You're listening to I have no process. I am your
host Nicholas England This is the first episode
of our second season What is titled "No Voice."
Indeed there is a direct link between "no voice"
and "no process." The discerning listener will understand
I have never said that I do not have a process,
but rather I have no process. It is the same
for my literary voice. I have a voice. That voice
is no voice. This isn't a matter of clever semantics.
It is the most sacred aspect of my art. This
podcast is produced by Bryce McManus and features
an original score from Tim McNally. "No Voice"
will be presented in three episodes in a familiar
format of monologues and poetry. At season's
end there will be an ebook of the collection
available for sale on our Patreon as well as
a bonus episode for paying members. I want to
thank everyone in our community for their unwavering
support. It really has been incredible. So far,
we've met every goal when it comes to membership
and financing. But we want to keep growing our
membership, free or paid, as much as we can.
This is a big year for us. So please, spread
the word to those you think would actually enjoy
this sort of thing. They can follow us on Instagram
at I Have No Podcast and find all of our materials,
including membership exclusives, at our Patreon.
I do insist on saying, I'm sorry it took us so
long to get this second season to your ears.
A year ago, I moved onto a property that has
required unexpectedly colossal effort in terms
of its early maintenance and improvement, and
I was seriously ill for multiple months this
winter. There were delays, but thank goodness
we made it here. Now, I have but to make the
wait worth your while. So without further ado...
Whoever you are, and whenever you are, I want
you to imagine that I am dead. Depending on when
you listen to this, I may have passed away just
yesterday, or last month, or last year, or perhaps
I died more than a century before you were born.
Whatever the case may be, whether true, or just
a fantasy, be it from throat cancer, heart failure,
or the toil of some gulag, imagine that I am
gone. For this will beg the question on my mind.
What earthly work have I left behind? I've thoroughly
documented my own existence, despite a youthful
aversion to autobiography. Yet when it comes
to humanity, I've never written anything that
was of the moment. I'm not a journalist, nor
a social critic. I initially trained my creativity
upon the classics, and thus made my ambition
beholden only to what is timeless. I've taken
great pains to remove predictable anachronisms
from my work. I don't want any of its meaning
to expire, to be thrown out by future generations
without a second thought. I've never written
exclusively for my contemporaries. Indeed, I
am as interested in speaking to the yet too young
and the legion unborn as I am to my own generation.
I think I've always been this way. Though it's
taken me a long time to have anything real to
say. I've shed my skin many times. My wife has
branded me a master of reinvention Though everyone
has their limits. There was a moment shortly after
my mother died when my ego was a single speck.
I experimented with a potential realization that
if I was ever going to annihilate my lifelong
urge toward being a man of letters, this was
my best chance to push the craft from the pier,
to give up the ghost without pain or remorse.
My attachment to all plans, hopes, and prophecies
was threadbare. Stop pretending, I thought. The
dawn star rises over a new frontier. Don't inhibit
yourself with familiar aims and designs. You
aren't the man the boy imagined he would be.
Life insisted upon itself and eclipsed your dreams.
You've proved you're strong enough to surrender
your delusions. So surrender the biggest one.
Make yourself useful for a change. Serve the
living. Then may you die without complaint. I
gazed at this nebula of possibility. I trembled
violently, and I wept. I tried, but I couldn't
do it. It was a stupid idea, an offering to a
false and nameless god. So what if my identity
is just a dream? The world is a convenient shorthand
for an incomprehensible mess of various entities.
