You are now folded in the envelope
I can see your rigid, defiant diagonal drift beneath the window pane
Framing my address, where I am. A layered presence of compressed time and space
Location as temporal and topological
Address to you and of me A locating in space
Allocating language to address
Allocating to address
You
—
I have shifted
Shifted to the left
Left Right
I want to open the envelope once again but I have chosen not to
You will stay in until I return
A Return
I need time and distance to think about you
It is me not you
I can still glimpse you
A few iterations
A few versions back
A few formats adrift from now
On a screen not the one I type at now
I can then choose between your monotone surface or colour
color
Is it about colour | color
Is it the color you broadcast which makes you another
another
Was it colour that created you contributed
For you to be another other sibling
Subject
As a subject
Objected to
Subjected to objecthood
Through deliberate systemic objectification
Subjugation
Can I now be fully objective
Or even fully subjective
Towards you
Obscured
Further left
Nameless
Faceless, just located
Tucked into the very corner, edged out
We could reflect on your subject, what the ink of you re represents
RE
Returns
There is a surface, a reflective slickness which separates you and I
Is it desire Serres
To my one true desire
my
implications of otherness through ownership
Property proper Tt
Proper job
Do I desire you to be apart apart of
apart from
apartheid
not deliberate here
If you are not defined then I am unsure
I am lost
I do not exist
Without you
John Donne we could appeal to god and the sun to leave us alone
But without you as an other the other
There is no we why bother
if you were an otter
if you were an otter, things would be simpler for some
But you have humanity
you are an image
There is no we
I return
You now bleed
But I will part
Be a part
For now
You remain
For now you remain
I choose
I can
leave
That other
That other image him
He
He is too much
—
I abstained
You remain
I have seen you as another
I have seen others
of you Since
Rectangles with bevelled or curved edges contain you.
Restrain the body of you by absenting your very real surface. Your crisp but folded and bent surface.
Used and abused on all levels of being. These others are not you, not you in their digital pixelated too present glow. A distraction.
I am distracted from the distraction of you by distraction
Akin to the plastic windowpane which teases your presence as you lay folded within. You are distanced. In fact, it feels as if you grow further away each time I see you.
Or maybe that is only other iterations, versions, copies?
Of you
You are never there when I want you
When I want you to be
This is pointless unless I hold you again
Against
I will refrain from comment until you are present
It’s all about you
—
While I wait I have to talk about her.
Her voice, her words are excruciating.
I am compelled into action
Each time she writes I want to scream at the screen. Rip the page and screw her into a tiny ball. Compressed so infinitely dense as to become a black hole
This would in- crease her inertia
It would satisfy her to draw in all light and life
This sickeningly twee colour of her page. That insipid single page with matching envelope. I detest it and yet am thrilled each time it appears on the mat. The headed image in green. Government green.
But worst of all, chief of her crimes laid bare before me, the ink. Her ink. This ink. Violently turquoise, sister to the pre-teen glitter gel pen. Are you seriously using this colour to sign your name and mine to this digitally puked up arrangement of carf ugly carefully correct indifferent and cold words.
It is an abuse. An insult to my intelligence and my being. It is an abuse to language and to those who speak it.
I would ask you to desist but I seem to instigate these exchanges.
But nothing changes.
Change is
Change is inevitable
However
—
And him. That image of him. An Adonis gripping
Holding aloft the colours, his colours, their colours. Not your color
I change registers as I must. You do, so why should I not?
Image image image
Maintain an image
Maintain the image
The image
The image of them
Truth
A truth assigned to image. I do not accept it
Have I ever, or have I grown
Grown wearisome around and through the image
You are violent but not all of you are
There are some good ones
“I take as I find”
An explicit declaration that I know that we are both aware I will not agree with where you stand
But he stands there
Not here
Nowhere and everywhere
Now here
But then
Nowhere
—
I just held you. Glimpsed your surface to ensure, to be sure you were justified or rather aligned correctly. You now have all of the words, my previous thoughts and feelings abandoned for this I now will write. You are proof that too much time with the digital, the copy, the second hand broken fourth wall, causes a malaise. An ennui much like the word brouillard or even mauvais. You are grey and foggy and cloudy. As printed on this pale insipid cream official office paper with your matching envelope. Twin set with no pearls. No peals from bells and whistles. Aged author who drips, no seeps, corrupt acts past, present and planned. But that is her not you. You did not choose. Your choice was not to be layered atop and threaded through this exchange of mine and hers. I instigated that and you. You are now present and in correct. A standardised letter printed on beige preferable to cream paper, in the default black with hand signed by her insipid and insidious hand top and tail. My name and hers. A non colour which is so very apt for her and the image I see of her. A turquoise that in itself cannot be blue or green. A pre teen gel pen turquoise that makes my skin crawl upon sight. But that is her not you. I chose to overlay the image, an image, intending it to be the subject of these words. But now you are so much more than that image. That subject. It’s appeal, it’s energy to seduce my eye and mind are now fused in you with your substance. Surface and fibres have taken that image in. Ingested but far too obviously unpalatable to stay down, to leave sight. Ink has bled it into you, but you are saturated. You even feel damp from the seeping you have been subjected to. I need a break from you. You are back in your tidy envelope. Concertina-fied, three parts folding, kissing and laying side by side till I return.
