To measure internal activity while it turns all I know to rubble

I repeat “dead” aloud enough times for its meaning to loosen 

from sense. Once the word I repeat is no longer comprehensible, 

it begins to attack everything else I know.

Giorgio Agamben says devastation is one face of a Genius 

that exists inside us. The other face is creation.

The two sounds that begin and end “dead” echo in my ears. 

Then a third appears between them. The middle sound, between 

the coronal plosives of the letter d, is the ghost.

Agamben tells us that the Genius is within us only as long as 

we realize it does not belong to us. Just as existence does not.

Now I begin to voice only the ghost, and watch it ‘not appear.’

Is the narrow space between my Genius’s two faces 

where that ghost lives? When I listen for what will not appear, 

I hear my own voicelessness amplify. 

My hearing is most acute when I’m naked 

in front of the bedroom mirror.

I want voicelessness to create an echoing hollow 

inside every word I type.

I feel how listening to find disappearances makes my nipples erect. 

Disappearance is my new self-seduction.

Copyright © 2024 by Rusty Morrison. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 2, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“I was dealing with the death of someone close. My feelings were complicated, leaving me exhausted. But something in me shifted when reading Giorgio Agamben. He freed me from grieving, allowing me to find a fierceness—a fierceness that asked me to plunge into this moment, then the next, to dive into everything changing. The poem took time to finish. I was standing in front of my mirror, as I describe, when I opened to see the many selves I am disappearing, as I asked myself who I am. Then I wrote the last lines, or the poem wrote them for me.”
—Rusty Morrison