The world is a dream. Why shouldn't I follow
suit? I've only got so much time here. The earth
interrupts our personal journeys with meaningless
misadventure all the time. An object falls from
a construction site only to crush the skull of
a passerby. A noxious chemical leaches into the
groundwater of an unassuming neighborhood. A
mob of people who weren't hugged enough as children
stone to death a woman whose parents were born
in a land far away. It's nothing personal, nothing
purposeful, just collateral damage in a story
that has no center, no arc, and no lesson at
the end. Today, in the year of Someone's Lord
2025, there is an overwhelming amount of meaningless
misadventure. A lot of personal dreams are dissolving
as one collective era shifts into another. One
can practically hear the gears of history cackling
as they pick up speed. Our daily attentions are
being taxed more than ever on matters greater
than ourselves. The pace of change outstrips
our ability to absorb it. With our heads on the
swivels of intentionally conflicting headlines,
we go cross-eyed, glaring at these multiple
horizons. No matter. We still have bills to pay
and families to care for. We need to get out
on a walk before it gets dark. Need to make sure
we get a good night's sleep Another big day tomorrow.
Is there really any time for poetry? No less
poetry that was written before the algorithm
of reality waxed to its inferno? I don't reckon
we're living in a very poetic time. Politics reigns
over religion and philosophy. Postmodernism has
deconstructed the very act of speaking. The difference
between bots and humans is blurring more each
day. We are post-truth. We have attention deficit.
We inhabit the generational exhaustion of living
in interesting times. With all that in mind,
don't you want a little continuity? Don't you
want something beautiful from the past to come
with us into the monstrous future? Thomas Gray's
"Elegy written in a country churchyard" is just
as poignant now as it ever was. So too, Eden
Ahbez's "Nature Boy." Don't forget them in an effort
to make space for more headlines. Don't forget
them for anything. I'm no Grey or Ahbez. No Angelou
or Elliot. I'm just some American guy named England
who made it through life by writing it down.
Make no mistake, I did it for me. But I think
you know I did it for you the same. So let's
indulge each other, shall we?
I Wish There Were An Alcove. I wish there were an alcove with a
bench to sit upon, and there, underneath in a
compartment, a stone box that would whisper up
to me all those things that I already know, yet
I'm bound to forget in every day's unyielding vertigo.
No Other Nature. There is no other nature.
There is not another earth. There is no destiny
but where the wind bears our dissevered grass.
There is no portrait of us. There is not a vault
in Heaven where such art could hang. There is
no same dream where you and I kiss, when moonbeams
fall and undercurrents creep, and clothes descend
from bodies in the dark There is no family. Your
blood is yours. There is no creed but a fevered
excuse. Man is never born. Never dies. Man blooms
and closes. Drifts unto form, through impulse alone.
Some men are prone to misconstrue their essence
for a soul. They mark their days in disparate
ledgers. Chalk on prison walls. They wail aloud
and wait to hear the echoes of their detonated
fragments. The pity of strangers calling themselves
friends. They pull threadbare that spectral cloth
of men and men. men and beasts, men and fields,
men and all the seas. They search for the right
words, they sculpt stone and fashion candles,
and this they deem good. Yet, for all that, the
creatures who walk on four legs shun verisimilitude,
living unconquered in dens far away. From the
altars we built upon their shores.
Parallax Standing in the mood of the well-lit apartment Looking
out the window Street level with darkness My
wife asleep in bed I stand alone Feeling as though
I am the only person in the world who is awake
The only person in the world who is in danger
or is safe So anything that might be moving outside
is a monster Testing the edge of an otherwise
peaceful evening. I turn in after hours of passive
lazing, walk to the bathroom to brush my teeth,
drain my bladder one last time. But then I see
something strange and unwelcome, an ingrown hair
sprouting from the shaft of my penis. A slight
protuberance, like a pimple. A painless nuisance,
and yet I don't like the look of it at all. I
pull at the hair a bit. A simple pluck ought
to do, but what it ought does no good. I flush
the toilet, grab a pair of tweezers. The water
swirling. I go at it again, casually, perhaps
unnecessarily, pull just a bit more forcefully,
precisely. An incomplete separation forms and
a thin ring of red pumps around the base of the
stalk. I went too far, and yet, not far enough.
