This is a poem about looking away, about outsiderdom, about the unbearbility of truth, about societies built to deceive ourselves. It’s a poem inspired by Albert Camus’ famous wariness of any kind of clubbiness, any institution essentially devoted to making insiders and outsiders of us. In some ways, it’s an homage to Camus himself.
No place between out and in.
Every one of them has fallen to viral us
and haunts the borders of our ignorance.
They can never be dead enough, nor we
alive enough to be safe. Nor can we
hate away the plague of being our
unforgiven selves, cursed by our identities,
stormed by foreign seemingness.
There is no place between out and in,
no grace unless to blink, stumbling
on our certainties, masked against each other, coughing
up our names as if they could save us from
death’s democracy.
Ours is not nature’s time. Ours is airbrushed genitalia.
We find truth too beautiful to bear and so
we invent economies that exist to look away.
And when we’re shuttered up
and we have nothing to do, we claw the
chalkboards of our skulls and drool
platitudes on our sleeves.
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