Canvas Pt.0
was it you who said that life is just a line on the palm of my hand,
making its way across our geography,
like
alluvial
straits
and cutting jagged pathways
through our hands, before settling on your chest,
finding a place
altogether unpopulated?
or that "electricity" was defined merely by the lines
that i traced, up and down your cold sleeping spine, in motions slowed only by the heat of our
eyes (and the lack of words or need for words in that moment that held only this life)
in a way i think you're right.
I'm feeling akin to a metaphor - when did THAT happen?
I'm counting every verse in a way that makes it seem important -
and you're hard asleep in the depths of these dreams,
your skeleton tracing a faultline across this crooked bed and
ultimately settling with one arm across my forehead and one ear to the ceiling,
everybreath, revealing an aspect of this geography.
and all i want to do is join you there, my skeleton tracing a faultline across this crooked bed,
revealing aspects of this geography, in a rather synchronized and syncopated rhythm.
(if this should end so abruptly i should find it improbable,
time is moving sideways in synchronized syncopated rhythm and our skeletons are topographies of
an otherwise barren geography.)
i am the earth...
"i am the earth,
and you are the air,
and all the rest
is really just bullshit"
"i was the sun
and you were an ocean
and i crawled, from
your bed, and i scrawled,
a letter on your eyelids,
until i lost my name,
until i lost everything.
now then, what do you
think of that?"
"our hearts, our heads, our
brains, our feet, our legs,
our hands, they are all
just machines, because
i used to watch the moon
fall into the skyline
under the flickering
streetlamps, lit, lighting
the asphalt below
where all the people
waved and screamed
and shouted and
whispered condolences
(i could never spell my own name
not even on the first day
not even in the last)"
the light,
streams in
through the cracks
in your skeleton
and the floorboards
and the wall
and the windows;spiderwebs;remnants of
better things
and the numbers
the math; the algebra
can't explain
the way you write your name
on my eyelids
in the dark
in crooked
and angular strokes
"you shouldn't do this to yourself,
it's all just temporary
anyway, and regardless of
the depth of your speech,
you will never be able to tell me these things
that you always wanted to
because you could never spell your own name,
you could never do a thing"
"i'll never be a winner,
i'll always be a sinner.
but either way,
it's the same,
the streetlights will always flicker,
and i will never sleep,
and i will always miss you,
always always miss you,
and you will never see me as
i trip over my own speech"
"you're comatose,
and still you stutter,
in poetry, in verse, in meter, in rhyme,
and you fell,
a whisper,
and moved backwards because
i was the earth
and you were the air
and we were together
and your name was the same
and the streetlights they flicker,
in poetry, in verse, in meter, in rhyme,
a morse code moratorium
(the lights in here are getting darker)
what happened
to those words
because i was the earth,
and you were the air,
and we were the atmosphere
and we floated away
now, then, what do you say to that?"
your face was in the mirror,
reflected, reversed
"I'll never know a thing"
and in that moment
that you saw the sky
you finally
finally
awoke.
"sometimes i wish
that all of the stars in the sky
would disappear for just a moment
so i could stare
upwards and just
float
away
now then, what do you say to that?"
About the author:
William A. Clark is a young&naive 16 year old who dreams of paying taxes and driving cars and adopting small African children and also space travel. He also takes photos and designs things, and sometimes he makes music. he has a spot on the web, at http://speechbbl.isgreat.org, which is still under major construction, but he still thinks is really kind of cool.
© 2011 Word Riot
