X EARTH · Y BODY
Illustration by Paradise Khanmalek
POEM BY PARADISE KHANMALEK
A heaping stillness sits unstirring. A deep weight sits hard on an x axis. My Y body intersects the world with resonant human energy. The world itself reverberates a reciprocal unnamed energy that my neurons slurp like thick pulpy juice.
X Earth. Y Body. That’s the situation, setting, context, motif, idea, object, subject, and argument.
Drunk crackling electric cracks hammer through the X Earth, disturbing the axis in jagged heaves.
My Y body jumps, leaps, skips, screams, squeals, and squeaks in the dance to escape each new forming trench and cavern.
What’s happening here is an earthquake – a deep tectonic shift. Layered plates of mass, matter, and energy slowly stir with clunky danger.
In many ways and in most worlds, an earthquake is conceptually, poetically, and literally the opposite of stillness.
But on the Y and X axis we are speaking about today, a deep quaking earth can exist in perfect harmony with the embodied, disembodied, linguistic, and intellectual manifestation of stillness.
Just as subatomic particles within the Higgs Field can exist, not exist, abide by, and break the assumed rules of reality all at once – so can a body, brain, and idea experience a state of unwavering stillness while simultaneously be engaged in uproarious, scrambling, scribbling, outrageous, CHAOS. The secret is in the axes. The Y axis is chaos, the X axis is silent undisturbed STILLNESS. The experience of existing is at their intersection. One can move about the intersection: plant themselves firmly on one or the other, waver between extremes, or live balanced in-between.
I have a leaning – I admire, aspire, and yearn to be CHAOS. I despise, feel anxiety with, and experience cold nauseous emotional stagnancy on the X axis of STILLNESS.
I allow the Y axis, or the CHAOS axis, to pour into my Y body and animate my spirit.
Once Y has filled me, I realize that the dichotomy, binary, opposite nature of CHAOS and STILLNESS was and is a deep illusion. The axes are one, also two, in love, in hate, in existence, and in non-existence. They disprove each other. And that’s what makes living at the point of their union so rich.
Perfection, in this model, is to be in the most lubricated tandem union with entropy; to relinquish resistance to the ecstatic, orgasmic, disgusting, carnal, and living speck of overlap between X and Y.