Just a Monday Morning
Soft orange light floods into my room, soaking into the old orange, stained floorboards. The warm light from the two lamps mixes well with the cool air wafting in through one of the windows, open. Outside the sky is gray in that sleepwalking way, and just past 3:00 p.m. the damp streets are devoid of human presence. Fallen brown leaves, the fist-born of Autumn, clump together in pools of water in the street. I can see them huddling, shivering in the mist. A girl is walking by, her legs writhe past each other like enticing serpents, like cobras weaving in a woven basket: powerful, deadly, but elegant. And of course I am enticed because I have a weakness for feminine beauty and grace, the sheer power of it, the subtlety, the awareness of its own effect. Seduction, oh, it’s a divine play. Ultimately, though, the girl with the serpentine legs and alluring green sweater walks past my window. Because I know that the girl walking past is only that perfect symbol as long as I see her from the window. But when I go down into the street to see if that Divine thought is in her eyes, too, I know the chances are next to nothing that she remains as she was from the window. And I know that even if I found that she’s not the one I’m after, I will still let myself become deeply distracted by her, inextricably enmeshed, because I think I can find love for anyone. But the most beautiful thing about the girl passing by out of sight is that now I can think about the brown leaves bundling up together, the emerald grass dotted with orange spots, the gray air heavy with moisture. And inside my room, red-orange-brown-yellow-deep red hue, varying stain, the air is orange and feels both warm and cool, distant road sounds drift under the raised white wooden windowpanes, and the air smells thick with books. Piled onto shelves, clumped together in rearrangement, laying on the bed, spread out over the glass table, stacked on the floor beside me. Words float above me in the air. So many books have been open in the last few weeks, words have begun to float up out of volumes, get caught up in the fan drafts, mix all together, and spread out over the room. Unnoticeable at first, now they’ve piled up, slowly floating down like dust, and I can feel them above me like a cloud. If you stand up, words pour through it. Nonsense words because all the syntax has broken, and letters have become dislodged and swapped into other words or simply dangle around their newfound friends. It’s a precarious thing if one doesn’t do well outside of sanity. If you are the sort who needs good, reasonable thought, then just crouch when you come into my room and make your way to a chair. But if you’re like me and think that nothing is so sane as a little insanity, then allow me to stand up for a minute and show you how wonderful language can be takes on a will of its own. Bubblegum popstick; frilly leather Derrida. Chicken can on a cone, flank the flank, mateys! A run of black ink tree, ink snake out, white linoleum floor, ceiling, Seal down backbrash, seal feather-filled pashmina. Kashmir? No! Sweater or place? But the tangled squash fruit, wait, N, nnnn, here’s a whole cluster of n’s congregating, clumping together like the Autumnal brown leaves, and yes, you can hear me better now because I ducked down for a moment to think about the theological implications of letters being self-aware and suffering pangs of loneliness, but of course we don’t want to get religious in a respectable academic discourse, so I’ll leave off for now and stand back upside the tomato barn, blue tomatoes fly and splat against the red-painted wood. Flies fly in figure sixes, strange, plopping down on the ghost bench? I hope so. Hey, a family of vowels trailing along, a trip, three vowels: momma, daddy, junior, hope they left cooling porridge, I’ll try junior’s first. Thin slips of inky script skip out of glass ink bottle, twirling in air, letters, words, man, God, posit tee-lee-logical, I know the facts, the facts, facts are the facts, that which equals case, yeah, yeah, Wittgenstein and the carpenter’s bench, overinflated balloon, but where does that leave me, Me? Seems I’m standing, and the horn in my hand, ivory white hron, white horn covered in red-bronze henna, deep orange patterns, twisty lacy loopy, leannn back on a white couch, deep crystal glass, crtysl frozen fountain filled with dark red wine, French grenache slopping slowly at the sides of the glass, a drop pops out, runs down outside of glass toward clean white couch, blood explosiion, ivory silk milk upholstery, but no, nO, my tongue finds the drop of wine as it goes from glass to fingers, lush, Decadence, I spread out on the couch, gray day outside dripping a thin strong cloak between me and the world. Ink! It’s back, words flooding my head, brushing past my lips, pushing wind against my face, sticking under my eyelids. Pantheon of pens: inkwells, fountain, ballpoint, gel, rising up off surfaces, resurrection, corpus reanimation, invisible fingers take control, pens geometrically positioned, equidistance, move together, synchronized, pen Tao, all swirl in dance, colored ink floods out, paints landscapes of images, one pen : all pens, Synchronicity, C.G.J., hay hay. I haven’t even begun to exorcise all these scripts floating about my ceiling. They’re like insectual pests (incestual?). You kill some, and more flood in. I’ll probably have to do this some more before these days are said and done. I think the research I did this past weekend really polluted my living space. Don’t get me wrong. I love the hanging words and morpheme danglers, but I just need to be able to breathe, you know?
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