The Speech
Dylan Webster
I come to words to grab the unwieldy,
I come to the page to be taken by the flurry,
To be contained—
To be expanded, to be expounded;
I come to the page to find friends.
The dead ones are so gossipy my ears prick up,
The living ones are theologians with personality.
My own words land on pages typed and scribbled,
Haphazard like the thoughts of thunderstorms.
I come to fiction where reality is saltier,
I come to poetry where everyone dances naked,
I come here to find you, and in seeking you
I find myself, I find God, I find truth, that little changeling.
I come here for ceremony, for incense, for ritual;
I stay for visions, for change that changes into the same;
I come where we’ve all come to find ourselves.
Some say the center, some say divinity, some say nonsense—
But the nonsense sure seems certain, surely carries some solace.
The pen in the hand is sometimes more erotic than the darkest nights,
More visceral than the sweat of skin, the fleshy expression of wordlessness.
Words are the only things incapable of being tamed by words,
And in that untameable, unspoken, unguarded uncanny valley I find us:
An eternal recurrence and an unending potential;
Fancy talk for the soul, for the mind’s undressing and teasing of the viewer.
I come for the show, and I stay for the life.
With an eye for the abandoned and a preference for the desolate, Phoenix College student Aaron Hedgpeth has been pursuing his hobbyist fascination with photography for nearly a year. Having spied the enigmatic intrigue of empty environments throughout much of his art, he immediately envisioned the possibilities that photography could have upon picking up a camera; he has been realizing those possibilities ever since. With ambience and shadow, he seeks to captivate viewers with mystery, practically forcing them to ponder his pictures– “What is the story?” He is currently pursuing an AAS in Digital Media Arts. Those interested in more of his work can visit http://www.aaronhedgpeth.com for his portfolio.
Dylan Webster lives and writes in the sweltering heat of Phoenix, AZ. He is the author of the poetry collection Dislocated (Quillkeepers Press, 2022), and his poetry and fiction have appeared, and are forthcoming, in journals such as Pennine Platform, Amethyst Review, The Cannon’s Mouth by Cannon Poets Quarterly, Ballast Journal, Hush: A Journal of Noise, Wild Roof Journal, Rise, Ghost City Review, Resurrection Mag, 5enses Magazine, Last Leaves, and The Chamber Magazine. He has also been included in anthologies by Quillkeepers Press, Neon Sunrise Publishing, and The Words Faire. He has been nominated for Best of the Net and is a reader for Black Mountain Press. He can be found @phoenicianpoet
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