telling stories.
It’s liquid expressionism that runs through his veins, but his small body’s saturated and can’t hold it all in. It’s all the same substance anyway, it’s all atoms alike, there’s no in versus out, or fears of out looking on. Now he’s standing in the corner gesturing wide to the walls and I’m crouched at the opposite end watching mountains dissolve. As he conjures and conducts his life keeps pumping all out and he’s liberally splashing the room around with every jerk and pivot. He can burst, keep on bursting, he can never deplete and not a single shred of shrapnel could ever tarnish his airy flesh.
This scene is the archetype of contact. A force flows from his eyes to touch every cell inside me and I see his skin’s just a part of the décor. There’s nothing between his soul and the world,
and I can’t seem to keep from merging.
His unhalting breath is now bending all physics and the act of his being bewilders, enthralls. how can he walk the earth with all the suits and cynics? how is he made of anything else but glass and wire?
In the corner, a writer sits plucking out steel hairs of the mundane. His flights of fancy are slowly filling up the page.
future tense.
So wide. So white. I wonder what those eyes mean.
You’d have to know those eyes to know that.
I’d like to.
My final ode.
I was born of District 101. I came of age at the Dep[art]ment.
This is the place.
We bled our love here and sometimes too much life, to map our mythologies across these bricks that bear witness
to all the limits leapt past the better to retrace, or all the weaknesses we smeared all over the walls.
And the twilight dancers never go home; when daylight wanes, the immortal revellers come out to play, perched high in their palace overlooking the tides:
The lost boy wonder buckling under an overgrown heart, with open palms and the pixie’s spark,
The pale dancing beauty of the world-weary eyes…whiplash girlchild, shine so bright…
The warm wind, spinning (landing), the golden boy with the smile that blinds,
The overgrown child of awestruck eyes, impatiently painting his wayward path home,
Our beloved emcee (so much malgré lui), the towering love-child of insatiable lusts,
La libanaise capricieuse, of insatiable life,
And me, the lifestruck observer, just give me a corner to write this down. Darlings, peel open this mold as I slowly slip into my skin.
“Oh are you going?” he asked. A grin and stillness hold the air.
“I don’t leave this party.”
I would do it all again.
Maybe tomorrow.
His foot is shaking under the table. His soul is shaking under his skin. It’s his default state, unsatiated, unsettled. Raging, always raging. His insides are twitching with every kind of lust, even now, as we speak. The conversation is flying too fast to stick to pages.
The kid has too much life for so small a frame. It’s only natural his lines would blur as it all swirls needily about in search of a form, in search of some release. His pores are struggling to keep it all contained.
His finger is tap tap tapping on the skin behind his ear where a pen rests, his head perched down toward the table in front of him. The bony fingers on his other hand are toying nervously with a cigarette as the cup of black coffee sits two thirds empty in front of us. It’s cold. His loose and tattered neckline reveals a skinny boy’s pale collar bones, and above, his long face, framed by the dark and scruffy signs of the always distracted.
He carries his weight with an orphan air; a lone child drifting about in a ceaseless search for his tribe, and undeterred by the faint underlying fear that he may be the sole of his kind. Jack Kerouac meets Le Petit Prince.
Maybe next time. Maybe tomorrow.
Maybe…that girl?
Yeah…maybe…I’m up from the table to go order a café au lait, and as I’m counting my change at the counter, I turn to see his pen out in his hand and his torn notepad lying flat on the table. Cheap, top spiral, tiny lined pages. The better to rip them out. His free hand is pulling violently at his hair as he scribbles in code with the other, his glassy blue eyes sporadically surfacing for air. He doesn’t notice me staring.
“Um, here. Thanks.” I take my change and coffee and head back over to the table, giving the packet of sugar a quick shake as I take my seat. I smile at him and hold it a moment. He smiles back, his eyes fall.
“She’s pretty,” I say.
“Yeah…”
His eyes are always facing inward, exploring new corners of his own inner world. It’s a beautiful world he’s crafted, almost vaguely familiar, with its own internal logic, its laws and maps, its kings and queens. Like some place we’ve all known but have long since left behind. They said we had to.
Don’t ask him to translate though, he won’t understand. Like a castaway from a faraway galaxy shipwrecked here millennia ago, who’s forgotten he’s not of this land; or that he’s vearing off into a pitch unknown to the human ear.
And this hollow, hardened world is not meant for his kind.
Keeping Inspiration 