"No Voice" // Episode One

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.