Golden Shovel after Taylor Johnson’s “Derrida/Coleman”

At some point, we were

two—You and whatever I am. It

made it possible

for us to play guitar chords in imperfect harmony. I

felt the way you held my hand from afar. Would

you ever call me Boyfriend? Could we be

Lovers? I felt hands below my shirt, naked:

The hole in my chest, exposed. Two bullet holes of

the widest caliber they could find. Shot. Bottom of the

west lung, by the people I’ve allowed myself to be nude

1. Now, I’ve developed a pheasant’s philosophy

of running every time I see something I could consider

a holster. I fly from destruction before I see it. Globalization

made these things more real than ever. I find I’m made of

all these discrete connections from around the

world, and you are included in that. Lovers is an expensive

word. I can’t waste my feelings. In this american

economy, words must be laced with an uncertain sound.

When Partner would suffice just fine, why should

we throw around Boyfriend like it’s expendable? We

should worry

about the way we

name ourselves. We should

worry because every name I’ve invented before didn’t work.

My mother, I

named the creator of my lungs. I thought I’d believe

in the redemption of sin, so I once named myself Christian. You’re

the one who made me question the right

definition of sin. Suddenly, even the name I

originally tried to give us tastes too sweet. I distrust

the

word

that comes from the human tongue. Its off-white

reminds me of eggshells that sour too quickly. It’s

the meaning the dictionary gives which can’t be sanctified.

Lover: a person who is in love with another. Propaganda

from linguists, themselves, who claim that repetition

in the definition of a word is

the gateway to meaning. But my

gripe is that to use love to define lovers is a sin of language.

My philosophy—that of

a pheasant—leads me to believe the origin

of the universe expanded from a single event: the

explosion some like to name Big Bang. The highest

form of human pride, to name something technology

will never document. Who were we, anyway,

to ordain ourselves to the

church of nomenclature. To give the body

the right to name itself is

a power that should’ve been gifted only

to the all-knowing. It is no power of mine.

Provisionally—

I say, though I don’t know for

sure if any of my reasons

are without that

inherent, human doubt—I’m

going to name you Partner, not

Boyfriend nor Lover. There is no sure

certainty to the things I can’t see the future of.

Someday, I

wonder if I am

going to be convinced

that

the way of the world before

I arrived—before becoming

a namer of things; of music,

of the music

behind the way we speak; of whatever was

before me—is the only

way humanity will ever find a

place in the world. Through the word

we use to name. I

and we and us and every phrase we prefer

to

use to destroy

the

rhythm set by some composer

of nature that simply seeks to renew

the silence, and the

concept

that never needed to be named so extraordinarily

in the lack of human limitation

that allows you and I to continue trying to name ourselves, playing

with some obscure definition of freedom.