Meditation

My naked body writhes in honey-dew sheets of sweat

Despising its thought-existence and craving the softness of another body,

Yet all that lurks pantherine in the shade of the room is a woeful beast,

Carrying and oozing the sour awareness of our vaporous immateriality;

So here it is, the beast of the sceptic, of the critic, of the thinker.

We exist between nothingness and everything, we are a flux of creation,

In that the very creation of ourselves in the language we speak

Will also be what we destroy, deconstruct and uncreate ourselves by.

Nihilistic despair dances round the room in huge black strokes;

For we are being and unbeing, caught in a paradox of feeling and not.

Inexpressible, my agony pulls at my ribs and language fails me

For all that is sensorial within cannot outbreak its prison of interiority.

All that I feel screams at the bars of my soul shaking,

Screaming at my lungs to be freed from sense into perceivable meaning

Yet all that is within me remains meaningless

For I cannot scrawl it into meaning with my tongue or my pen.

All that I write loses its very essence and what I say melts soulful intent.

Written word attempts to embody all that cannot be embodied

Whilst the ghost of speech seeps puffs of an unmediated soul

But in this very mediation I only project a splattering of true sensation.

How can this be? How can we be without being?

For we exist in states of which our pain is inexplicable

And yet the whole world cries out tears and babbles mournfully.

It is fearful to know that language itself fails us

But is the only thing through which we can truly ‘be’ in the eyes of others.

So it is that we spend our whole lives half-living and half-saying,

Cast in deep seas of unwilful ignorance to the truth of each other’s minds.

We live in a paradox and though I lie in my lover’s arms

And feel the intimate support of a calming breath

I know I will never truly know the soul that escapes in those gentle breezes.

It is sad to think we elude genuine and absolute representation

And can live only relationally and associatively but never truly.

Language is a weapon of agency but one that wounds

As we spit our tautologies and mutter empty truths. .

Inspired by Derrida and Titus Andronicus - analysis and commentary upon the interaction between body, soul/mind and language. How spoken word also compares to written word and how spoken word is correlative with the soul whilst written word is correlative with the body in that it embodies and yet is also mediated, corporeal and thus 'of the body' rather than 'of the soul'. All in all a very intriguing question in regard to how pain actively eludes or acts to destroy language because bodily pain cannot be expressed in language properly, only in relation to or association with other objects i.e we say it feels like a hammer is hammering my head to describe a headache but cannot actually describe the headache without reference to an external object or external reality.