Sunday

Sayer of lies

If all you know are lies, say lies. 
I tell a lie 
about 
the 
grip 
feel 
in my gut 
when looking around. 
When I look around, I feel nothing, 
mostly. 
I deny my peaceful life to write about the pain I feel on behalf 
of men 
and their failures. 
I have lived with many powerful and angry lovers who no longer exist. I wish they would have called down a sticky madness to soak my nerves and fasten my feet to the floor. Or a chemical attack to unravel my senses.
so that I may tell 
the truth 
in this. 
But I fail in telling the simple and boring truth.
I am not a teller of these stories. 
I am a sayer of these lies.

2 comments:

Ezra said...

ooh, Love! This is meaty. Mmm, meat. I like me some meat.;) What i mean is that this is thick n full. No spare words, just dense with each word having a purpose/function.

I like the assignment of verbs. Tell = truth
Say = lies

So the speaker feels nothing when he looks around at his environment, just the disappointment (?)in others. He's at peace with this, as in the "whatever" sense? "I deny my peaceful life to write about the pain..." but we know this isn't "real" pain. Just make shift pain...why? I think that's what give this piece (at least for me) it's core strength; wanting to find out why, then, is it important for the speaker to disturb his peace in order to lie.

"I have lived with many powerful and angry lovers who no longer exist. I wish they would have called down a sticky madness to soak my nerves and fasten my feet to the floor. Or a chemical fix to unravel my abilities so that I may tell the truth in this."

I keep going over and over that to understand the speaker's POV... and I think that's what I've been enjoying about your work so far the most. It all has underlying, almost encoded motives/emotions that I'm drawn to decipher simply because I want that moment of recognition where I'm like "I so hear you." It's all kind of unsettling...

Kevin Kelpe said...

Thanks for the thoughts, Ez...

On the subject of wordyness or non-wordyness... I think I write a lot of work from the intention of a songwriter and musician. And I think songwriters get a little wordy because we think a lot about rhythm and melody and we want our words to bounce around the mouth like you might expect song lyrics to do... Something I've been thinking about anyway, and it's interesting that you mentioned it with this piece, which has no rhythmic intention at all... and is maybe a little tighter because of that.

On the intention of the speaker... The speaker desires to write and wishes for an emotional reaction that "feels" a little stronger. The speaker desires to write something intense and profound and meaningful but can't seem to muster the inspiration from the world around, and so writes about what he may feel if he could feel. Thusly saying a series of lies about a perfectly dramatic situation that really only exists in assumption. The speaker desires turmoil to tell the truth is his story, but will settle for an assumed interpretation of what he thinks may have been that reality... had he been granted a sticky madness or a chemical alteration. It's hot. It's pop. It's lies!

Thanks again for commenting. You're a badass.