to slide past the pains of honesty
in the shadow of home,
two, filled hollowness with ambiguities and
set silence adrift on hardwood echoes.
–
one, stashed happiness for strangers,
delighting in the simplicity of brief encounters
one, shed hurt with cyclical tenderness,
shivering up hopes that slipped away in the sighs of exhaling
–
two, slept in parting.
shifted as parallels, juxtaposing for the break.
veiled eyes, washing serendipity asunder.
to dream of befores.
Will be moments late; although it may still be considered fashionably so. In a polite quarrel with some honey.
We humans are deceptive, even to ourselves. We write in half-truths. No one, for instance, truly writes of love. Instead, we write of that which our love had the potential to be, that which it was not, or that which time has softened into fondness.
When Mark was born, his mother thought his bloody face resembled Cicero–after he was beheaded. The eldest son of a physicist and a professor of Russian literature, he built transistor radios and read Bulgakov while other children played with Legos and read C.S. Lewis. He was a mischievously pensive child who liked very much to remove the inner workings of clocks and hide that which did not fit dutifully back inside. The clock, or VCR, or radio–because really, one cannot be forever trapped in singularity–would return to the shelf or table with little to discern it from before; except that one or twice, his mother happened upon his stash while tidying his room. And thus he was forced at the age of ten to electrify the doorknob. He was sorry to offend, but told them with the utmost patience and grace that he couldn’t have people coming and going from his room as if it were a rail station; he required privacy to hatch those plans that would lead to great accomplishments in his twenties, before his genius began to steadily decline at thirty.
It was a pressing deadline to be sure. He had already begun by reprogramming the application icons to redirect his classmates to porn. But as his teacher did not understand the intricacies involved, he was subsequently banned from bringing floppies into the school computer lab. Undeterred, he proceeded with his new coded creation, and carried it into the lab stored safely in his own memory.
I sip coffee, staring at blank bottoms for grounds to foretell my fortunes; but in this day and age, all is too refined to reveal truth.
I would have it turn and turn again
and yet it lingers,
the gray cold hardness resisting
the unfolding of
pressured minerals pressing out modernity.
It is a modern mind, this,
my computer.
Dust settles one flake before the other, revealing layers waiting for a combustion of sorts to revive each one in its due time.
