Something by Sarah Temporal
Something
Transcript:
Something slow
and melancholy
and familiar…
I don’t fear this feeling anymore.
When the world is furled and quivering
like an unborn creature
just inside the limits of my mind
And I feel as old as millenia
for all the times I’ve sat
still as possible,
hardly breathing,
wishing not to disturb
the unformed thought.
something likes me to make
no impression, even on the air.
Night wind beyond my window
and a square of light within which
all things might be allowed, for now,
myself included.
The wind is eloquent in exchange for my silence.
And I wonder,
What sort of person spends every night writing pages,
away from partner and friends,
just in case something valuable pops out?
What sort of person cultivates a life
fifty notebooks high
and just a few good lines wide
and then tries to measure their progress
with metaphors?
People are always surprised to find that I perform poetry.
You can’t judge anything by its cover-up.
Rather judge a book by its spine,
and people by their guts.
It’s our words that rule us in
and rule us out, our words
Rule us.
On stage,
how can you tell
who is in service to them,
and who is in exile?
Performance is mistaken for elevation over and above the text.
When in fact it’s the very edge
of the page we tread
and pretend
that falling
would be no big deal.
But the comedown after is dismal.
You left your balance in the ears of other people.
Put yourself so far out there
your stomach doesn’t come back for days.
I wish I could say I know the way
to manage that feeling but all I’ve got
is binge-watching Gilmore Girls
in flamboyant unshowered-ness for many hours at a time and
being allowed to be completely
quiet.
To let things blur in front of my eyes
(focus can be such an aggressive stance)
and allow the distant growling of the world
to resolve into something like a cat’s purr.
Something slow.
Melancholy.
Familiar.
And after all this there is
something
I know:
There’s the truth you want to tell
And the truth that wants to be told.
Can you tell the difference?
Executive Producers
Sue White
Daniel Henson
Karolina Ristevski
Elliot Cameron