A minor mistake, of no great consequence, but
for the wooziness now overwhelming me. Nausea
drowning the mind. I gaze into the mirror and
there is no blood in my face. I hold my heavy
weightlessness upon the vanity. Only blue, white,
blue, white, violent white, violent, violent,
violent, shaking in the belly of a horrible engine,
blue, white, blue, white, screaming out of blue,
white, shapeless, into, through, upon the blue
machinery, white teeth clattering against white
teeth clattering, each limb spasming, I am holding
myself, I am holding myself, shaking awake from
what must be a seizure. I have spawned mid-fainting.
What name? Where? I am insane. Time is not time.
Only the primal screaming. Awakened to awakening.
Edges form. A hand recognized. A receding of
a kind. A shuddered breath. A return. A man.
A return of this man. A return of Nicholas. In
the bathroom. Where it is late. Nicholas' wife
in the next room, dreaming. There is no need
to wake her. Are you sure we're not dead? Either
way, no need to wake her. It was only a fainting
spell which led to a seizure. and a brief psychosis
wherein no permanent damage was done, save the
memory of the thing. So breathe, you idiot. Stay
down. Don't get up. Don't write a sequel. See
the door handle there? Scoot over to it. Where
is your water? Always good to have that. Now
just crawl out of the bathroom and crawl into
the bedroom and climb onto the bed and burrow
into the sheets, with the lights off, just as you
always do, so as not to disturb her, and then go
to sleep, the way you ought to do The way you
would have done if you had just left well enough alone.
The Washboard. Ramps of plywood face each
other in a vortex on the crest of the hill. Elevation
upon elevation, and a space that finds its span
in foretold motion. The spokes on the wheels
of my bicycle sparkle in the firelight. The priest's
sway their censors, chanting their canticles,
stepping in rhythmic orbits around the altar.
Riding in circles enclosed within their circles,
I weave through floating torches, searing my
unstained cheeks. The washboards upon their chests
slick with viscera. caked brain manner, strands
of nerves, scalps, jawbones, minced eyelids. Me and
the ramps and my figure eights. Their masks rigid.
Black elephant smiles. Maces and flails dangling
at their sides. None stop nor threaten my way
so long as I keep moving like a shark, keep witnessing
like a child, keep conjuring disgust at my own
unstanched liquidity.
The Swamp Orchids in the salon, shifting patterns in the efflorescent
carpet on the floor, a grim moistness in your
skin, the creeping clutch of decay. Move into
a dark bedchamber, flee the color of shapes under
the canopy shadows of a hyacinth-patterned comforter.
its murk hushed blooms. Hyperventilating won't
dissolve the vegetal coursing through you, conscious
vessel occupied by mycoid sorcerers opening time
across the known boundaries. Don't dredge, plunge
into the swamp, its churning, amniotic grime,
where all bodies submerge, pull off their skin
and spring again. One oozing death birth. A portal
opens to the stars, the sky so clear and near
It can be touched with more than just your eyes.
Vaulted too in your emptied, pressurized probe.
The psychic rumbles ripple through ferns and
trees and the person is gone beyond the world
Though they left their body resting in a Himalayan
pose. Barking and growling and yipping like a
dog, lolling its limp head. A girl gazes vacantly
around, licking her lips. Each of these your mindless
meet. Hours drip, scenes change. Parlors, toilets,
other bedrooms. The loom turns time over and
shuffles again a dreamscape nebula, complete
without terminals or fountainheads. The deep
fear frenzy summons claws and sharp teeth gnashing
at the body that remembers it's a body, even
with no person inside to save or watch for. Illusions
arrive in droves to queue up for the stories
about who you yester were, but the body is floating
like a dead lily pad, and the spirit is strung
throughout the cold gap, dividing the furnace
of estranged suns. Vectors and orbits emerge
into view, the energetic disclosure of re-entry,
the unstoppable deluge of reality, the body shivering
nakedly, dismantling without a heat shield.
A crash landing, an immolation, then the long,
slow, tedious return to the once known. Immersed
in the sediments of the here, the out there,
another person, no person, never a person. One
sip of tea, no more. A nap on the couch where
it all began. A cool hand on a warm head. Pupils
locked in dilation. Taking in the imbricated
seity of zombies, asteroids, you and me. "Will
I ever be the same?" you ask. As though comfort.
was the prize you sought.
