The money quote from a very thought provoking piece in the New York Review:

The personal essay’s historical and aesthetic function has been to persuade us not just that personhood is beautiful or good, but that it is primordial—that individual subjectivity and its expression exist prior to the social formations that gave rise to it. This is a lie, the lie that subtends bourgeois individualism and all its intrusions into language, art, and education…. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/11/03/the-illusion-of-the-first-person-merve-emre/

Ten Dollar Words

How will I unravel?
I mean, finally unravel.
I tend to think of my ceasing
in the frames of my favorite
ten dollar words.

Will I deliquesce?
Turning to liquid
seems like a relaxation; 
a flowing surrender
leading to a merge. 
Or, will it begin with
incontinence and shame 
and dissolve 
all borders between 
words and body
meaning and confusion?

Will I dehisce?
Blowing my top
could feel like a fruition;
righteously releasing
moral certainty 
upon a world barren
of sense and care.
Or, will the shards
of what I once was 
slash and burn 
on their way out,
the ballistic ejecta
of a madman?

Will I dissociate?
Ah, word of the day.
A least effort release.
Daily steps into the woolly fog
will stiff arm the aging body’s cries
and mute the sound of Others.
Inside the final 
self-soothing bubble,
distance will define me.
Drinking helps.
			

Copyright 2021 Mylor Treneer
All Rights Reserved

Business As Usual

Without a totem
standing for us,
we fear division.
Without a sound bite
we walk unsteadily
into our next thoughts.
Freedom is generous.
We can believe anything
so pulpits abound.
Our every living second
is complicit.
There is theft
in every purchase.
We cut down Demeter’s tree
to make a maypole
for our hungers.
You might ask,
Where do I live?
Where do I hide?
In creature comfort,
with the rest of you,
at the apex of a supply chain
forged by greed
impervious to humility
and hallowed by ease.

Copyright 2021 Mylor Treneer
All Rights Reserved

GAIA

We are so busy
swatting away at
the buzz of content,
we cannot see that
the planet
has donned
its thousand yard stare.
It has yielded
as much as it can.
It is now
the zombie in your
life’s movie.
It cares not for your intentions,
your morality,
your consciousness,
your family or your dreams.
It will muster
a twitch in geological time
and we will be far-flung molecules,
smithereens,
in its gravitational field.

Copyright 2021 Mylor Treneer
All Rights Reserved

All Rights Reserved

copyright 2021 Mylor Treneer

The Meeting

Meanings meet
outside the body.

The white cane
is good to think with.
It assesses the pavement and curb,
tapping out the future.

All our words
also precede us
though we do not hold them in our hands,
these creatures of our breath.

Given wing
they sound out the world.
Wheeling flocks stirring the air, just birds
escaped from our intent.

Who am I?
Who are you to me?
A murmuration of starlings
we exhale between us.

Copyright 2021, Mylor Treneer
All Rights Reserved

Conspiracy Theory

Think.
Certain patterns emerge.
Here and there can always be linked.
Clues will be withheld, so guess again.
Timing is everything.
When comes next to how
and where is very helpful.
Isn’t there complicity in proximity?
The sharp edges of vision
get us to the grocery store,
but are of no help
in looking behind, below
where reasons live
crowded in a dark hold.
What is intended?
There are so many starting points.
Why don’t we know?
The world works without us
and could fail us
without further notice.
Who rolls the dice?
(Somebody knows something!)
Close your eyes,
what starts as a whisper
can become a sing-along and
the pattern of the certain
can feel divined.

Copyright 2021, Mylor Treneer
All Rights Reserved

Surely

Sometimes I feel like
I have shuffled through my days in loose slippers.
Had I arisen just a little earlier
in time to press my uniform,
lace my boots and cinch my belt
I could have dressed with fit.
My options could have been coolly surveyed,
attendant risks given their red flags.
Surely I could have walked the world
to a different destination.

Copyright 2020, Mylor Treneer
All Rights Reserved

Perspective

We are small in bodies
that sculpt perception
with the clay of memory.

We cannot look around the corner.
Mismeasure is our ken,
improvisation our best hope.

God enjoys full presence
and cannot be surprised.
God will never get a joke.

Somehow that makes me feel better.

Copyright 2020, Mylor Treneer
All Rights Reserved