If You Speak

I spoke at a poetry open mic a few years ago. I spoke on several different occasions, to be more precise. It was an LGBT event but they were open-minded so they allowed breeders to attend and speak as well. The location was the Star e Rose cafe on Alberta Street in NE Portland (alas, Star e Rose, previously the oldest cafe on Alberta, is now closed). Week after week, young attractive lesbians and transgendered folk would give word to their passions and their passions seemed to be overwhelmingly related to love. I could feel something rising each week--no, not that; get your mind out of the gutter!--until ideas crystallized in the form of words. What I had to say was not poetry but the event organizer was wise enough to allow other forms of spoken word to be uttered. The following are the words I spoke in the spring of 2011:

...

If you speak I will fall in love with you. Do not speak to me, do not say a word, unless you want me to fall in love with you. If you want to hear my story as I plan to tell it then do not speak. For if you speak I will know, now, that you want me to fall in love with you.

Now, if that’s what you want then I have to surmise that you may have a number of motivations for wanting me to fall in love with you. You might be making a whimsical decision, not believing I am telling you the truth. You may be curious, you may want to see what will happen if you speak. You might think I’m sexy and you want me to know that you’d like to hook up after the show so you've decided to communicate that in the next, say, fifteen seconds by saying, “Hello, Michael.” ...

Speaking may mean other things as well. It may mean you've decided I’m an easy mark, that you can have a man-servant at your disposal whenever you’d like. Need to get a few things from the farmer’s market? Sure. Or maybe you think, “There’s this guy I really don’t like at work. I’ll have Michael could talk to him privately for me.” From there the thinking may become more predatory: “I can take over the entire Alberta Street area if I can just make a few more goons like him fall for me. Who’s going to stop me when I have a small army of men willing to kill for me? I, a lesbian, a woman who will never have sex with a single one of these men, am using their brute strength to satisfy my larger plans of neighborhood domination.”

Extortion might come next and then you’d start tricking out your friends, those who don’t suck up to the new “You,” The Capitalized YOU, the You in bold type font, You with calligraphic elegance, You with a machete in your left hand and the severed head of the defiant in your right.

You can see why I may not want you to speak, why I may be wary of falling in love with you. But love is like a spell, there’s no will involved, there’s just succumbing, giving in to it, allowing it to direct life, to make plans, to start saving a little here and there for an early retirement together. I’ll be blind to who you really are. I’ll believe you are the woman of my dreams and that you love me and that you live for my love for you. "What will I ever do without you?" I’ll start to think. What did I ever do before you? I have been thinking for years before meeting you here tonight.

Now you understand why I’m going to fall in love with whoever speaks to me while I’m on stage tonight. I've been setting up this moment for five years, preparing for it in every possible way, physically, emotionally, intellectually. I've been hiking, eating healthier, smoking less—-can’t quit just yet without you, babe-—traveling, spending forty days and nights in a fleabag motel in the middle of North Dakota, day after day, never leaving the room, never opening the curtains, just sitting in bed, thinking of you, for forty days and nights, wondering what you look like, wondering what color your hair is, wondering how it will feel the first time our eyes meet, the first time you speak to me.

That’s when I realized when and where it would happen. It would happen in Portland, in 2011, at a poetry open mic called Word Out. I didn’t know how it would all transpire between then and now—this all happened years ago, mind you. Now you really know why I’ll fall in love with you if you speak to me. It’s destiny. A destiny I chose to create for myself but a destiny nonetheless.

Why Word Out, though? I wondered, too. Lesbians? Really? How is that going to work? It doesn’t matter, though. Love doesn't work that way. I still haven’t figured out why I exist so expecting me to understand any of this would be an inexcusable error on your part. Things work out for a reason and one hundred percent of the time that reason is that things have worked out just as they have. Things couldn’t have been otherwise because they weren’t otherwise. Things that couldn’t have been otherwise then can be otherwise now.

In other words, I could believe now that what couldn’t have been otherwise was otherwise then. But the only “place” where that which was and couldn’t have been otherwise is otherwise would be within my mind. There’s everything that exists and then there’s everything that exists in my mind. And your minds.

Belief. A crazy thing. Dangerous. Frightening. But it’s essential. We have to believe. How can you have a purpose or meaning if you don’t believe? Believe what, you ask? The particulars are less important than belief itself. It’s sort of like human skeletons. One may be short of stature, one tall, one deformed in this way, another deformed in that way. But all of them, each one of them, is a human skeleton. There is Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, capitalism, socialism; there is no end to belief. Nihilism is … an impossibility. Except in the mind.

Let me say one more time, though, that if you speak I will fall in love with you. While that may seem grand in its own way, it is probably disturbing in most other ways. If you communicate in code “I love you, too, Michael,” by simply saying, “Hi,” then you must realize how much more serious that is than you may be thinking it is. As I focus my attention solely on you, as I serenade you, stroke your hair with my words, lift your skirt with my voice, you’ll regret having singled yourself out. You’ll say, “Hey, whoa, I just had to do it. You’d been begging for it all night, telling us ‘Ooooh, you shouldn’t do this scary thing or else all kinds of bugaboo bullshit’s going to happen,’ and I just wanted to fucking shut your ass up already! I didn’t ask for this shit.”

Except that you did. I told you I’d fall in love with you. You might have an idea of what that would mean, but could any of you reasonably say anything about what the experience would be like? You have no idea. Even I have no idea. I’m making things up. I’m guessing. How could I know any more than you do? All I know is that it will happen if someone speaks to me. I’m just trying to convey the seriousness of the situation, the unpredictability caused by the absence of reliability in light of the flight of accountability to the delight of responsibility. This is not good. But we can’t say that for sure, either. It might be just what we need.

If you speak and I fall in love with you I will probably come and sit next to you when I am finished. I will talk to you, as lovers do, about my hopes and dreams, about what I like and what I don’t, about great things I’ve done and horrible sufferings I’ve endured. I’ll lean on you, ask you for more than you can give, I’ll fail to give you what you need, and I’ll disappoint you so much that you’ll question everything you once believed.

That is what will set you free. You will, finally, by speaking so that I fall in love with you, discover that belief has been making all of your decisions for you. You will, finally, begin to understand that you can change your life only by changing your beliefs first. You’ll look at me, once you’ve had this realization, and say to me, “I don’t love you, but thank you for giving me this gift. I may never have come to this realization without your words. I am grateful.”

You’ll smile at me, you’ll gather your things, you’ll rise from your chair, you’ll say goodbye, and you’ll walk out of my life forever. You will go out into the world and create your own way in your own way. I’ll be here, sobbing uncontrollably, debilitated not by my love for you but by my belief in my love for you.