Real is the Word They Use to Contain Us Read online

  REAL IS THE WORD THEY USE TO CONTAIN US

  Real is the Word

  They Use to Contain Us

  NOAH WARENESS

  BIBLIOASIS

  WINDSOR, On

  Copyright © Noah Wareness, 2017

  This book is released under a CC BY-NC-SA Creative Commons license: you are encouraged to share and copy everything in it in any way you like, and to use it as material to create new works. Three restrictions apply: you need to credit Noah Wareness as the original author, you can’t use the new works for profit, and they need to bear the same Creative Commons license. For more information visit

  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/”

  FIRST EDITION

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Wareness, Noah, author

  Real is the word they use to contain us / Noah Wareness.

  Poems.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77196-159-2 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77196-160-8 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS8645.A7567R43 2017 C811’.6 C2016-907963-5

  C2016-907964-3

  Edited by Zachariah Wells

  Copy-edited by Daniel Wells

  Typeset by Chris Andrechek

  Cover art and design by Noah Wareness

  Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Biblioasis also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Noah Wareness works without government funding. All the money he makes from sales of this edition will be donated to a family shelter in his neighborhood. Visit noahwareness.com if you want to read more of his stuff.

  for Daniela

  the weirdest kid I ever met.

  “Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

  “Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

  Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

  All those who forget their wildness conceive wildness as a single thing, by some teachings wicked and others wise. But wildness is the entire world without exception and no single thing to sit neatly at the feet of a philosophy. And to assume anything of monsters is the gravest mistake, because monsters are wild shapes, the wildest things that can be. Rabbits who grow as old as myself often come to believe the tangible matter of all their experience is a thicket of monsters’ bones, monsters starved and tamed to death by the operation of reason on the world.

  Trilliath of College Hill, First Sermon Against Inlé-rah

  Before summer’s end, the Boy took his air rifle down to play in the green shaded yard behind the house. He fired one-handed without sighting down the barrel and shot the little spotted Rabbit through the eye. Neither one had ever imagined a ball bearing could strike deep, or that six trees were less than a wood.

  Later, his grandfather’s man picked the body up and cut a seam around the haunch, just before the strong hind legs that were the Rabbit’s special pride. He drew the skin away all in one piece like a long jacket, taking great care with the ears and the bottoms of the front feet, and sent the meat to the kitchen. The hide was scraped and packed with coarse salt, and the next day rubbed with tanner’s oil. Baths in odd liquids followed, and powders that stung the dead Rabbit’s hollow nose. On the near table, a frame was built of sticks and twine, then fleshed with rags and plaster in the shape of a leaping rabbit’s forequarters. The Rabbit could not turn his face away, for he was a skin; but he would have watched with bitter wonder all the same, for his life had been long and chaptered and much visited by mystery.

  h sawdust, the very way he came into the world. He wore a dry nose carved of pink catalin and his glass eyes looked nothing like boot buttons at all. This day was the little Boy’s birthday, and he was summoned before his Nanas and Mother with the narrow air rifle balanced on his shoulder and the buttons of his dress freshly shined. As Grandfather whisked a sheet off the Rabbit, they all at once praised the Boy for his marksmanship and conduct, and in a moment he began to cry. Long after the adults retired to the drawing room and the little Boy had been led away to bed, his air rifle remained propped up and forgotten against one arm of the overstuffed velveteen settee. The moonlight held, gray as rabbit’s fur, against the glass marble of an eye; and it seemed to the narrow Rifle that the eye flicked, and that the Rabbit was making ready to spring from its walnut mount on the wall. She was a rifle built just that year, younger than the Rabbit or the Boy, and she had never seen an animal skin made to appear lifelike.

  “Sir, are you Real?” said the Rifle trimmed in brass.

  “As much as you,” said the Rabbit. “But that is something you must never ask anyone. Real keeps us silent; Real keeps us still.”

  And if you were there to see them speak, it would have struck you that the dim parlour was not empty at all, but full beyond reckoning. The nap of the rug was the same mottle of gray shadows, cobwebs still laced the bed of the summer-cold hearth, and the dust only kept falling across the air; but already a thousand new images flitted through the room, more teeming and raggeder with strangeness than any living thing. They dwelled in and across the contours of objects just as your imagination might play at finding faces in the whorls of a plank. No matter if you looked somewhere else, the figures would follow you. For the nonhuman world has never been mute at all, but only silent by custom; and the words of its speech are called by humans monsters.

  And when the Rabbit spat, nothing came from his mouth, not even a grain of dust; but he spat, even so.

  “Real is the word they use to contain us.”

  ...their words darted in the fluttering curtain and its shadow and sped across all the room’s lines, animating in turn the uncountable shapes that had slept within them. Like jugglers who tossed and combined their shifting flesh, with every move they became new, rejoicing in their own creation as do all words of the hidden speech...

