Urgency

Let’s pretend you are holding a box. A frustrating box. Your fingers claw at its ends and corners and somehow they meet no entry.You seek out sharp objects and you growl out guttural noises and the box won’t open. You begin to stab at it in a repeated dance of arms. 

Somehow the creases of the cardboard make up an endless surface, a merciless platform for failure. Spectators gather and gawk. You start asking your friends to help and they’re asking their friends to help and no one can open 
the goddamn box. 

In this example I will be the box.

Between your fury and flesh lies the repose. 
A fluctuating chorus of fragile heat and hesitant sizzle and
I can’t feel anything at all.

Your hands turn purple. 
After hours of pushing and pulling you start to beg me, demand me, to open myself or at least split one of my edges, to slice myself into reason. The cardboard crunches into a false sense of hope and the spectators continue to look on. 

There is something that you expect, some response to urgency that you think would be more fitting. A natural order- the contents that follow the box, the flow that follows the ebb. 

More hours pass and your questions turn around. Their shapes flip in cubic rhythm. You begin to check your mailing records. You begin to wonder what you mean to find, or if this box was ever intended for you at all. You begin again in your repeated dance of arms.

I’m sorry, I am. But is there another way of saying what has been said one thousand times?
Is there another space to hold our truths as they fall like bodies?
In chants, in posters, in whispers, in letters,
but never in boxes till now.

When the outward voices crawl in 
And the arms above your head lay like figurines at your side,
Maybe you will see. Maybe you will see.

There is a kind of desperation that transcends the push and pull.
That wraps and bends around itself until its ends are endless.
And knows the silent nature of its space.