besides thinking
Language is always limited and limiting. It always falls short of what we’re intending. Slavoj Zizek says that “To speak is to tarry with the impossibility of speaking”. It is to recognize that every word we reach for will never reach the totality of all we have hopes of communicating. “[O]nly poetry can do the job”, says Zizek. “[W]hen we cannot say something directly and we nonetheless insist on doing so,” Zizek says that poetry is the very act of inscribing “the impossible into language”.
Writing is always difficult for me for precisely these reasons, and lately my words seem to be especially hard to get to. When that happens I return to poetry, specifically cut-out poetry. So here’s my attempt to put the impossibility of a feeling into speaking.
May the words you cannot reach always find you.
May the impossible lean close enough to whisper all that you cannot speak.
May poetry hold you when language alone will never do.
In case no one’s told you today, I love you with all my everything.
P.S. - here’s a scan of my cut-out poem outline:
and a transcription below:
this morning I opened and saw that I was blank I sit for hours and realize that one days seems to be practically the same as the next day so here I am writing to do something else besides thinking










Beautiful words and collages. The first one with the envelope wallpaper behind the TV. Letters with words. We remember those way better than digital emails and messages. A written word can hold so much and make an impact. Positive and negative.
I definitely think the writer is correct about poetry. I like how precise I can be in the intricacy of lyric language.