  FOURTEENTH CHAMBERS

  Now I understood by some sort of intuition that what I had been writing was a never-ending story and that the name of it was “A Ghost Story.” The name comes from the only thing that I have learned about all people, that they are ghostly and that they are sometimes split-off…

  R. A. Lafferty

  This is not what I look like, I tell them.

  Neil Gaiman

  You’ll never be a writer. Same for me.

  But only listen: no one ever was.

  It’s nothing that a human life can be.

  You persevere, you practice on your knees;

  you hollow out your life into the cause.

  You’ll never be a writer. Same for me.

  Read through your grafted lines: at best you see

  a ghost look out that’s wiser far than us.

  It’s nothing that a human life can be.

  They hardly need us, only that we breathe;

  and they don’t know us, they don’t give applause.

  You’ll never be a writer. Same for me.

  Don’t count yourself among them in your greed,

  that lineage of nonexistent gods.

  It’s nothing that a human life can be.

  Don’t turn around and lie how you’re a dream,

  some magic fucking dream that jumped the o
dds.

  You’ll never be a writer. Same for me.

  It’s nothing that a human life can be.

  ...they leapt upon each other in their eagerness, tracing figures in the billow of the curtain. A lecturer bent forward in his seat, his oversized brow as round as a soap bubble. As he waved his arms about in endless proclamation, his huge nose bobbled as though it would come off, tipping him to and fro with such force he nearly spilled from the chair. More words gathered at his feet, which is to say within the curtain’s shadow, making him a mocking audience. Rearing up with backs turned, they bent over to spray the lecturer with clouds of gas, humour swelling at pace with his indignation...

  THE RESIGNATION NOTICE OF FILBERT P. P. PENETRALIA, FIL. CRIT.

  for Glyn

  A resignation notice?

  No, never mind the pre-printed stationery

  delivered by Shelby, my sanctimonious would-be necromancer

  of a live-in proctological surgeon. Call it what it is: an old man’s

  suicide note. Over the past three hundred years, this whole film

  critic business has become increasingly degrading.

  And the old man I mean—

  now overhauled with dual colostomy sacks to accompany his prosthetic

  caterpillar treads, noise-damping cowl and lap-mounted radon detector—

  remains obliged to cart about the decomposing framework of himself

  and witness up to seven films nightly.

  Well do I recall the aged Ebert,

  his humiliating bicentennial “celebration.” Dragged by his tongue—

  then his oesophagus—across the bar; crucified on a swastika-shaped

  roulette wheel; then the whole dripping, spinning works defenestrated,

  shooting sparks, on the Gibson-Clooney-Medici-Dicaprio Show.

  And this for what?

  For stating films are nowadays the same!—And

  as the cyanide-contaminated tea cake dissolves in my hateful dentures,

  I state it too! All films are nowadays the same. All exactly the same!

  —And all that farting! By Ebert’s thumb, the incessant farting has

  driven me to suicide!

  The old man’s heartbeat already becomes arrhythmic.

  Needs must he loosen his cummerbund.

  But if all films have converged,

  Attentive Reader—one sophomoric singularity, endlessly regurgitating

  itself—I can see it now! Only now is the ultimate film review possible.

  To categorically condemn all films, and all films to come—and then

  make my escape into Satan’s gnashing teeth.

  Very well. Very well.

  Reader, I consider every story formulaic and puerile that originates

  with a self-styled “retired hustler” drinking gravy in a locomotive

  cigar lounge. Juggling lockpicks in his fingers, he breathes upon

  the window, then sketches boxer briefs in the ensuing condensation.

  Invariably the cut of his jacket is casual. You know the type—a scion

  of the Clooney-DiCaprio union branch.

  Soon, a newly arrived friend

  will hector him toward one last caper—this fellow thief a retired specialist

  in the undermining of surveillance systems. While simultaneously

  enjoying two differing-flavoured cigarillos, this unkempt technician

  describes a “big score” in voluptuous terms—one last big score, and then

  they can retire. When not the vault of a Monégasque bank, their score

  will be a casino’s subterranean cache, protected by redundant electronics;

  or, occasionally, a Nazi art collector’s son’s shark-haunted bunker

  on the Baltic seafloor.

  Our “retired hustler” rejoins with disbelief.

  He cites uncrackable security apparati and slain or imprisoned comrades—

  statements serving to reaffirm the target’s familiar yet legendary nature.

  With oblique reference to a “plan,” the technician trips a tiny lever

  on his cigarillo butt, manifesting an abrupt smokescreen to conceal

  his exit procedure.

  Inevitably, the train encounters a dark tunnel. Tea lights,

  arranged in a disused pantry car, exist only to illuminate a montage

  of anonymous erotic actions. Beforehand, we notice the hustler puncture

  his own condom, then discard it; afterward, in the marbled bathroom,

  a single tear ruins his silhouette as he contemplates a folded family Polaroid,

  a vasectomy certification card, and a sheaf of tiny death certificates.

