I’m exhausted. Exhilarated? An ‘e’ word. Though ‘e’ is far to common a letter to be lovable. Find me a ‘q’. A ‘j’. The quiet ways they jostle against the palate. The alveolar ridge. Burbling over the tongue in clumsy tumbles. The way words ought to more often. In jigs across the larynx.
Archive for the 'snippets from somewhere' category
Once upon a World in a Time far, far away
Ours was a grand and glorious love affair. The fabric of clichés — the pattern from which clichés became threadbare. It began with a toe. Or maybe it ended with a toe. Somewhere in the affair was the incident of the toe in the night. And if you have never heard the phrase Our love is deeper than the cut that severs a toe, perhaps you have never known how exquisitely inexplicable these compulsions of devotion are.
Second floor (II)
I can see the TV again, flickering darkly. He has stepped out onto his patio for a cigarette. The ash end flares orange into the midnight parking lot. He must see the little lamp in the window of my office nook and the shape of my head, but I don’t think he can tell I am looking at him. Truthfully, I’m not certain that he is looking up at me. So perhaps we have been staring at each other curiously unconscious of self. Never acknowledging with wave or nod the seconds that we shared in silence. Never betraying awareness of the other’s presence. But maybe he, like me, gloats over a few stolen glimmers of a human across the pre-autumn evening.
Comments are off for this post
Second floor
Silence is all I have tonight. The silence of sparsely populated buses and late-night cyclists. I can see the flicker of a TV through a window across the parking lot. The screen flicks colours faster than my eye can register from this distance. So I play guessing games: video games, the news, sports, an old movie. Maybe all swirled into the fuzz of channel surfing. Sub-aural messages into the darkness. They hold me like the strange touch of a new friend. I shut my blinds and pretend there is nothing but silence.