The Trouble Is

He feels slow, tectonic, deeply submerged even, unable to act, not able to speak, disabled (apparently) to respond, incapable even of processing.  Something seems to have happened.

She – is confused and confounded – experiencing a complex cocktail of distress and depression, pointless and pointed-out, sludged, sloughed and slathered, comatose and doomed, sad and angry in equal measures.  A compound.  A compound problem.

But she’s not.  And he can.

And they will.

The trouble is.

Yes, the trouble is.

Not easily fitted.  Because it is this time.  Again, it is now.  And now, again.  The words were made from before, or for some last time, some other.  Something foreign.  Along with the categories, analysands and diagnoses.  Along with the remedies: all for a potential future or other distinctively past.

But it is now.  Yes, the trouble is.  Is now.

Words of others.  Ideas, aspects.

Always malappropriate and inadequate.  Words are not it.  Words are something else.

This is not discrete or verifiable.  Simple.  Is.  Trouble.

Yes, the trouble is.

And the trouble is now.

She collapses.  He freezes again.  And this frozen is yearning.  Something excruciating.  Like her.  Like where she is, now collapsing.  Collapsible.  Collapsed.  That’s the trouble.

The trouble is.

He wishes and fumbles, at light-year’s remove, another era, disabled, catatonic, all too aware.

She breaks in and through her fall.  He hitches and constricts.

She gurgles a sound, a horrible mutable sound, hardly audible in her destruction and dismantling, her infolding and coming undone.  And he cries, cries out, a sort of bellow and howl of noiseless emission, helpless to keep up with time, incapable of presenting, shaped and occurring like shore-stones and wheat-seed.

She is done.  He has yet to arrive.  He will not get there.  Too far ahead and far too behind, and she is in trouble, and the trouble is.

Yes, the trouble is.  It is now.

Something has happened.