PEOPLE DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT AN EMOTION NORMALLY LOOKS LIKE
The human emotions are made of more than just flesh.
They're language. They're the shavings from old growth trees, especially the kind that are beside a river.
They're abstract wire sculptures displayed in the corner.
And no one understands what they stand for.
But, then, people don't understand what an emotion normally looks like.
For instance, the human body is 60% water. Which should make it very mysterious.
Until you get older.
By this time in my life the mysteries have settled so that they're little patties mixed from wood shavings and tender skin and
a good deal of water.
I think this is my whole life together,
one emotion I apply to each of my body parts, and each body part proud of how emotional it is.
I should use a metal wire to string them together.
Like I run a metal wire through my left shoulder
and then down to that tender part of the skin that's just above my genitals.
This is for when I'm feeling a little sexy. And it's time to turn off the lights.
What a way to speculate about the laws of nature!
As in, emotions add up until a person starts feeling very emotional.
1 + 2 + 3 + all the things that abound in the sun. That is spring.
1 + 1 + 6 + the TV. That is summer.
Maybe people don't want to know what an emotion normally looks like.
And they're wary of metal wires if they're attaching things.
I should have made the wire a part of my outfit.
But since my Grandmother never thought a boy would need to know how to sew, I'm going to have to just tuck the whole
apparatus underneath my jacket.
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I have used wire to weight my emotions down so the wind will never confuse them for chaff.
They are OK to settle among the wheat, or on the cool concrete of the patio, or in a pile of dead leaves.
All the days of my life.
What if I hold my hands out and, voila, the patterns in dark silk.
Or I paint my windows with rubber cement.
Or I hold plates just above the table until it is obviously uncomfortable to be doing it.
This is the weight in my soul. Actively speaking. To anyone close by.
Has anyone ever spoken to a tree while it is reaching over the water?
I'd imagine it's uncomfortable. I'd imagine it has some complex emotions.
Is it the Law of God coursing through all the world using the same equation?
Do we say "all the days of its life" because we don't know how to add everything up to whatever x it is that equals "this
tree is feeling emotional"?
I took a metal wire and pushed it through a young bough that had just budded from when it was the beginning of spring.
And the tree grew around it.
That might have been the happiest day of its life.
Because now the tree would be connected to me and my very complex emotions.
We could wait for the eternity and then after that the Apocalypse. We're together, I said. All the days of our lives.
Which sounds like a softer way of enduring the Lord.
Oh Lord, why must You insist we suffer in complexity the sum of Your outrageous emotions?
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