Manifesto
With my resolve, small, compact, like a bullet, I will get what I want: catch and keep, write until my fingers bleed beauty, pierce the publishing mystery. I will take what I want like a man, my knuckles bruised from the struggle, from pushing through brambles and misperceptions and reluctance.
We collect history. Memories cloud our vision, they clog the landscape of thought, tributes to a dead past, cairns on a moor. We react before we know why we're reacting. I’m used to my own brain fog but I sometimes forget other people have sad pasts, too, that I’m not the only one with clouded vision.
The resolve cuts through all of that – it pierces the fog, it sees the others clearly. It’s a bullet of love and clarity. With it I will get what I want. I will rip off my own shirt, muddied, dirty with leaves and sand and cigarette butts and the smell of a barroom floor, to reveal the smoothness of my skin. My candor will make the others want to do the same.
Hands intertwine, with hope for connection, with concern for the roadblocks on the way. I prefer to feel my heart rather than use my head, to let the is-ness of it be, to live in the ontology of the other, of the moment, even when I don’t understand it. The more I think, the less resolved I am, the more my heart withers in my chest. Why not let it sing, let it call out, let it ask for nothing in return but love or a facsimile thereof, the regard, the explanation-defying connection?
One target, one set of eyes, the resolve like a bullet. The rest will fall into place. It’s part of my plan to live, to write, to love both selfishly and without self. The bullet is silver, it is platinum, it is made of blood and bone, brain and heart. It waits in my chest, to fly out of my mouth, out of my fingers, from the center of my soul. I concentrate, I let it be, I see what will happen, knowing that what happens will happen no matter what I do, that the more I let go, the more I will receive.
From a prompt: Keep your eyes on the target. Edited slightly and reposted because some of the wording was bothering me.
Image: One of Jasper John's many Targets. I got this image from The Nervous Breakdown. Where The Nervous Breakdown got it from is unknown.