Knotty Texts - artwork by T Newfields

How do you gather what won’t align—
these threads that will not call themselves thread,
but masquerade as shifting climes,
as weathered moods the mind has bred?
They laugh at hands trying to trace
their tangled, self-denying lace.

So, yes: normal texts needn't be twisted,
yet do not trust surface claims:
the trouble than brackets, codes, or names,
deeper than the ways we pretend meaning.

For writers twist their rhetoric tight,
to force an end, to feign a means,
yet lose the pulse and living thread,
in overworked, mechanical schemes.

However, contradictions aren’t defects,
not loose screws, not missed turns—
maybe they’re a kind of wholeness,
strange yet true, that will not flatten
into tidy lines and convenient lies.

Yes, we should permit random fluctuations
and let randomness take up its stage;
let flickers breathe and drift away,
unruled by any statistical cage.

Who cares about averages
when you’re building a world out of breath?

Juanita dragged her fingers through her hair, brow furrowed in open perplexity as she stared at the text. "What is this trying to say?" she muttered in reluctant sympathy. "Sounds like the bloke is frustrated," she added as an afterthought.

Jack nodded in immediate agreement, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. "Yeah," he sighed, staring blankly ahead as if imagining the writer's endless solitary toil. "Don't people eventually get tired of writing to themselves?"

Shu let out a short laugh, shaking his head. "I can't follow any of this," he said bluntly. "Why wrestle with something this dense? Wouldn't it be more fun to just watch something on Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, or perhaps even Apple TV?"

Juanita didn't answer right away. She kept staring at the text, as if daring it to explain itself.