tom taylor - a life lived underwater

A life lived underwater. You’d think I’d have gill slits by now, bearing witness in silence, slogging upstream with lead boots holding you to the streambed, bubbles streaming from your nostrils, no shift in pronouns, only in focus or strength. Ah, no regrets, it says here. As if and no other to your seeming open doors of perception. Sure, I’d like to rip it all down and show the blood in my words, screaming into the non, but where, what, when, why? That’s a news story, no doubt. News to whom…. The hours as days went on it seemed forever, far too long. Why did I hold on so long and so tightly to a set of events which I knew to be fabricated? It was too much to let go and find that the reality I lived in was a true reality and not an illusion which could be dispelled with some energetic letting go and falling into whatever was left. Done that. air escaping from my lungs. The sign of the times blinking on and off, ‘open’ or ‘closed’ for the heart meter on your face and season. Sink of the blink.
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from where we started, an entirety of history seems to have paraded past while the inner drama stayed the same, at least the lenses through which one looked did not change color too much. Was it reality that was perceived or its imitation in the mind’s interstices? No answers are freely given, the universe remains silent over head and feet in love or not. Usually not. But that was the challenge, no? to make it right in the signs of the times, to clear the air of its mosquitoes and falling leaves, the harvest brought in and the barn door nailed shut for the winter. Apples growing from the walls. Hay piled up to the peak of the barn, the mechanical treadmill lunking the bales ever upward where you pitched them into their geometry. Out in the field, you pitched the bales from the ground up and up four layers to the top of the wagon, returning at the end of the day to eat another immense meal around the kitchen table. Those recollections soothe. Indications of usefulness, not some agony of untended propositions and unexpected results.
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what’s singular from the heart is its constancy and motion, it keeps on tickin’. Beside the road, you kneel in the dust and read the inscriptions on the cobblestone, ‘no questions asked,’ it says, chiseled into the ancient stone roadbed, marked by the ancestors we look upon as such bumpkins. At this repose, we notice that nothing has changed all that much, the ghost in the machine, the magician behind the drapes in the corner, the priests wandering through underground tunnels to find apertures in the walls from which to scare the assembled worshippers, prayer groups of soldiers gathered around the humvee just before slamming into the village with guns blazing, that’s our guys, our very own mercenary storm troopers descending from the skies like a myth or like an old movie, but no, it’s today and you are still wondering about god and the remnants of faith and forgiveness which have laid the world to shreds, poising it on the edge of mutiny.
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distances amassed in the name of something. There I am in the photo, bent over, staring stupidly into the lens from the middle of the group, ‘where am I?’ I seem to ask. Still the same question and still the same lens; some alternating current flows through my wiring. Sometimes not as well. Prayers to the unknown seem to fall on deaf ears, if ears there are at all at the listening post upstairs. I split my seasons off one from the other year after year on the high road to nowhere, where these pages come off as if they were sleight of mind or hand or both on the keyboard – the soft air outside fills the plants full enough that they explode and seed the air with their immortality and cunning in the face of it.