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.