Thursday, April 15, 2010

Maybe a Beginning (read: middle, end, etc.)

After a shot rang out and Eddie's forehead leaked something red, something red...she couldn't place it...and his eyes rolled up as if floating to the surface of some invisible body of water...and he slumped...she couldn't place it...Jane continued to describe all the minute flavors of her tea, very confused now, but maintaining the decorum as if she had stepped into the middle of the highway and it was the swerving, horn-blaring, tire-ripping, metal-crunching, automotive tonnage hurtling towards her that she addressed with the details of her tea. It was not until nearly three minutes after her teacup had fallen and shattered, bits of century-old porcelain and puddled brown water on her wood floor that she heard the shot.

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Things that are sharp

Lots of things are sharp; tiredness, awakeness, ice sculptures of lonely people, combusting lonely people (though hardly spontaneous), lines on dark roads, dark on lined roads, hollowness (though hardly spontaneous), fifty-seven mile-per-hour tire hums, the smile of a guitar neck though I bet you never saw it and thought of it as straight-faced though you'd be sad to find out you were wrong, the translucent skin of a window through which you hear the young heartbeat of an old 3 a.m. city, the memory of summer's coast pyrotechnics and the echo of bang along the wall of your inner-ear and gunpowder mist tickling your nostril at the salty outstretched hand of an ocean's shore somewhere you grew up too fast or didn't grow up at all or grew just enough to watch the salty shore betray you, good china, Hải Ninh at the Chinese border and at the border of a salty shore like yours, duck quack, a mirror's tempo, a mirror's gait, a mirror's swagger, a mirror's polite shared glance in public, a mirror's private brick-powder stare, a mirror you can't see into, a mirror you can see right through, a mirror that remains in one piece, a collection of many jagged mirrors, the opposite of stars, what happens to stars when they have been sad for a long time, what one wishes for upon a blue giant versus what one wishes for upon a red dwarf, biting wind, swallowing softness in the center of her palm, vows, fighting (for, against), the smile of a guitar neck you will never see it if you yourself aren't melting along the edge, melting, but shaped by the edge, angled, and always sharp, angled, so that you cannot turn your neck to see what dull things have been cut, yet you are cutting them, and melting, and there comes a time when the dull things will realize that to not be cut is to deny sharpness, and to deny sharpness is to not be cut.