Jeffrey Neilson

End Zone

Jeffrey Neilsen

Upon re-entry, here too I saw a nation of lost souls. All packed in the impact of such a controversy: the women who “adjust” as housewives, who grow up wanting to be “just a housewife,” are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps. You wake up with the feeling of never having been anywhere else but beside this holocaust. Running around the track, you look ahead toward the western edge, which you approach and then recede from. Circularity once soothed. Now it is a choice that seemed a boon but proved a bane. There are, at any given moment, multiplicities of dead lives and their momentous changes coming back to this place where resting is resisting. When he arrived home, he lay down his baggage. And then threw back the earth again and buried deep his voice’s evidence… Was it anything more than an empty image escaped from the flames of the pyre? To be rid of an earthly obligation to the total reality, to becoming more. To feel free for a second, as you are riding to the guillotine of empty days and fecal smells in corporate bathroom stalls. We sit and shit and get back to work. That’s what it may all stand for. The friend you’ve only just reached—dedicate this moment to her, or whoever listens for a second, as you come up for air. Whoever passeth here: may the sighs and silence of the hoard be heard. Word travels on in the night, without lantern, bewildered more than ever. Without guide, without a middle of the road, take these sounds and let them go on into their own.