| home | issues | about | shop | submissions |
With a prophet’s moustache and a penchant for conspiracy
the madman explains to me that language is a form of mind control
the grammar itself holding our hands in a mudra
with an incantation muttered over millennia by our mothers,
shaping our thoughts
I want to master the art of the pictogram, he says,
as this earliest form of writing
is uncontaminated by the misers, the drive for accumulation
manufactured with the rise of agriculture
the letter M, for example, originates from the pictogram of a wave
we forget where it comes from, it loses all meaning
we write it over and over without ever thinking of water
or how mar y mother,
muro y morada,
music and moon,
mareo y marea are of one essence.
As he speaks, I watch the surfers
gliding along the lip of the perfect breakers
almost for the whole line of the horizon
before they topple over into the sea
like tiny plastic soldiers.
That night we slept hearing the waves crash onto the rocks
and in the morning, we knew we were rocks too.
Our hearts, hardened lava.
The Pacific had smoothed round windows through us
and like a Barbara Hepworth sculpture
we were made whole
by what we lack
Juana Adcock