Raven profile picture

Raven

About Me

I found my orphaned voice one day,living in the ruins of a house collapsed years ago beneath the weight of what was unspoken. I sculpted diction like pulpfiction and gifted it the colloquial violence of a gun. I lifted glib scriptures from a street preacher's passions to fashion mispelled gospels from its own fears, while the illegible heart left the tracts of its tears untranslated -- but the word got out. No manifesto but the breath til even that goes. See, I misread the writing on the walls that said: A death without joy is a night without stars; and when at last I comprehended I penned this on remnants of night, between pinpoints of light. I misunderstood: people are not killed for what they say, but for its echoes. The roar of distant suns is unheard, yet years after their deaths are we aware of their presence, when it is darkest. No manifesto but the breath til even that goes. We have all misspoken -- testimonies consigned to air are yet tethered to earthly prejudice; word balloons are too leaden too fly and make cartoons of speechless reverence. We have all misspoken, and for it our ends will be identical when the bottom drops out: all swinging our days away on the rope of this life, our inexhaustible diatribes, our inexpressible disbelief choked between lip and lungs and lost forever. No manifesto but the breath til even that goes. But tongues will cleave to language as fire to that which fuels it, until meaning is burned out and nothing more can be said, and history cannot be recited nor repeated; until we are left standing in the ash of voices fallen from a feverish nation with its tongue enflamed. The ash of voices, spiralling down in ever slower revolutions to a day when we have waited in their remains long enough to recognise the virtuosity of their silence; to a day when every song martyred by mouth goes unsung at once, the harmonics of sympathetic strings and crossed wires fading at last to leave empty the contemplative air and room enough to simply breathe.

My Interests

I'd like to meet:

The man who watches the man who's watching me

My Blog

Circadian National Anthem

Has anybody heard of Circadia? I thought not. Back in the day... well, it only existed for a day, by design. It's citizens decided that in order to form a nation free from the pitfalls of others with ...
Posted by on Thu, 22 Jan 2009 19:50:00 GMT

God Is A Butcher

After a lifetime rolling cud cut loose  tongue in the window a slack bluish loll  shushed and weighed priced and placed midst plastic garland  a sermon summarily for the pot in truncated phrases detac...
Posted by on Mon, 13 Oct 2008 00:43:00 GMT

Now, Zip, Now

 No bullets in ya gun, son?bring ya sense of humourfew more shovelscuzwe all gon dig it:punchline to yourriddled guta thought no deeperthan these six feetno room to swing the devil inwhenit looked lik...
Posted by on Mon, 13 Oct 2008 00:04:00 GMT

Perfect

 This onenearlydiedon the table it was so perfectthat by the timeI had itwrittenI wasbored of itsinfamy.
Posted by on Mon, 13 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Astringent Joy (words for New Orleans)

  An astringent joy washed blank my worry swept clean into the following days inmates in common frames of reference in reverence for the incomprehensible   it could have been Pentecost -- th...
Posted by on Tue, 09 Sep 2008 06:06:00 GMT

Azania

I have been away too long porch lights in mid-winter turn the night into passage to another country my room is an island I sojourn there untouchable I fill a tiny, cradle-shaped boat with longi...
Posted by on Mon, 25 Aug 2008 03:42:00 GMT

Pantomime

St. Genesius I know. The other faces are unrecognisable each one looking wet under the house lights as if newborn a field of ordered and attentive stars the veil is drawn, the world made knowable ...
Posted by on Mon, 25 Aug 2008 03:30:00 GMT

November

  October came and went, us naked in the winter tide November, in counting days eleven, twelve, thirteen as if days in a cell   now the stunning weight of your body in a bed still wa...
Posted by on Wed, 14 May 2008 13:37:00 GMT

Beautiful Countries (The Year of Drifting Continents)

  The continents are still drifting in our house a box the breadth of our ignorance of each other and as long only as our time here on earth we wave at each other like the lone citizens of two b...
Posted by on Wed, 14 May 2008 13:32:00 GMT

Uglier

You say: ugly American knowing only the face on a dollar bill they say that George Washington had wooden teeth that you could hear them rattling in the splintered ideology the whittled down declara...
Posted by on Sun, 23 Sep 2007 00:05:00 GMT