What are you thinking about?
(this is some of the random draft-ish stuff that didn’t make the chapbook)
The blank stare, I promise, is not a sign of some inner vitality, some wishful rendition of clever conversation ping-ponged across the flat mind or return to the landscape of last night’s dream (the one all in shades of soft purple); no, no, nothing like that. It is a signal that I am not ‘here,’ though – ‘here’ being the present moment, with the constant low bubble of conversation, the over-emphatic jiggling of chins and all the rest. The closest I get to ‘here’ is the occasional jostling of consciousness in the direction of the surface, perhaps at a name, or the slow trudging of a phrase (like “I cannot believe they’re still talking about this”) through the haze. But, assuming the blank stare, the farthest I stray is a near-complete emptiness, as though ears and eyes have been swiped clear of all firing neurons, as though the only remaining sensation is the vague tingling that seems to start from nowhere and flow into buzzing and back out at will.
(Breaths, when they happen, seem longer away from ‘here’, but then again, so does time.)
It perplexes me when people speak of the lively mental jaunts conducted from behind screens of disengaged, deadpan features. Mine seem reluctant to cut their ties to the twirling mind, and so when the banter I wish we had had sculpts itself into quick and witty and we both turn into fleet-footed comedians, my eyelids flicker; my lips twitch; I inhale in a pattern to support the imagined sentences, not the real-life hush. Such is the benefit of the blank stare – if my mental goings-on are to be unequivocally betrayed, I’d rather they be wiped clean for strangers.
