Two Essays In Defense of Caustic Speech

With a Link To Something Else As An Example Between Them

Ω Many times, which is to say many many times, meaning simply, and as clearly as I can put it, far too often for it to have been an accident or a random urge on the part of the accuser, I have, myself, been taken unaware and stripped of all pacific illusions as to the nature of my pretty consistently automatic reversion to a form of inverted informatizing which people whose genetic predilections and cultural instructions did not, however unconciously taken in or absorbed, at their mother's knee as it were, or an uncle even, or more deeply and ineradicably impressed, imprinted, fixed in the person by template and imitation, include a grandparent whose own accents link direct to what some did once and many after do still call the 'Auld Sod' as distinct of and by its nature from any catamitical behaviors however currently acceptable, and in like manner to their object of accusation, have had no recourse, have never had recourse, to puzzle out its working parts word by word or sentiment by locution, as for the utilizer to analyze it in the heat of its deployment is to take apart a functioning device of protective and non-ameliorative juxtapositional re-arrangement of true and valid expression, the unheartfelt display of the heart's own inner core, the "Well excuuuuse ME!" of the ancient tongue untied and somewhat more biting for the murky depth of its complexity and the stench of roasted veracity kept to the spit just that one turn past its moment, the bitter taste in the ear that is the firm denial of the very truth the page would speak like a good little rattish snitch were it given to the page to produce it verbatim sans emphases and nuance, that selfsame stripping as referred to above being the testimony mute but eloquent of her eyes being the eyes of the too clearly unmoved recipient of that self-same deployment as mentioned above, most often female in all that that would seem to import and does, and does often, that each of them, she and she alike, have said in firm confusion, unequivocally and brooking no dissuasion, rejecting what immediately upon utterance I had felt sure would be my glorious hour's time come round at last, having delivered up for inspection and gradation both heart and soul as well as chest and backbone, and other parts whose vulnerable innocence calls for protective shielding at such times, and forget us not the mind in all this haste to our conclusive statement here, that she, all of them, said, in much the same way, in much the same sentence, using often much the same words to chillingly similar effect, as opposed to that of mine on her, that flat thud of the acrobat's slip, that clang of the fused differential, that slammed door's echo and fade in the still room of unsought solitude, that "You're so fucking sarcastic!" meaning no, meaning it has not done quite what you seemed to hope it would, not here, not now, not with and/or to me.

lines written after reading Portadown News Nov.11.03

ΩThat it is a hurt beyond your therapies' soft reach that brings that bitterness to your attention is all you can know, not knowing the hurt itself or a degree like it; and your inability to hold that claw denies it's once having been a hand, as your inability to meet that eye denies the clumped and remassed skin around its gaze was once a face. Your inability, not hers not his, not mine. Yours.