His glistening chest heaved in the half-light. Would she notice him in his pseudo-erotic pose? He sincerely hoped so. He hoped something unexpected would push their paths together. He hoped Chaos theory would finally be on his side. He hoped and hoped, and panted quietly.
The solstice is a time to feel closer to the creator, the thunder and fury of the storm. Winter wind whips around my heart, sapping my heat. I draw near to the throne of power and am disappointed by what I find--warmth and love. I wanted fear and I got love. I leave to find the winter chill somewhere else.
This magic rectangle spits light into my life. It outshines everything else and ruins my retinas. I look at you now, but you don't flash and blink, so I grow bored.
I'm in an airplane to meet Josue. There's a woman across the aisle from me who's poised and refined and attractive in her hoodie. It means nothing.
[From a journal I told myself was worse than it is]
[This is the most beautiful thing I've read in ages and I want to share it.]
If being in the band wasn't going to be a possibility for Sulimaila, then he at least wanted to be around the band. There were a couple of other boys who felt the same way. They volunteered to be the band's helpers. They would attend every rehearsal and performance. If a band member needed a glass of water or a towel to wipe the sweat off his brow, one of the helpers would get it. They were the ones in charge of setting up and packing the band's equipment.
Sometimes when the show was over, the stage lights had been turned off, and the band members were out in the crowd receiving adulation, Sumaila and the other boys would stand on the stage and hold the instruments. They wouldn't play them, they'd only stand there and hold them for a few minutes while starting into the empty chairs in the audience. They'd let the energy of their dreams seep through their hands and into the instrument, as if it were a Bible or the Koran. Maybe one day, they prayed, their dream would come true. Eventually, the other boys grew weary of being so close to something they wanted but knew they couldn't have. They stopped coming to rehearsals and shows but Sumaila didn't. He continued to dream and believe.
Pages 155-6
My First Coup D'etat
John Dramani Mahama
Stop trying so hard to sound like you know what you're doing, Robby. The things you wrote when you hated what you were writing were always your best work. Why be clever when you can be good?
He finally let go of that axe. The smith who came to take it nearly lost a hand. The poor elf's face condensed into an unrecognizable scowl when he saw the blood-soaked haft and the worn, beaten starmetal. He has taken to carrying the shifting sword, but I can tell it's not doing the trick. I hope they bring him something to do, or he will die as surely as if he were stabbed.
--
He grows daily worse.
--
Today, it arrived. It is light roan, like the flank of a deer in the low sunlight of a darkening wood. The haft is long and straight but the grip is made for much smaller hands. He reaches out a trembling hand and takes the blade. Pulling out a hammer, he gently taps the haft free and tosses it aside.
We go running. We cross easy miles in the woods until he stops at a dead ash tree. He reaches out and rips a branch straight from the tree. The bark has been stripped from it by antlers and the surface scored again and again. He takes out a knife and scrapes off the end until it seems slim enough, and taps the head onto the new shaft. He grins at me and I grin back. Now, he takes the strip of leather from our first kill, so many hunts ago, and, with the skill of easy use, begins to wind it around the handle. He binds it by itself and it stands a finished work, shoddy but workable, unbeautiful but functional, completely him and completely us. He turns to me and I tilt back my head and howl. He roars with me. We are complete again. In the stillness of the woods, the leaves scraping against their trees, he whispers, and his voice is husky: this is the Stag, the one that runs with no reason but joy.
--
The other came today. He sheathed the Stag and greeted his old friend with two hands and a wary eye. He tapped the length of the haft to see it was sound, tasted the blade to see it was sharp, and swung it round his head to see it still sang. Its singing is near deafening, now, and it hums with the kind of malevolence that gets the heart beating and puts fear in the hearts of those who think they know death. It hums with the quiet anticipation of the hunt, waiting with explosive energy to break out and destroy. It hums like wind though tree tops or like ice in the cold, like a lake on a night that kills.
It feels like a kindred spirit, and we welcome it back. I can hear emotion deep in his voice and I can smell his sincerity. This one is the Fang, he says, the one that waits to strike.
--
Together, disparate. Two parts of a larger whole. We'll see who can stand against us now.
