Kimberlite

This is a proverbial message in a bottle. I don't know who it might find, but there have to be others out there who speak my indigenous tongue...


I once wrote a very heady poem about diamonds (sort of) and named it 'Kimberlite'. (According to Emily Dickinson poems are children, and so thusly, we name them). Generally I would spend the current sentence giving a brief description of what Kimberlite is, clenching my teeth to seal the intangible yet somehow vast space between my lips and my tongue; between what I want to say and what I actually do. I live my life in a *constant* state of self-edit and redaction. Muted out of habit, out of necessity, I am often accused of being a poor communicator, but the truth is I suppose I don't trust the thoughts to amalgamate into words properly. I have become accustomed (but never comfortable) with the way that people often look at me when I speak freely. My fingertips however, are well versed at acting as Interpreter, and so here I sit, trying to forge a treaty between the Poet and the corporeal. 


I know well the Loneliness that settles, ghost-like, in the periphery of quiet; the hazy aching that life becomes when we are reaching for something intangible. My mind is a drifting island. I can give my friends the geography; the longitude. I can show them my customs, but...I can not teach them my language, so I have had to learn theirs. I can only stand my inner cacophony for so long before I drown it in Whiskey, or distraction (or both). I have chronic synesthesia, so I feel things others don't. Or maybe I just feel them with a part of myself that many others don't possess. I don't read as much as I used to...I have no appropriate outlet for the intake. Poetry is the exception. It cultivates my patience. It speaks to my over-stimulated ears in throaty whispers. It bends language because it knows I covet flex; flux. 

And so, digression aside, I have to re-mind myself that nobody probably cares that much what Kimberlite is, let alone the metaphoric implications that I spent 3 typed pages excavating (no pun intended) from my manic-tinted brain. I find myself wanting to believe that someone might actually look it up; might understand the metaphors humming a lonely, tenor hymn between the lines of bleached scientific jargon. Or I could just state directly what it is and what it means to me...but that wouldn't be as rewarding, would it? 


I am fascinated by diamonds, or rather, by diamonds in the (no, not rough) raw. The finished products do not interest me for both personal and political reasons, and I silently apologize to Africa frequently for the many misguided proposals that have forgotten the symbolism is in the ring itself. But, engagements and engorgements aside, I am compelled by these Janus stones. Diamonds are made of pure carbon, the elemental God, the base of all life. It is immense pressure over countless years that produces these stones from graphite. Graphite. Lead. Coal. Add a little unrelenting pressure and a perfect ratio of oxygen...voila. Diamonds.   

My hands are dirty; permanently stained a chalky soot. I have yet to not press too hard and find that what I have touched has turned to sable dust, my fingertips ghosted by a smirking, perennial irony. I am a modern day Midas. I have prayed too hard for words; for the medium. I have committed the sin of gluttony and now I am left with nothing but a mountain rising up out of pulverized coal. What can I do but smear it on the walls of my cranial asylum? What am I left with besides onyx hieroglyphs to tell my story?

Scientifically speaking, to sublime is to evaporate. Diamonds in the absence of oxygen will sublime. The fists I make around words...the clench I wield...does indeed sometimes conceive a gem. But human nature can not extort Mother Nature. Eventually, I clutch too hard...asphyxiate the ideas with my own hands. Is this some kind of twisted, mythical punishment? Am I sibling to Tantalus and Sysiphus?

I have a second home in this remote, hollowed out cave where slave songs crawl listlessly, like phantoms in the walls. Maybe you find yourselves peering out from within the cave, too. Maybe your journal-words surround you like that musty, pitch-black ether. Maybe your hands, seeking a tactile communion with this catacomb have stumbled into the fractal grooves; human made notches, betraying days--weeks--years here, removed in self-induced patterns of both exile and reprieve.

I know this place where diamonds and coal coalesce. I've marked my times here with neurotic compulsion...and I know there is always a way out, because every cave, like every human has a mouth.