A Dog Keeps the Exit. At dusk, I climb the muddy footpaths leading
up into the hills. My shift at the furnace has
reached its end. The soot of toil stains my clothing.
The ashes of industry blanket the border of the
town's demesne, mixing with the dampness of sod
and clay caked upon my boots. When I pass the
crest of lavender and golden grass, and there
merge into the shapeless dark of the woods, I
somewhere fall under the piercing flame of an
owl's gaze. As I clomp toward home, amidst an arcade
of familiar trees, the sentinel pursues, patiently
Barely a shadow on a moonless eve. I cross into
the clearing without my abode. Smell the smoke
rising from the chimney. Catch the warm glow of
an oil lamp, gladdening its window pane. A calico
awaits me on the bridge of the gate, but before
I can reach her, she lifts and turns her head,
then bolts and vanishes into the brush. I freeze
as a mastiff the size of a stallion bursts from
nowhere beyond the house and clambers toward
me. With practiced dispassion, it checks my way.
I spy no hint of motive in its face, no trace
of cause or claim, whereas I feel penetrated,
unmasked, as though this creature has known me
from birth. His fur is silver in the night, his
eyes the deepest blue. I can taste the wetness
in his mouth, the iron tang of saliva spools.
He makes no noise within his throat, his growl
locked in silence. He simply claps his jaws to
let his sloppy spit stream between us. Unsure
what move there is to make, I watch transfixed
as the beast saunters to the edge of the lawn,
before the dense canopy of oaks whence I came,
and there stands firm his ground. He must have
sensed the winged hunter in the green, for soon
there starts an awkward rustling of leafy cloaks,
followed by a clumsy swoop, as the owl takes
the goad and crashes to the ground. It is a massive
bird, like to a human dwarf, its slight head
projecting just beneath my keeper's cavernous
maw, which with measured lentor begins to yawn.
The bird must treasure what its amber glare seeks
amidst those teeth, for it proceeds to bury its
pitch-covered crown deep within the luring gorge.
Its prize secured, the mastiff's mouth clamps
onto that heavy, spongy head. The owl, half sheathed
and fastened against its will, fails to escape,
its cramped wings flailing, helpless, no snap
retreat. Indigo feathers clatter like mails of
chain as the dog raises its head, the owl's neck
stretching, tearing, all the bones and tendons
rupturing, its gruesome moans ending coldly.
The naked torso spreads its muck upon the ground,
as the mastiff, spattered with gore, turns to
face me, trophy safe inside its mouth. It approaches
and snarls, "I'll leave this here for the women to see."
Then marches against my wordless plea,
placing the token of bloodshed at my door. The
beast runs off into the night. I rush through
the gate and fall upon the head, lifting its
greasy weight unto my chest. I wrap it in my
shirt. horrified that daughter and wife should
learn what might have slain me on the road
I delay our embraces, for which I now so ache, to
creep behind the house and find a spot of shade
somewhere by the garden wall underneath the bramble
bush a place where no one goes but in a dream
to there enshrine within a tomb of mud the totem
and the augur of my just desserts
Nightfall The flickering candle closes its flame. Snow falls
on the black garments of a weary crowd, descended
around the child. Still, but for the snowflakes
and flower petals piling atop the casket. The
chest is lowered into the grave. The women weep.
The men struggle to shovel the icy earth. Grass
frozen sharp. Lungs horrified by February's breath.
Listless gazing, spine blue agony, unmoored from
sense. The prayers are said. The mourners turn
away, then trudge the charnel field. There is
no arc for them now, no sun to ascend the cold
horizon. No vigil's kindling to awaken their mirth
One grave is not enough. They need a tomb. A house
of pure interiors hewn. Residence of silver gloom
Tilted toward the vague and vacant moon
The Talk in the Plain How often I second guess each rooted
expression. In the end, we return to silence.
