond appetite like a private compulsion rendered unto obsession by the nervous automation of desire intangibly set in oblivious form

I once had to teach my father to want to eat again by offering him the foods he once feasted on so that he might remember his old pleasure anew in the intimate nexus of desire and anticipation precariously drawn between need and want

thunderous un-spirited terror of aboriginal being and belief exorcised presently in the pallid, waxy lust a postcolonial recovered memory treacherous images of invading native spirits huddled around the self-reflective embers of ancestral healing lodges inhaling the deep glacial non-colors of dysfunctional wind-breath a fetid snuffle uninhabitable and poisoned now offered as the involuntary evidence of the betrayal of spirit though blind ambition and belief thus at last and forever excising the domesticated silence of the dying and the lost from the crackling filaments of cardboard claptrap abodes the she skin of rags and the molting pelts of vanished creatures forever totemized in untold memory call not for the impossible retribution nor compensation a hopeless act of unspeakable reconciliation for world against world must still remain apart in the differance of all difference shadow to light silence to noise order to chaos

until true surrender finally appears evident as and in self by a finalizing deference and acknowledgment of the world to come in the face of the other

we only want to forget finish off disappear vanish slowly and as best we can end our lives with dignity and some assurance of past purpose(s) well done leaving well enough alone as they say this we have seen is obviously not easy nor should it be when your turn comes for the journey into forgetting will always be complicated by the living memory of others

with the stones of soiled outrage and civilized silence in their mouths almost unknown before now deep in dark shadows of conspiracy and untruth screaming rampage into voice and consciousness on the steps and in the corridors and theaters of monumental buildings “patriots” now embodied and emboldened by the consciousness of this perishable revolt follow the primal insight and counsel of a spent and desperate demagog through thoughtless, conductive murmurs, rained on and fed with terror streamed on frail devices, yet intimately palpable, like the thunderlight outbursts on cable news barbarous lascivious and indecent forever a crimson scar on the Spirit’s eye to be in and by this moment forever banished from decency and honor the community of nihilism now committed to flame and ash confined to the cataleptic articulation of sleepless shocked abandon and catatonic exile beyond yet still within bewildered secret

betrayals and the blood oaths of self-destruction and abuse in all its wretched forms clearly and irrevocably there can be no reconciliation nor truth in these screams for deliverance from this grim dominion of paranoia and this drought of hope and faith lost forever in darkness and in pain, is the once imagined idealistic will to community and the promise, now shattered over and over again by failed social experience, and the narrow desire of appetite and hunger beyond need. now what?

since when have the intangible gifts of grace and mercy begun to open unto complete disaster and destruction? why has spirit become irrevocably clenched in formal accusation and tautological recrimination articulated to the politically correct order of suppression and denial in the long forgotten invisible cities of our once vigorous and passionate youthful aspiration the air is now filled with choked strangled cries of revenge and calls for murderous reprisal; the granular whimpers of this increasingly accepted and reposted/tweeted post-historical narrative betray the modern civilizing imperative at every perceived chance and irrelevant opportunity and social order quickly dissolves into inchoate unformed error expressed through the recombinant identities of those who choose to self-identify as terminally marginalized by birth biology the forces of human circumstance or the sheer will of their contrarian imagination

the glimmering, shimmering language of unimaginable distance has in this instant become the reasonable metaphor for a conceptualized experience of intoxicating self-loathing flatly contradicting prior intangible manifestations of spiritual hibernation existential exile and honest truthful mindful self-reflection

pornography is a now-displacing ever-present reality a material imaginary of political rhetoric and libidinal economic purpose traced in the newsprint skin books, those faded almanacs of dysfunctional repressed impotent and bored lovers picture book encyclopedias of the illiterate emotional cruelty of cable news inflicted and enjoyed while deeply etched on parchment bodies entombed for now in the polar recollections of past submissions dumb b &w pawns dancing unwittingly at this festival of intimidation and micro aggression all along inciting little revolutions their middle-class boredom curated by bourgeois mystics and tele-evangelical misfortune tellers those marketers of the “impossible redemption with future feet who roll the crazy bones of credit card payments and legally binding agreements fearless godless ones, unshaken and soulless night riders with bareback messages of imminent redemption embarked on the age-old pilgrimage of plausible deceptions post-truth-fake-news- deniers of science and fact

while the sweet/hard /wet dream of self-interest flashes sporadic and harsh like neon in the rain-clothed parking lot of long-dissolved memories here-there wild and wide-eyed reconciliation and recovery is all laid out in subterranean plots of ancient conspiring desire of the alienating passion of forgotten civilization seen through the now ever-indignant reflection of history’s unforgiving two-way mirrors hiding out in the babel-like nearly incomprehensible accents of a classless multiculturalist utopia who will use the silent mystery of a frozen pubescent face all tattered and torn by some-imminent revelation of soft eyed innocence and vestigial ambiguity to trade for just an instant of light before the revenge of the repressed the uncanny silences everyone for … ever.

