a perfectly ordinary rainbow

There is sweet music here that softer falls
Than petals from blown roses on the grass,
____from Song of the Lotos-Eaters, Tennyson








the ones we left behind by iNeedChemicalX


a perfectly ordinary rainbow, __yes, indeed.
__commonplace miracles now, mind your feet, there's one passing any given tuesday

these are clumsy times to fail ; it's a heavy price to pay to be caught-out watching balloons drifting away -
____you there, hey, you, yes youyouyou - we don't pay you to daydream
____what? whatever, that then, we don't pay you to imagine cloud-faces and taste autumn breezes
________(whatever that means)

more important you have medals and awards and certification to show for your brown eyes,
bruises on your hand and well-worn library cards are the work of hobbyists.
________(best call it quits right away if you think there's room for those on this boat)


*___*___*

__'but you know, i can't shake the future-fear'
__'in what sense?'
__'like... that i won't ever get a decent job. make ends. be... ya know, adultish'
__'oh right
__'you get that?'
__'no, not like that, but i get it'
__'you get it?'
__'yah. baby-clock. with women it's always love, marriage, babies, saggy boobs, that's our ticking clock. with men, paychecks and mercedes'
__'at least you get it.'
__'sure. __you'll be fine you know.'
__'sure i know it. __but believing it maybe...


*___*___*

[Q, a self-portrait]

the idea makes sense, but you were never really prepared to pay full-price for it.
sometimes you have to though.
all i'm saying is you're like a religion you only sometimes subscribe to;
__other times shifting uncomfortably in your chair when spoken about, or
__hustle for more pamphlets to prove the validity of.

decent enough, sure;sure, but when no one's looking you grow heavy like a paper-weight,
put down roots and mate with a coffee table so you're three quarters inanimate object,
a minor, man-shaped black hole in a bedroom in a house in a suburbanite night whatever after night
__despite the self-accreditation issues, you still hold out for the big miracle, thinking sooner
__maybe later, Stephen Hawking might come rolling in with a flashlight to mete out
__a string of equations to describe the luminosity of your internal organs sucking in through
__their own heavy gravity the breath they might have emitted.
__you want to solve the riddle of the secrets your lungs keep from you.

man-shaped black silhouette sitting on a couch drinking your tea, disappearing into, absorbed beyond some precipice, a boundary between knowable and human.

someone asks you your name you respond _nocturne. __liebestraum. __de profundis.
what should your tombstone read? 'the abuse of words: what's left (of/in 1 Act)'

when they leave you alone you read in silence. think in silence. dream in silence of what silence must sound like in dreams.

____the mirrors dance at you when you walk past.
____sometimes you notice it,
____other times... not.

last month you drank four energy drinks, several litres of green tea, popped a bunch of little white pills and stood on a vast lawn trying to explain to passer-byers that light was emanating from objects everywhere, escaping from skin and blades of grass and cement roads and traveling to a common goal only light knew why called the sun where they (freed from the constraints of us) ran amok and kissed with blazed tongues and lay on inferno lined couches and told their luminous stories in shaded languages; __awaking later with a migraine and your mother telling you to take the trash out.


sometimes you have to though,
__time's up despite the 30day money back,
__damn video's due back at the store if only you could find the case
____(and the soil chuckles at my ankles, licking its lips to swallow:
______just a lightly haired sack, like the skin of a kiwi, or a peach, filled to the brim with
________organelles and mismanaged possibility,

where've you been?, we haven't seen you in months she says
waits for your response, oh, you know, here and there, here and there
she keeps waiting... here and there, here and there, white rooms here or there.

it seems like a promising proposition.
but when you get the package home, you never had the confidence to take off the tags,
and it sat for 27 years wrapped (though occasionally poked at, sometimes even partially used)
your not being sure if you'd keep it.

____your mother says she loves you
____which you believe, but never quite understood.
____(just like your mother believed she loved you but could never quite understand how
______anybody else might)

all of which you avoid by sucking another frozen-iced-soda, watching repeats of Southpark and giggling yourself to some long-lost utopia of politically subversive wit ;

from a vantage point you watch yourself watch clocks, waiting the calender out.

in a notebook somewhere it's written that you'd like to take a year off, is that true?
yes.
and what would you do?
when?
during your year off.
oh. __collect flower petals, make gifts of them to people i loved. so people who smiled at me on trains, i could sit besides them when they eventually dozed-off and rub a petal across their cheeks and nose, and they would dream of being kissed by angels with satin lips and imagine walking across the moon where snow soft as baby fingers was stroking them; __people i knew better, my friends, i'd bathe them in ivory tubs of petals, for a little while they'd feel as though they were swimming across a lake in Olympus, or had stumbled back into their mother or were a bird's back being tickled mid-flight through the maze of cherry tree branches; __it could be a sort of gyro, a mechanism to translate the morse code of the heart to sensations transmitted through skin.
i see.
hmm. [nodding]