Sunday, April 26, 2009

tides

When you weren't looking, I slipped open a glass valve that sucked in the breath between us, that pant and humidity. I collected your airborn spittle with a porous fan, passed it through a chromatographer, so that I could isolate the compounds that once conjured a flower garden to untangle from my mouth. I clipped your toe-nails, scrapped off skin from your elbow, shaved the hair off your stomach, clipped the bristle from your nose and did all that was required of me to hone that poison that so gushed from lip brim to flesh rim, for an antidote, so that I could be immune of you.

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Paper-thin boys with scribbled-on-black-marker moustaches with pic nic tablecloth worthy plaid shirts. How? A cohort of EarthFirst!ers laced birch bark with serrated steel saws to bark back at lumberjacks, they caught in their machinery, and sliced a few jugulars. Now, there are all these plaid shirt spectres haunting society and seeking vengeance by strangling the torsos of Green-indie hipsters, belying themselves as ironic. In truth, plaid shirts are preying on society with a bloodstained thirst for vindication. Be warned.

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Where was I? It was somewhere between the moment when I wasn't and when I was about to. In other words, when I had yet to begin but hadn't quite finished. To clarify, I was doing nothing. That's it. This is the story between when it happened, it being that aforementioned instant when it had yet to happen at all. I was drinking out of an empty water bottle. Viz, I was breathing. Something was written on the underside of my eyelids, or so I had been told, but I lacked the necessary light as to illuminate the message from inside my head. To resolve my predicament, I took a knife and cut along the seams so connecting my fleshy eye flaps to my face, and held them before me. Confused, I had somehow managed to muff the order. Did they read “I am” or was it “am I?”

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What of whales that fall in love 10,000 leagues beneath the sea, stumbling into each other amidst the dark, and forget to breathe?

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Look at all this space! 'Nough to fill a yawn! Or clog the ocean! Or bridge you and I!
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We've become like backwash from two months ago: dilute and residual. You were my doorknob moment: fleeting and relevant. Now, I am in a different room. Here, there are white paper-thin blinds, blind walls: they are pale as the eyes of a walleyed fish. There's a wind, it feels like steel against my cheek. There is no furniture, nor ornaments, or fixtures. I am its sole adorement. Here, I do crouch, a makeshift couch, a property. Here have I sat so long that a ring of dust does mark itself along the floor, skin particles having shaken from my shoulders, my hips. I am without water.

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