  Soon we arrive in Dresden, or Vienna.

  Reassembling the “old team”

  takes seventeen to nineteen onscreen minutes, the four retired ex-members

  each sporting unsatisfactory jobs and lukewarm excuses. The retired fixer’s

  pedi-rickshaw meets them at the airport—yes, the AIRPORT!—while

  the retired safecracker uses television to sell weightlifting paraphernalia.

  The retired bartender has not yet recovered from her small-calibre wound.

  And what of the retired small child with a talent for factoring immense

  semiprimes? —She has embarked upon a speaking tour of high-school

  gymnasia, speed-solving Rubik’s Cubes.

  The retired film critic distances

  himself from humanity’s works forever. Hypoxia has rendered his fingernails

  gray; meanwhile, constantly adjusting his lapels, our hustler rekindles

  the “old team” with cryptic insider references. “Total eclipse of the nose.”

  “Powdered white Batman.” “Baking soda volcanoes.” Camaraderie solidifies

  at “the hottest fucking snow in Antarctica.”

  Later they assemble to sketch

  plans on a napkin: this either in the gift shop of the very casino in question,

  or the well-lit alley behind a hardcore punk venue. In any case, they shout

  over a backdrop of thumping Euro-techno music; meanwhile, through

  a Fiat’s amber window, a plainclothes detective observes.

  Her history

  with the mixologist emerges in a grainy flashback projected upon

  the hustler’s Clooney-Bans, simultaneously revealing the small child’s

  parentage. We zoom out from a single tear as the technician reappears,

  gloriously tardy. Leaning against a lamp-post, ankles crossed, he inputs

  a green-on-black algorithm that brightens the Sony or Clooney logo

  on his cellular phone, instantly decimating the detective’s credit rating.

  She speeds away with shut eyes, crunching traffic-cones, a travel mug

  exploding in her fist—

  My mouth foams, Attentive Reader.

  The blood has flown my extremities; my perineum has rejected

  its dialysis shunt in a blurt of unmentionable froth. Prolapsing

  like a newly-hatched botfly from my tear-duct, a laser-equipped

  magnesium nozzle sprays the desk with diagnostic readouts—

  But you know how this note ends—

  The Reaper bids me summarize

  entire tropes—a morphine-laced coffee pot incapacitates the overconfident

  coast guard—the mixologist, having rigged hundreds of “D” batteries

  to a blood-heating machine intended for hypothermia cases, stows away

  in a Clooney 747’s wheel well—the fixer pursues the small child

  through the gearwork of an operative escalator, each one strapped with

  explosives,
each smoking cigarettes—the plainclothes detective swaps

  out her prosthetic breast, revealing a tattooed QR code for savings

  on Medici brand gravy concentrate—of which the team jointly consumes

  a two-gallon drum—and the film studio convinces us to invest emotionally

  in suave felons! For we, complacent in our IV-equipped recliners,

  are moral and intellectual paramecia!

  Met with the appropriate harmonic

  resonance, our uncrackable safes spring open, nested like Clooney dolls.

  The contents of the innermost locker flood the underwater casino with light,

  revealing their “last big score”: an infant or diminutive police informant

  upon a white satin pillow. Art-house films notwithstanding, it is wrapped

  in a rubberized sash bearing corporate logos. Over the course of at least

  forty-five seconds, this small target is farted upon, spattering it with fecal

  residues while it enthusiastically flashes two thumbs-up—a process which

  somehow has been deemed worthy of onomatopoetic subtitles: Brrrtbbpb-

  rrOOOOpp-pBBbPpbbP-THRuppPBTBTH-bup-bUPP-BUPPPPP-rrr-RRRrb-ppbp-

  BLORRRRTT-PUuuuuu-rraaAAAP.

  I die.

  The credits begin.

  MONTAG ULYSSES MONTESQUIEU Lucius Gibson-Clooney-Medici-DiCaprio, Sr.

  PATRONYM T. B. WOLFVENTOOTHE Shepard Clooney-Sony-Medici-DiCaprio, Jr.

  FINCHA WHATELEY Clontissa II DiCaprio-Clooney-Medici, Sr.

  BRAVADO MEMOREX Bravada Medici-Gibson-Clooney, Jr.

  RUTHVEN “STING” COVENANT Gibson Clooney-Medici-DiCaprio, Jr.

  FILBERT P. P. PENETRALIA, FIL. CRIT. Himself, Fil. Crit.

  INTOXICATED COAST GUARD Richelle Gibson-Medici-DiCaprio, Sr.

  INCOMPETENT COAST GUARD Gibsonelle Clooney-DiMedici-Caprio, Jr.

  etc. etc. etc. etc.

  THE RT. HON. CONRAD BLACK IV Himself, Rt. Hon.

  DOG “Noam Chompy”

  BEST GRIP Terrance Gallopardo-Kardashian-

  Gibson, B. Gr., Sr.