Only a larger silence. Heavier. One taut with
the silhouette of something dispersed. We cannot
hold what must pass through. We are not changed,
are not moved, as is so often said. We are left
behind, then asked to leave ourselves once the
moment ends. This is the way of grief, the shame
I feel to get back to work, the day I had planned.
How disturbing is tomorrow's fresh-dug grave
if I force myself to banish it, to be practical
for the living instead. In times like these,
whenever a point is made or gesture given, we
sacrifice reality. What rebounds to us is only
the decoration of mourning, what we wear for the
sake of the mirror. when no one else is home.
I ought to pass on writing eulogies. What use
is there collecting thoughts when I see my face
where hers should be? In the photographs my cousin
sent, she turns to me. I can hear her voice,
the gentle crack in her wry and rural drawl.
Woman I never knew, in spite of our time together,
the span of my life. When she first held me,
she was already old, already on the far side
of her dreams, and she kept her mind close. I
loved her as a child, cherished her as a man,
but it is ridiculous to say I knew her. In this
restless wake, upon the reservoir of consciousness,
an oar will be pulled from its scull. It will
drip, and drip, drip and then...
Mykines Mist clung to the island like frozen breath. The village
was empty. Its people had left for the day to
go shopping, to surrender the beauty of their
backyards to us. Scholars believe the Irish were
here first. Those priests who rode their fortunes
on hide-stretched sails. Rowboats foundering
in God's cupped hands. Historians continue to
pour over the stones of forgotten walls. The
homes of men who wanted for a life without neighbors.
Saksun has tried to curb the tide of its euphoric
invaders. Those who trace the Viking roots of yore
From the Volga to Vinland, each market between
Whatever their intentions, people come to the
Faroes to die all the time. They hike slopes
without trails, in slick grass and sheep shit,
to crest a ledge and peer out over the Atlantic
Then disappear. Without bothering to check into
hotels or lodges, jumping straight into rental
cars with salt-encrusted brakes, the pilgrims
waste no time lurching off toward their own ends.
The Faroese come to fetch the bodies, without
names or relations, and add them to the ledger.
We climbed to the northern rim of Mykines, meeting
the pasture fence near the top of the cliff.
Fog filled the narrow corridor, away from the
signs warning us of landslides, the island's
neck unable to bear the weight of our enterprise.
We lingered a while with the photographers and
their puffins. Soundless silhouettes gliding
through the vapor. Once we moved on, we were
mostly alone. When we paused, we could hear the
waves crashing into the rocks below. No arrows
or ribbons showed the way. Nothing manicured
or meant for us. The pasture fence turned and
we walked into the middle of a slanted expanse.
And there, before the threshold of the next enclosure,
we met the only horse living on the island.
A stallion who charged like thunder out of the fog,
charged out of the fog, determined for us.
We spun. and ran, then spun back around. My wife
broke down the hillside, leaving me to face the
cataract of hooves upon my own. He came to me
in a rage, came to catch me by the neck and toss
me to the sea, came to rid his mind of the poison
that had summoned him to me. And like a matador,
I let him come. Let him come on a full-tilt
run. Let him come till he couldn't help but take
the high ground, though it wasn't mine to cede.
He halted at arm's reach, with a snarl and a
stare, his wild eyes menacing the body of my
bride. I raised my hands to demonstrate my sheer
subservience. The artifice, the weakness of my
human nature. We breathed hard together, our
tempers burning the island's cold shroud, exhalations
fusing with the mist. I stood beneath the horse
who'd galloped like a ghost in a twilight fair,
a stranded beast in a dwindling circus, binding
us to frank and frantic witness. One long minute
fell between us. A static swirl of bewilderment.
Wordless pacts sealed in fear. Then, as if in
a straitjacket, he tore off the way we'd come
Taking up the attack once more against his constant
and unyielding foe. The limit of his durance.
The emblem of his woe. That ten-foot gap between
the pasture fence and the sea below.