Allegory of the cave

background: i'm having my students do an art project where they re-envision the allegory of the cave in their own way. i wanted to show them an example of a project, so michael and wrote a correspondence poem pretty quickly today. i wrote from the perspective of a woman whose lover left the cave and comes back he wrote from perspective of the lover who left the cave. i hope we do more deez.

Cave
(by kim and michael)

When you left for the

edge of dread you

became a monster in the

shape of a man.

A once beautiful mouth

now emitting a mad web

in the shape

of a thought,

and a stream

that smells like

her mouth

and stings my eyes.

You call her Truth—I can’t echolocate

this name stinks of sorrow

and is shaped like nothing.

You see

 and seeing

nothing in this seed

that is our home.

You call this seed now a shell

and you call me a shell in the shape

of a person. 

do you not remember our first shadow

and cool dark gods gliding across our eyes?

reverberating in their unintelligible god-voice

And you, cool eyed and clever, saying

What is this if this is not love?

 ----------------------------------

--That language was a dialect called metaphor. You said, tell me the truth, so I lied. Though even then I could not love you, my eyes so dimmed by the liminal light of darkness unanchored, of transitive verbs, of other women whose names were Truth and Light and Capitalized Indulgence but whose praxes unbinded our hearts before binding them. Wisdom languishes in the reassurance of retrospect. You said: are we there yet? and I, holding you, said: no. It is not darkness which denudes a place of its light. It is time spent in darkness. Having not seen for so long one cannot be expected suddenly to see. But aphaeresis is not negation, does not denude a word of its light, and so only now I can tell you the truth in words which is this: you are beautiful. Like this thing called ocean. Like this thing called metaphor. Like this thing called bird which is not a shadow but casts one, so that even in that darkness I still can think of you.