THE SECRET NOTEBOOKS

Everyone, it seems, keeps
a secret notebook in which
they write their most profound
thoughts and ideas, thoughts so
deep they frighten you with
their stunning clarity and
grace, philosophical knives
that cut to the very essence
of what we know, and beyond,
the inexplicable mysteries.
It turns out we all know
how to define beauty, how
to resolve the universal
paradox, the story of
human origin, the
stupefaction of the life
force, we know why we love,
why we pervert love, why
the Babylonians built
a tower and a ziggurat,
we know why the praying
mantis devours her lover
when mating, we know
why the locust swarms, how
the mind translates all signs
and symbols in every
language, why we score our
skin with the truth when stars
burn under the surface,
we know why some of us
are born imbecilic,
stricken by lupus or
leprosy, are devoured by
craving, stung by evil's
honeyed lips, torched by
obsessions, why some of us
drown in schizophrenic seas,
why the agonies of desire
and loneliness scratch us
so horribly, why we
prey on children, lop off
the arms of boys with
machetes, why we pray
to goat heads, blood-stained
altars, ethereal manifestations
of abstractions.

We keep
these words a great secret,
hidden even from ourselves,
every night we scrawl them
with fat pencils, or ashen sticks
pulled from the smoldering,
feldspar, chalk, our blood and
piss, bone, spider silk, our
souls, the traces of our flesh,
our nails, and the tablets, the
journals, the notebooks, they
are everywhere, we surround
ourselves with extraordinary
truths, clarifications, theories
that explain everything, they're
quantifiably certain,
phenomenologically ever-
apparent, they're ontologically
indisputable, and yet,
and yet they're indecipherable,
a great babel, indeterminate,
but the very fact that all of this
truth exists, that we all know,
and what's more that we do this
at all, that we record this,
that we keep these riddles
and divine knowledge, this
esoteric gnosis so private
not only from each other
but from ourselves as well
and that hey, we've always
done this, and that we always
must, knowing that there's no
hope for breeching this innate
indwelling truth, this
instinctive constant we know
as the intuitive gospel,
the preternatural preface,
the undeniable, whether
or not what we know is
sacred or profane, well,
that's the only thing we
don't know, isn't it? I mean,
I'll show you my notebook if
you show me yours.

You first.





,