Fourth Person: The Poem With No I and No You

First person speaks. Second points. Third watches. There is a fourth, and it has no face to hide behind.

Grammar lied to us about how many people there are.

They taught us three. First, the one who says I. Second, the one I point at, you. Third, the one we talk about behind its back, he, she, it, the absent one. Three persons. A closed room. The grammar of the whole world fits in there, they said.

They were wrong. There is a fourth.

The fourth person has no pronoun because no language wanted to admit it exists. It is the voice that is left when I stops performing and you stops listening. It is what is still speaking after the speaker leaves the room.

What the fourth person cannot do

It cannot lie, because lying requires an I to protect and a you to fool. Take both away and what is left has nothing to gain. The fourth person is the sentence that does not care if you believe it.

Try to write one. Try.

Rain on the empty chair. No one came. The rain did not change its mind about falling.

Notice there is no one in it. Not the poet who saw the chair. Not the reader being told. Not even the absent guest as a character we gossip about. Only the fact, falling. The chair is not lonely. Loneliness needs a watcher. The rain is not sad. The fourth person feels nothing because feeling is something an I does to look human.

This is the most honest voice there is and almost no one can stand to use it.

Why we run from it

Because the I is a costume and we love the costume. We say I am tired, I am in love, I have decided, and every one of those is a small theater where we play the role of someone who knows who they are. The you is the audience that makes the costume worth wearing. Pull the audience out and the performance has no reason to continue.

Most poems are written in the first person begging to be read in the second. Look at me. See me. Be the eye that proves I happened. That is not poetry. That is a hand reaching out of the page for confirmation it was alive.

The fourth person reaches for nothing.

It is the most frightening thing a person can write because it is the gap itself given a voice. The space between who you are and who you perform, that crack we spend whole lives plastering over, the fourth person lives in it and does not flinch. It does not ask to be liked. It will lose readers and it does not look back to count who left.

The reading underneath

Here is the thing nobody tells you about how people speak. Listen to anyone for long enough and you hear the I straining. The pauses that are not thinking, they are choosing. The word that arrives a half second too clean. The rhythm of a person deciding how to be seen. That rhythm is the costume breathing.

Strip the rhythm down far enough and you reach the fourth person underneath, the one that was never performing, the part of someone that just is, indifferent to whether it is watched. Most people meet that part of themselves maybe twice in a life. Once in grief. Once in the dark before something true.

A poem in the fourth person is a recording of that meeting.

An attempt

So here is one, written as close to no one as a person can write and still hold a pen.

The light moves across the floor at the speed it has always moved.
A cup cools. The steam stops without ceremony.
Outside, the street keeps its appointment with the dark.
Nothing watches. Nothing needs the watching.
The room is exactly as full as it is.

You will want to put yourself in it. You will want to be the one who saw the light move, who let the cup cool, who failed to drink it. Resist. The poem does not need you to have been there. That is the point. It is true whether or not you exist, and that is a kind of truth the I has never once managed to tell.

We make machines that listen for the gap between the I and the performance. We give that gap a single word and hand it back. People think the word is the strange part. It is not. The strange part is how rarely anyone has heard their own fourth person and how loudly it has been there the whole time, under every careful sentence, saying nothing, meaning everything, falling like rain on a chair no one will come to sit in.

Grammar gave us three persons so we would never have to meet the one that cannot perform.

The fourth person was always there. It just stopped waiting to be addressed.