—
I have damaged you. It felt necessary to finally describe what you are. To de scribe would make the task infinitely simpler but as you know I prefer to complicate things.
You are a sheet of paper that was embossed, printed upon, hand signed, folded, slid into an envelope, franked and posted. Further details of your handling I do not know.
Until the day I found you on the mat.
My name and address clear to see through the slick officious window you were pressed up against. The text you bore, on your all too predictable pale skin, was unremarkable in its content and appearance. Even down to the sickeningly twee turquoise ink used to write my name and sign the letter. Top and tail of implied humanity where there is none. Framing a cold calculated intent to avoid responsibility or commitment.
Back into your envelope and forgotten about until this text was requested. Even then you were not yet an image, an object to be reflected upon, interpreted and aestheticized. Not until I chose.
The image I chose was far from my immediate thoughts in appearance but not content. I knew I would not be content if I did not choose what for me is a valid subject implied or inferred by your image. It is good to hear others speak of politics threaded throughout choices, acts and images. Permitted I cycled through the choices of images which matter. Which have matter and have gravity of form and content. None were the right one for this. Either because I feared tainting them with poor writing or they would let me down in this. So now I have you.
I found the image first and it implied, necessitated your return. It was digital but now is all too analogue, upon your surface and in your fibres. Printed quite aptly by a canon ink jet. Fired by a jet onto you in sweeping flyby passes. Repetitive action to lay upon you an image of gravitas and power. An image which exemplifies the systemic purposeful intent of power exerted to humble and destroy.
An image of Gaza. Reduced to black and white, bleached, sanitised, having been processed through many iterations to arrive, to be in and of you. It is hard to maintain attention on you. Focus perpetually oscillates, shifts from your physical to perceptual presence. From Baudrillard I take metastasis. Shifting so imperceptibly from one position to the other and back, to give the impression of stillness. Also, the medical meaning for this, which implies decay, wrong and necessity for intervention. But that leads back to content.
Interrogating your surface under a harsh light. Layers of type ripple across your creases, the apex and valley of folds. You look as if you are crisp again. Desiccated by an unforgiving sun. Your form accentuates what has happened. Layer upon layer of promised resolution, broken commitments now rent asunder. Pressure gives form to an implosion, cascading lies down upon the lied to. I felt impelled to increase your palimpsest appearing. I needed to lay down multiple attempts to engage with you before these words took shape. So, you bear the scars of far too many flybys intended to bridge the gap. Subject and object rubbing close with one another. Your corners have the look of corners with impending curls. Bottom right a definite lifting but others are less so. Both short edges have firmly indented rows left by the grip of the machine. A rhythm flits from left to right. Beneath the rigid vertical of a footer demarcated, bars take the eye down. Diagonally down towards the base of your folded peak, which draws us up to your most intact object. This bares two pitted, hollow faces. At right angles to each other but not the eye. The corner of a building sits slightly a kilter to your fold. One face framing what if clear could now become a square. At present propping up the rubble of its kin. Zigzags abound in what tastes like dust swept floors. Dry, resigned and fate-full. Look down at your feet, at the ground. This land, contested space which you imply as an image but resolutely refuse.
Government type reflects where mine can not. I can feel the embossed logo of the lower House. I am seduced by your appearing, what you imply. A tainted record of such utter despair and violence. You induce anger which trumps resignation. An energy to respond to you, what you present. Words raining down after the event. Post this, post that. Post whatever you chose to post. But respect the moment. Be replete, as you are now. Vulnerable because you speak a truth.