haze

This place heats up. So much haze. This must be what my brain looks like when I'm lackluster. Bumblebees crash into their own reflections even when open windows are right next to them. They don't want in though. They're just buzzing around trying to catch a glimpse of themselves.

cavity

There is man I know who knows words. He shows me a poem but I don’t understand it.

And he, who shows me this poem is above me, academically, intellectually. I wish I could say something profound but there is only profoundness in that which I struggle to explain. How given the author, in the flesh, in sight of me, at the precise time, then I would know something a little more substantial, slightly more redeeming. I’d know his motivation, what was in his heart as he penned it, if he was anxious, sad, broken, lugubrious.

Just as I know of this man, standing close, with the book open, of how he hides, of why his eyes like thorns and mist, tear me apart. I want to tell him I love him because he is fragile and needing of it. And because I mean it.

I barely know him though, and all he knows of me is that I don’t understand what he’s just read to me.

I am in this moment both the idiot and the savant with no way of defending how information is carried to me, invisible and inarticulable.

So distracting with him so close, in body, in mind, in emotion. I am not the lunkhead I appear, I want to say.

He stands there post-reading and I look at him with blankness. I barely know him and yet I care for him.

Silence, awkward with my non-reaction to the scribe and to the pause filled with so much bulging emptiness.

I want to reach for him, but know this is a ditch not yet dug, and so I settle for concealment, not of my supposed ignorance to this piece of literature, but of the precarious way I see into his heart.

mutated

Sulking, pitifully, laying in the grass, damp from the dew. It was such a letdown of colossal proportions. Dreams were beginning to seem logical, now that reality had eclipsed the line of unbelievable. He had walked through the tempid, viscous wall, effortlessly, impossibly so, and yet what he found was a world even further entrenched in fantasy. He had just come from a place where he could levitate and now he was in a place where he could morph back and forth form solid to liquid, from dirt to water, from oil to ice. And for what good he mused, insincerely, being the only one left to bear it witness. How could the end of all things trump his yesterday off-white days?

In a flash, it was his feet, eyes, heart, skin, blood, body that burdened him, doomed him, salvaged him, here, in the wasteland of what was once the planet. He was just an unwitnessed catastrophe, miracle, genetic anomaly, sentenced to forever unravel the before with the after. He was now, just a person, a mutated superman with no hope for glory. All the power, beauty and freedom to do nothing but die alone next to the pulsating dandelions, crawling like sea urchins with legs towards the sea. He thought of following them, thinking all might still be normal in the black oblivion of the Atlantic. Maybe he was meant to go there. Maybe it was his home now.

thing

Every one of us has that ‘thing’ we think we should chase away, shoo off like an abhorrent house-fly when in fact that thing may actually be chasing us, wanting, needing to be in our lives, desperate for us to just welcome it in like a wise-yoda-type-man in need of a hot meal and long shower.

Joy is there, underneath who I am.

hop

And she's stone sober, none of these influences to blame. How can she explain the blueness, subtle, not quite lumbering on her, more like the heaviness of a grasshopper on her arm, though, a million grasshoppers, which is very different than one. One she could handle but it is the sheer scope of all of them at once that is challenging. Some people feel it more like a lead coat but for her it isn’t that massive. It is more like a shawl spun of silk yet laced with despondency. Sometimes she just cries and it comes from somewhere deep, so deep I wonder if its location is in another universe, another lifetime.

place

There was must and mildew on the walls. Checkers and zig-zags etched into the cement, dank wall, almost making it pretty. If not for the horror down here it would be alluring, mystical and enticing. There will be no mention of this place because of the rumors, because of the judgements. There is no love for those places deemed illogical and whimsical. Only the forget-me-nots and odd balls inhabit this inhabitable place. But I won’t apologize for its darkness. I refuse to paint my brush of blue along the wall. It is not meant to be altered. To do so would insult its journey and evolution. To at last separate ourselves from our senses means perhaps for one snuffed out moment, we can truly love.