busyPutting Everything in Its Place
Collage is the fine art of
using pieces of paper for
putting everything in its place.
After the injury -- and it
doesn't matter whether you're
bleeding in body or soul --
you take it out on the page,
ripping pictures and words
out of the gutter into open air.
You push them around on
the table, trying to make sense
of something that doesn't,
of chaos, of entropy.
You move them until
they begin to show
relationships, parallels,
perhaps a sort of timeline.
It is better than nothing,
so you smear them with glue
and fasten them to the background.
It doesn't mean anything, and yet it does.
While your hands have been busy
with pieces of paper, your brain
has been sorting splinters of memory,
too sharp to touch directly, but
safer when wrapped in metaphor.
What was chaos becomes
comprehensible in images,
becomes a part of your past,
as your personal narrative
begins to heal from the injury.
You won't keep bleeding forever.