Shelby slit my throat today. The crimson cascade rolled down the designer shirt of Egyptian linen and pooled in my navel. Hours later, she finally stopped crying and sat, distractedly picking at the mournful and crusted flakes. She rubbed her hands together, rolling the smear on her hands into countless tiny cylinders of hand grime and lifetime, eventually slapping her thighs to clear them. If only I could have spoken, then. The things I could have said! Don't worry; I'm sure you had good reason. Don't worry, it's not like I blame you. Don't worry, sometimes these things happen. Don't worry, I knew the risks. Don't worry, don't worry.
Her delicate little feet left just the faintest impression of themselves on the unfeeling linoleum, smudged at toe and heel from the scuff of her stride, marked indelibly in the last-wet remnants of my blood.
The next residents of the little downtown colonial will get the stains out with a cheap vinegar recipe. The young couple who buy from them will never know anyone died here. Things will go back to just the way they should be.
Well, I don't know what to tell you. I guess when I was picking up the pieces of my life, I found a sharp edge or something. It's really a considerable amount of blood. Can't you just hold me until the end?
You can? Oh, good. No one should die alone.
The sound of your choir is so beautiful, but I can't separate its sound from your own. I try to hear you in it, even though you practice for hours to blend your voice so subtly and artfully that to my untrained ears the sound is as many aspects of a single voice. Even so.
This song, especially, I love the sound of you. You lift the noise up from an almost imperceptible pianissimo into a swelling grandissimo trumpet blast, the utterance of angels, the utmost volume of your hundred vocal folds, the outspread wings of a sound that takes the shape of an enormous bird as it settles to the shape of the church. Every feeling of the crowd is tuned to a feverish ecstasy by the glory of word and tone. We rise to the edges of our emotional limits, driven onward by the energy ripped from the conductor by your voice, playing back against each other in a reciprocal loop, feedback upon feedback, drawing us into the same rapture. I look at your face and hear your myriad voice lifting bell-like from the up-turned face I know so well and I am full of you in this moment, full to bursting with words and emotion.
But my moment is bittersweet, the taste desirable and overpowering to my sense. As if gifted to me by a cruel future, I know that this mood of glory and light, the meeting of your voice and the raw edge of my consciousness, is too much for my limited knowledge of spirit and void. My grasp on things that cannot be known is feeble and worried and you exceed it so far that I love the you that you have now become. The voice the voice the voice, it coaxes me to further heavens even through I know I will never fly like this again; my wings will melt, beeswax clinging to me as I plummet, ears full of your sound.
You will come to me after the concert is over and open your mouth and I will find the boy I met long ago under entirely typical circumstances, not the mythic creature that, sole object of my desire, I can never have now that I have for a moment met. I know I will be cruel. Please forgive me. I will leap away from you and throw myself to the froth and tumult to find the voice I know you can possess. I will sink beneath the waves of anonymous humanity rather than deal with the face that should be glorious portal to a voice so magnificent as to weep in smiles. I would rather die, solitary, than go without the voice now I have true knowledge of it. I don't mean it to hurt you.
You know I love you, but I love the siren more. Keep the wax and give me rapture.
I was pleasantly surprised yesterday by something that upset my sense of description. Usually the right word just bubbles up to the surface unbidden, like some sort of children's movie witch's cauldron—a cornucopia in a pot, a mélange on the make.
And yet, there was no word for what I was seeing. Could it be that the powers of diminution could have failed me? I was transfixed. The simple act of condensing my approximate state into a single utterance, a phrase or word, anything, was lost to me as surely as if it had grown legs and merrily skipped away.
First, of course, came the shock, but then I grew to be fond of the feeling as the sense of it grew in me. I was lost in uncharted waters, adrift in a sea of words the waves of which I had unheedingly trod for a lifetime. I suppose it is a feeling which will become more common with years and the slow, inexorable degradation of my neural capacities, but for now, the feeling is a pleasant stranger with whom I am just now getting acquainted.
Quite unexpectedly, I found myself swimming in the pool at my neighbor's house. The party has been so good up to that point that I hardly dared interrupt to point out the girls' error: that I was not, in fact, wearing a swimming suit but instead an expensive wool suit and silk tie, both in a rather dashing shade of gray. Really, it wasn't their fault as much as mine. I knew it was a pool party when I came over. I even knew that many of the attendants were inebriated, so really, what did I expect? In their defense, they had no way of knowing that I just wanted them to turn the music down; they couldn't hear me over the rough beat of the enormous speakers. And to be quite honest, I hadn't been swimming in such a long time that it wasn't impossible to derive some slight joy from the feel of water in my leather shoes.
