The meaninglessness of existence ceases when one learns to appreciate beauty.
Sun shines intensity, the sharper the shadows cast
Garish make-up and outfitted vainglory, the duller she felt. She feels as a puppet feels, dancing powerlessly to the submission of each and every element of cosmic tyranny. calculations dancing on my pillows
and answers weaving into dreams. pretending that I am forgetfulness and forgetting that I am pretense. Denunciable,
because you are lawless; disintegrated like a ray of light; refracted from a shard of glass; lost as you have always been. No matter what, I am strange to you. I am strange to the people around me like the moons circling Saturn. A gap exists between us that cannot be closed when gravitational forces and centrifugal forces lock us in place. I asked you to at least look at me from a different angle---say, at 45 degrees rather than at your perpendicular 90 degrees habit. Maybe then we would not exist on parallel planes. In the end, I still had to adjust the angle of your head myself like I did for the life-size mannequin I bought one baking Sunday afternoon, and all you said was, "I like weird, but not that weird," and all I could do was pop the head off the mannequin as I watched you leave
one after the other. Where I am there are plumes of soft cotton swabs in the sky, as if the airplanes with its needle heads have been diving in and out, drawing the clouds apart like a suture unraveling. Now they're wispy and dry as cottoncandy. It's the time of the year when wintry skies are gone, and the sun is beaming down majestically in its backdrop of forget-me-not blue.
I really despise the prolonged feeling of sun on skin. I imagine a sunny-side-up, all white and yolk, sizzling in a frying pan, and feel glad that the baby chick is dead before it lands itself in such blistering hell. I imagine myself 70% water, which all humans are, and that I am cool as a fresh can of soda from the fridge. It doesn't make sense that where I am there is no one but me and this girl trudging through the landscape of sea-green grass. They wave like a sea of spectacular choreography, and we bury in and out of sight behind its dancing blades. Unlike the calm waters, this green sea does not glitter and sparkle rainbows like fish scales do. The only glitter comes from the girl's wrist where a gilt spangle snakes round and round. It winks at me and I look up. Her name is Runa and she tells me that she bought it from Bangladesh, along with her red and gold chandelier earrings. And here, we are giants and not the five-feet gnomes we are, where we stomp on ground to watch flying critters flit from leaf to leaf... Here, we feel as fragile as love, as eternal as memories, as indestructible as energy, yet as ephemeral as all things. |
With a smile every step forward, my eyes are adjusting to this dark. I no longer see microscopic tadpoles wiggling in the air. All I see is the map of the world, continents drifting apart and lands submerging, ships capsizing, cities crumbling under magnitude-8.7 quakes, and some hundred miles away, people lying in bed trying to remember lyrics to an old song. A sister is waging warfare against her brother, while a house away a daughter is sitting in her bedroom playing with desolation. Words and ideas are slipping, bridges are burning, and skyscrapers are running for the heavens. Roads are repaved. I forget where I am, where I fit in this broken up picture of pangaea. Maybe I am Atlantis, submerging into myth as if I have never existed at all.
Leave me when the stars blink out. I'm stuffing this defected heart, rattling sighs and bleeding of pinprick wounds, back into the margins of my mind, connecting feelings to thoughts in search of my own constellations for consolation. And
then the stars blinked out. the crepuscular creature dithers
like eyes wanting to stay close against the rising sun: wanting, but not yet the time, wanting, but failing to find the time, wanting, but realizing it's only a feeling, so realizing to choose giving up feeling |