Black Telephone Richard Siken

There are two birds in your head, raven and crow, and only one of them is yours. A ghost and a robot doing battle, singing like telephones, the phone is ringing, a headache word. You are dancing with the birdcage girl, banging your head against a cage that isn’t there. You want to say yes: yes to the bathtub, yes to the gumdrops, no to the laughing skullheads.

The holes in this picture are not flowers, they are not wheels, and the phone is ringing ringing, a headache word, it’s ringing for you. This is in the second person. This is happening to you because I don’t want to be here. Is there anything I won’t put words around? Yes, there is.

And so there are gaps. And so naturally things try to get into the gaps. I imagine things because I like them or sometimes I dislike them and I am afraid of them and I live in an imaginary world. The phone is ringing and I don’t want to hear this. The T.V. is on and I don’t want to see this, I don’t want to rise to this occasion.

I stood the yard in my everyday clothes singing Wings little monster, listen to my soup bones. Does it help? What does this have to do with the airplanes and the buildings falling down?

I’m a romantic, an absurdist. I am bad with facts and I get confused. I’m a hostile witness. I didn’t want to see this, talk about this. I wanted to testify to something else. The phone rings and you pick it up and it’s bad news. Now what do you do?

There are many ways to write about war. On one end, there’s clarity, facts, the updates and the eyewitness accounts. On the other end, there’s Paul Celan, a holocaust survivor who wrote poems in the language of his oppressors; weird, fractured, tragic, and beautiful lyrics that render the experience of confusion and meaninglessness and loss.

But I don’t want to write about war. I had other plans. I wanted to talk about monsters and terror, not war and terrorism. But since September 11th, monster means something different than it used to. Not only are we trapped in our bodies, drowning in gravity, but we’re stuck in our time, too. Down here, in these years in which we live.

Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa says that as a writer, my primary obligation is to write. He adds, however, that this should not be incompatible with concern for the place where I live. “If you are a writer,” he says, “and there is no freedom where you live, you cannot say that this is not your problem.”

It is difficult not to feel obliged to participate in the public debate and commit oneself politically, but I don’t know anything about these kind of things. I’m still trying to figure out the difference between comedy and tragedy. I’m the last person to ask about right and wrong.

For two weeks, I watched the constant coverage on the television. I couldn’t get my head around it. It seemed too simple, too one-sided, too much of a good versus evil thing. I am wary of the simple. Perhaps I am being unreasonable, but I still believe that there are answers that aren’t yes or no.

Personally, I’m a mess of conflicting impulses—I’m independent and greedy and I also want to belong and share and be a part of the whole. I doubt that I’m the only one who feels this way. It’s the core of monster making, actually. Wanna make a monster? Take the parts of yourself that make you uncomfortable—your weaknesses, bad thoughts, vanities, and hungers—and pretend they’re across the room. It’s too ugly to be human. It’s too ugly to be you. Children are afraid of the dark because they have nothing real to work with. Adults are afraid of themselves.

Oh we’re a mess, poor humans, poor flesh—hybrids of angels and animals, dolls with diamonds stuffed inside them We’ve been to the moon and we’re still fighting over Jerusalem. Let me tell you what I do know: I am more than one thing, and not all of those things are good. The truth is complicated. It’s two-toned, multi-vocal, bittersweet. I used to think that if I dug deep enough to discover something sad and ugly, I’d know it was something true.
Now I’m trying to dig deeper.

I didn’t want to write these pages until there were no hard feelings, no sharp ones. I do not have that luxury. I am sad and angry and I want everyone to be alive again. I want more landmarks, less landmines. I want to be grateful but I’m having a hard time with it.