I'm shaking slightly from the exertion of holding your weight, but if I let go, the shaking won't stop before we hit the ground anyway. I'm going to shift my weight--I assume that sharp intake of breath signifies pain. Well, we'll get out of this one way or another. Either someone will find us and take pity on us, or there's always the long, slow, inevitable fall to our little, meaningful deaths.
From Faulkner: "held by that electric furious immobile urgency."
Sometimes I feel too small to be believed. The walls expand out and the world opens up until I'm lost. I'm not saying it's pleasant; heaven forbid! I'm merely saying that sometimes the world seems a much more dangerous place than any of us realize and I should perhaps be far more afraid of it than I am. Truth be told, the open metaphorical places of the world are far more numerous than we commonly recognize, and it's up to us to notice and do something about it. Ice simply chosen to feel like I've been engulfed. Yes, I think that word will do nicely. Engulfed. That's me. So what have I chosen to do in those moments of complete obstruction, when the world is a smothering element? Well, I guess the common answer has been to feel small and then run away. That's how I deal with conflict.
[Where did the ending go? I thought I was going somewhere. I must have lost my touch on reality.]
There were some who tried the Brighton line with a single sheet of innocent paper. There was no simple bureaucracy here; the entire working machinery of rubber stamps in London was called into play. Thus, the travelers often found themselves unbelievably detained.
[I love the sound of this. The middle line is what I woke up repeating to myself. But I can't help feeling to myself that the entire thing, though beautiful, is punctuated utterly wrong.]
[Also, I can't spell bureaucracy. The key,apparently, is "bureau." My cheating with the Google voice recognition only gives me "do you rock chrissy," and I can't help but wonder. Do you? Do you rock, Chrissy?]
The furnishings loom formidable, shadows with weight. My refrigerator, covered with the alphabetic magnet ramblings of a dyslexic household, has now become a creature of myth, bristling with sharp surfaces and kit from within. The chairs are traps for toes, a hundred legs thrust into indefinable darkness. The lamps are winged, ready to take flight on transparent skin. The walls expand and corners become erratic, close or far, moving to make room for the attack dogs: couch, coat rack, desk. Everything is an obstacle, madeunfamiliar and hostile by night.
My blind wife calls from the next room "Honey, did you see?"
I'm very starved to the moment in Perks of Being a Wallflower in which the characters agree on their own infinity. Starved isn't the word I chose, but my phone chose it for me. I long for a moment in which I can be so sure of my own infinity.
My favorite tunnel in town goes under missionary ridge and sometimes I drive miles out of my way just to go beneath its years of history. The old civil war is in its name and the CCC is in its construction and a global community of commerce drives through it.
Tonight, I rolled my windows down to disk in the light and sound of the place and a beater passed me, old enough to rattle and smoke, but loud enough to satisfy what my Toyota was never designed to. He revved hard in a low gear, ramping the machine back on its suspension. I stuck my arm out the window and shook my first into the night air.
That man and I parted ways at two am on a Sunday morning, never knowing each other. We are not infinite. But I have this moment, and I'll continue to look for the moment my life.
This entire post will be recorded using Google's voice identification system. It's not so much my artistry, but it will do.
Toys brillig the slidey toes did gyre and gimble in the way babe all them see where the board grows the more math grade. Beware the Jabberwock, my son the jaws that bite the claws that catch beware the Jubjub bird and Sean the firmness Bandersnatch. So took he is also read in hand long time to make some phone she sought so rested he buy the TomTom tree and a while and thought. And as in official thought he stood the Jabberwock with eyes of flame came with flying through the told you would and burbled as it came! 1212 and through and through the vorpal blade with Snickers snack! He left it dead and with its head he went well um thing back. And hostile slain the Jabberwock? Oh come to my arms my boy friend just a Kalu Caillat he joke tokle in his joy. Twas brillig on the slide it over did gyre and gimble in the way babe Allman see where the boar Groves Rasta outgrabe.