the world, lost in machines and neon in transmissive rituals of bytes and pixels moribund with growing co-morbidities like an ever-growing pain in my chest living safely behind the chain-link electrified barbed-wire fences and gated enclaves of racial exploitation and economic excess in this land of starving infants children separated at the border from their migrant families and inconceivable billionaires drunk on tankards of finely-aged oppression and the psychopathic statistical ramblings of personal achievement and media-conceived glory far removed behind the singing and dancing mask of unverifiable numbers and unstable probabilities trading like so many futures through a construct of impulse, wave and vibration burst from the infinite ugliness of persecution into bellowing clouds of suffocating greed as the subterranean trade winds of global displacements and human rights abuses are dissolved into any and all objects, as so many coffins for those who work no more or less

abandoned, castaway and forgotten in the most-cruel silence of insomniac chemical memories as the systematic suicide of spirit before body and the unforgiven genocide of the lived history and un-documented experience of a sublime idea now gone bad forever

later she took my hand another simulation of deep intimacy a mimetic of imagined closeness emulation embodied in a ritual of minimal transacted pleasure and once more blind fingers remembered what they must do to acquit themselves of obligation or later remorse even guilt eyes now closed – blind by intent and ever-growing misgiving I imagine a smile across her face oh so brief like a clearing in the clouds of an impassive yet somehow angry sky

morning finds us once again opposing mid-western puritan preoccupation with enraged bad karma, fierce and swift our country, always torn in this silent winter of the spirit, barely born prior to myth and legend survives somehow yet still mysterious and wholesome adrift in the cold visible air pushing the omnivorous horizon where any thought of freedom is also an unquenchable miracle of secret meaning wherein the narrow dreams of useless words suddenly turn into songs that warn us of danger and lay our weapons bare in the perfect knowledge of blood loaded with shadows ready to burst, the original ritual of being set in the irreversible and infinite movement of time as an inexhaustible form of love

the prisoner of all lost hours eyes still bursting with hope will, only at this exclusive hour finally harness the right of blood with gestures of light so that it can be fatally undone unto being with others it is time to renew passports and think of travel

Pierre Ouellet is a teacher, documentary filmmaker and composer.

He lives in Toronto. This is his second published collection of poetry.

Some more of his work can be found @ projectlifeworld.com

Silence(s) is a lifeworldtext e-book - 2021

I was speaking with a publisher of poetry books not so long ago -just before the pandemic - and he was telling me how he admired the fact that a friend of mine - a well known poet - avoided including essays offering his thoughts on poetry in his own books of poetry. And I remember thinking to myself “well, what an unexpected point of view from a publisher.” And I further reflected that nobody is really interested in hearing about why and how an author came to produce the work that one was about to read anyway and that if it needed explanation, in most cases, that need represented some flaw or lacune in the work itself. In fact, following this line of reflection, these questions of what, why and how belong to an entirely different order of discussion and should be reserved to the critical realm where such inquiries are valued, more or less, for any number of reasons.

With this in mind, forewarned as it were, I still want to say a few words about this collection of poems. There are events in one's life that take one’s breath away literally and figuratively.

Although my published output is minimal at best, I have written, in various forms for as long as I can remember. Writing is, for me, an integral part of life. Further, I took to writing music as a way of distancing myself from words and from literate meaning-making. And I believe that there are things best expressed away from words through music and sound. And movement and the plastic arts and so forth.

When our son Philippe passed away suddenly in 2016, I was breathless and by extension wordless. I could not even begin to express the depth of the sorrow that I felt; people say that losing a child is like losing a part of yourself, but that isn't quite true. The loss is so much deeper and carries a sense of irreversible finality that surgery, for instance, does not have. Here I must simply state that this is not a universal statement but one inherently limited to how I feel. I do not intend nor want to speak for anyone else.

I remember turning over one sleepless night, after what seemed like an eternity of sleepless nights, and finally saying to my dear son “goodnight Philippe, I'll see you tomorrow“ and that's when it began. Sometimes, when I would sit either at my desk or my computer, I would feel the urge to write again; very slowly at first, then more regularly and more convincingly words and lines would come into my head. But what I wrote did not make much sense to me. It was as if my need to write came from another place and did not really care about my everyday existence, my troubles, my deep sorrow, but rather, offered gasps or spasms as language overflowed from the dead silence of my mourning heart. Nevertheless, I would write down these lines and paragraphs and put them aside to look at them later. I couldn't find a common thread that ran through these offerings, save perhaps a deep sorrow and a pessimism about life itself, and an increasing feeling of wonder regarding how words could come together to produce their own meaning beyond existence itself.

