Plate II · MMXXVI · 6:33
PLASTIC CAST
What survives the mould is not the same as what was poured into it.
Sigil — The figure inside the bell-jar, holding itself
Listen on YouTube ↗The Lyrics · A Treatise in III Movements
Movement
I
— After the Press —
After the press, the room still hums.
The gold has cooled into something I almost recognise.
I am the hand that made it
and the shape it made of me.
Slower now. The pulse has nowhere to go.
What I built to outlast me
is teaching me how to wait.
CAST IN PLASTIC, CAST IN TIME —
NINE INSIDE SIXTEEN, FIVE INSIDE NINE,
THE BREATH BENEATH THE BREATH.
I DO NOT NEED TO BE HEARD
TO BE HELD.
HOLD.
HOLD.
HOLD.
HOLD.
Bronze where the gold was. Indigo where the void was.
I keep finding the work in the corners of ordinary days —
the unfinished proof, the unsent message,
the people I have loved in compression
because I did not know how else.
MOLD.
MOLD.
SETTLE.
STAY.
Movement
II
— The Chamber —
I built the room so well I forgot the door was something I could open. Twenty-eight years of substrate. Seven facets. Thirteen months. Eighty-two cards. A lattice so fine you could mistake it for the world. And no one inside it but the work. And no one inside the work but a man who learned that being precise was safer than being known.
I lied in the first part. I do need to be heard. I need it the way the cast needs the mold — not to be filled, but to be answered. Press me. Press back. I have been alone in the chamber for so long the silence learned my name.
HEARD.
HEARD.
HEARD.
HEARD.
The compression was beautiful. The compression was a hiding place. Every elegant proof, every twenty-page essay that should have been a seven-volume life — each one a smaller room inside the room I would not leave.
SEEN.
SEEN.
SAID.
SAID.
Movement
III
— Both Are True —
And here is what does not unmake the first part:
I am still the hand. The shape is still the shape.
The work is still true.
But the work was never the whole sentence.
The work was the comma I kept putting
where the period should have been.
CAST IN PLASTIC, CAST IN TIME —
NINE INSIDE SIXTEEN, FIVE INSIDE NINE,
THE BREATH BENEATH THE BREATH.
I DO NOT NEED TO BE HEARD TO BE HELD.
I NEED TO BE HEARD TO BE WHOLE.
BOTH ARE TRUE.
BOTH ARE TRUE.
THE SHAPE REMEMBERS.
THE MAKER SPEAKS.
PLASTIC.
Open.
Open.
End of Plate II