Movement

"M24 Movement" by LRD615

by Nate Kenny

A dozen of us move thoughtlessly through the house, seeking only the yawn of the basement, and there is not one conscious thought between us. There are only pieces of impetus, like the pulp persisting at the bottom of an empty glass, that we clump together and roll towards our goal. All self now, all identity, is found in the rituals of the evening. Ceremonial acts assert my being. I drink, therefore I am. In the meantime, my ego, id, and superego huddle together on the front lawn to share a joint—the person taking the cover fee required me to leave my psyche at the door. 

Our feet slap against the wood slats of the basement steps, one long millipede of Converse and Docs. I have come just in time; the band tunes their instruments with pliers, their headstocks sprouting with the bent ends of guitar strings like fingers sagging from paralyzed hands, and the lead singer goes let’s fucking do this into the mic. The walls are ribbed with wooden beams, throat-pink with bare insulation. Their nakedness sets an example. 

Noise hits me like a chloroformed rag. This vibration, this anesthetic roar, is why I am here. It numbs me with a finality. I wish I had said this. I’m worried about that. All of it is gone. Our minds now only have the capacity to conjure up monosyllables. Sweat, move, want, heat, we wordlessly chant. Some form pairs to kiss, and form iambs, spondees, trochees; others swing their arms to assert their singularity, an exclamation point in the poem we write in tandem. We are all a vibration, a constant thunder, moving in circles and merging our atoms into a cloud striped with lightning and youth.  

The lead singer slumps around his mic stand, and his words are suddenly above language. I realize that the only speech worth speaking is the kind that cannot be uttered without pain, without risk, as I watch him stretch his vocal cords and rend his throat into a psalm, swinging us into our clouds again, roiling us into a sea that bites at the rocks of his lighthouse.  

We are a movement. We are energy. We are change, ever shifting, leaking out from the basement and onto the sidewalk, past the lawn, into the street. They should tremble in our presence, our oneness, our plurality, our paper doll silhouettes burning at the edges, joined in ash and dust, to which you, yes you, will return.