A Stain. Yes! A stain.
Not to be confused with a scar.
No—no, no. no.
A scar is poetic
even meaningful.
From a scar we can learn,
but a stain—no.
People laugh at it.
As if it was a joke.
A stain is a misshape.
A stain rots.
Value diminishes instantly—
Climbing deep between woven thread
Scrub it out. Yes, scrub it out.
It’s still there making light grey dark
clinging like festering cracked skin
why this one?
why not another?
Are you still there in secret?
Near the middle of my back
I hardly ever saw you outside of work, but at work we talked often. We were a part of something that was outside of our world at the time. People that found us incompetent surrounded us, but we knew better and we leaned on each other when we needed to. At that time we didn’t understand the details of things. We didn’t comprehend the importance of the cogs we just saw the wheel. I knew you for only a few years, but the memory of you haunts me like some smiling ghost. You worked by that hot metal and you died by it. You were my friend and still are. You deserved more and one day maybe I can give more.
A long hair of hers, spanning at least eight inches and covered and wrapped with black like a long coated gangster concealing a dangerous weapon, clung to the flat part of the porcelain and draped down into the sink like a sales banner on a closed down super store. As the water hit the hair it waved and you can imagine the wind catching the loose side of that same advertisement You can hear it violently smacking in the wind as the shiny vinyl is caught by the light and then hid back into the shadows.
It used to be the bigger things and the more grotesque that you couldn’t handle, but now to even imagine her lips against other flesh wrapped in red grooves or the idea of her hand flat against another’s chest made your eyes go black with torture and your head buzz with demented ringing.
What happens when the fraud falls in love? When the imposter looses his edge and is for once sincere? Others would say he still has his talents and then the rest would call them his moves, but he can’t seem to use them anymore at least not the old ones. He is forced to come up with new ones not only because he wants to make it authentic, but because he has to or his insides would rot and decay festering with maggots. He can’t take her to the same places, he can’t tell her the same sweetness in her ears, he can’t even buy her the same flowers. The wheel has already been reinvented for him. And standing here at this level looking down it is easy to not make some Hollywood sequel of the same formatted five part structure when we see the guy behind the door with the knife or the ill-fated lovers that just miss each other in the hall.
That which is truly new cannot be compared to a blueprint from the past. Here it is not a race against time or a fight for the impossible. We do not transcend the moving soil beneath our feet or the turning spirits that up until this moment have seemed to be a nuisance. Instead we work within it. For the first time we are part of it like the softening ice, transforming and moving faster, and then heavy in the cloud, until it falls back down into that cracked earth.
We cannot handle how others limit us because of the way they see our bodies and perceive our vessels. It's appalling to us and confuses us because they cannot see what we know is inside us, which is so much more. It is ok that they are limited to sight because it is not a sign of our personal limits, but just of perception.
A Quarterly Report Concerning the Optimizing of Processes Involving the Adulation of the Devoted versus Defeatism in Ideas of Nullity and or the Act of Not Moving
To watch her slowly get dressed was like lying on the cold wet wood with my limbs being pulled in opposing directions. It was this reverse order of everything I wanted and it was just happening right before me. The Japanese understood torture in the realm of speed. They would keep that drop of water constant. That was the big part of it. And the little piece of clothing here by the bit of tied shoe there was something the they had not capitalized on: to use the most fundamental and devoted organ like a ration in front of a starving prisoner.
And when that door, crooked on its hinges, had to be violently pulled shut the tragedy of it washed over me in the most unforgiving way. My body started to fail me. The color in everything seemed to be pulled like someone had sucked it out leaving an empty transparent drinking glass of an existence allowing me to break it and impale myself on the shards. My motor skills as well start to give out and with my hands now numb the blood in my body nearly stops flowing when her light is not there to stir it. Buttoning my shirt became a task of sheer will to focus on the flat circle traveling through the hole and then to catch on the side the way you had agreed that it would work. But then some form of life starts to come back. I can feel it in my fingertips tingling just under the curves of the print. A slight shaking as if I was denied something needed like an engine running low on the slick brown lubricant. And the misanthropes talk and I deserve it or at least have earned the title of dreamer or affectionate fanatic, but what is it when I have grown out of the games and am fine in the world? What happens when the impulse is controlled because the pain is gone as if a wound has healed and all that is left is the scar of everyone’s memory. Is this really the certainty of an impartial confidant or the grumblings of a pretender, an imposter that cannot come close to anything that I am or have come to be except maybe in the streets of pretentiousness? And I tell her listen to the misanthropes, the Nay Sayers, the priests, and the beggars. But be careful whose words you let the transfer from simple letters pushed together into some kind fictitious truth or some forged document. I tell her, I beg her to think of the most cliché of all rainbows. I say to follow it all the way through the clouds, between the branches, and if there is a thicket of sharp hard thorns to cut through them like a diamond cutter through glass. And when we reach the end do not be disappointed that a little man with a red beard and a green hat doesn’t stand there with that pot of gold the lovely pop songs may talk of or what the skeptics insurance policy recommends. But rather know that the pay off was the colors and that it was every shade. Know when my eyes no longer see or when small electronics fill your ears it was the whole spectrum of it all.