The philosopher Heidegger is famously quoted as stating that the true nature of being can only be understood through “being unto death,” that is to say, when one experiences the finality of death itself as it indelibly marks existence and everyday life. I was very fortunate not to have lost someone dear to me early in life, and so I knew very little about death and dying. Phillipe’s death changed everything for me.

Over a few years, I came to realize that these strange and often seemingly incoherent or abstract thoughts, that somehow intruded and sought to be written down whenever I tried to write something, were, in fact, a reaction on my part to the finality and suffocating silence that is death, to the breathlessness that is absence and I was almost forced, in a way that I could never have imagined otherwise, to express feelings, desires, passions, thoughts and fears through the filter of death as it had come into my life when Philippe left us. And this impetus, this expressive energy that I felt, as mentioned earlier, came from beyond me. The sheer power of words and their need to be with each other, released from the existential imperatives of meaning-making, was driving the entire behaviour, prior to project; the cathartic will that words, in their escape from the silence of my deep sorrow, were able to conjure and bring to my life, slowly reclaimed it from a great darkness. And so I continued to produce these disconnected pieces of writings over a period of several years, returning to them, time and again as if summoned, reworking, expanding, searching for the truth of their being in the mystery of their coming into being and persistent existence.

Just recently, I decided to assemble these elusive fragments into some intuited order and offer them as a finished collection. Their work in my life was done, and it was time to move on to something else. And I have recorded each poem in order to open up the oral pleasure of their being and make it absolutely real. And so, these few poems exist outside the order of everyday life. They have no past, no memory, no future ambitions, and their connection to my life has now come to an end, as mysteriously as it began.

It will be five years, this June (2016), since Philippe passed away. Not a day goes by that I do not think of him and feel the deep sorrow of his absence in our lives. This unusual book is for him, and for all who knew the beautiful soul that he was – and perhaps, if the stars align properly, a means for you who read these lines and say them aloud, as they were intended and first came to life, to get to know him a little…

To further complicate everything, I know that Philippe’s heart still beats today, in someone else’s chest, because he had donated his organs for transplant just a short time before his death. And I hope, with all my heart, that his heart still gets to live the fullness of a life that was somehow lost, now with love and grace and joy.

I entitled this collection Silence(s) (a fortuitous bilingual title perhaps?) because the words emerged from impenetrable stillness to claim existence by and of themselves. Please read each piece aloud – they were meant to come into being this way. And I hope you find some comfort in this work, as well, as I did, knowing that it was inspired by the living memory of an unknowable heart that still beats in the world, as it was meant to all along.

Toronto – April 2021

SILENCE(S) TOC A WORLD WITHOUT I close my eyes he was a paradigm of autobiographical folklore absolutely bereft I remember holding his hands – I think – (2) he appeared un-appeasable so many misdeeds (2) the bones of death that existence rhythms of life thinned and stretched lips moisten in wonder sounds, numb (2) A WORLD WITHIN here the chances of immortality are practically nil these unspoken dreams of progress (2) the irreversible infinite movement of time crystalline voices rehearsed and imaginary famines beyond--- the garish light of atonal obviousness these cells of spliced suns luxuriate unassailable unstudied insolence (2) the tree in the orchard, yellow sands press up into the meadow the winds clothes the overfull atmosphere (2) in this land with wild-eyed amazement the ambitious yet strict coolness the once-evil silver breath of night sets brine from the sea, the forever pregnant water, WORLD imperious voices once demanded (2) the innumerable forms in silent rhythm (2) here the chances of immortality are practically nil (2) the vulnerability of the mind and spirit as self without self (2) gigantic motorized insects increasingly rejected social-distancing (2)

SILENCE(S) TOC (C0nt.) anchored in pleasure, neatly buried (2) the thought of--- reconciliation on this final decisive (2) we now live (2) dough-white puffed knuckles (2) thunderous un-spirited terror (2) we only want to forget with the stones of soiled outrage and civilized (2) since when have (2) pornography is a now-displacing ever-present reality (2) the world, lost in machines and neon (2) Later she took my hand morning finds us (2)

These poems are dedicated to the memory of Philippe Lloyd Ouellet 03-08-1983 • 06-16-2016 You were a kind, gentle and beautiful soul my son and I miss you deeply every day.

Silence(s) is a lifeworld e-book - 2021

Cover photo: unknown Author photo: selfie International Standard Book Number Manufactured in Canada Copyright: Pierre Ouellet – 2021

A lifeworldtext e-book - 2021