Month: March 2021

Gentle Giant

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We are afforded by time to understand one another, our place and relationship to the immense universe that spirals around us.

From the moment we open our eyes we try to learn what is first within sight, then reach, every glistening star in each other. It falls upon time to allow any more knowledge than that. A vast shining possibility of sensations.

I watched a boy, gentle and harmless become a man caring and kind, starving for love, not riches. First from family, those who were within reach and secondly from beauty often times an abstract of earth, if not of a womb.

Time allowed for many teasing sensations to course through his eyes into his heart, tickle his mind but not love. Love he so desired.

He moved slowly, spoke slowly. Some would take him for slow. Though mocked and tormented by the blind who surrounded him, he did not give in to woe nor spite.

Head never bowed, he found love in the woods, the sea and sun that shined down on him. His only reward.

The rare beautiful soul. He did not give in to judgement and ridicule; that, damming assessment of children then men, lost in their own doubt and frailties, all which he possessed. But he did not give in to the howls and chants or those that surely hid in the shadows of his mind.

How this spark of life did not become a raging fire burning every atom in its path, I will never understand.

Life’s cruelty ricocheted off his enormous frame. He smiled and chuckled. Time’s cascading absurdity made his spirit only softer. He marched forward without harsh word or raised voice. The gentlest man. My friend. My kind of guy.

But how I deceive myself. His life’s genius I discover only by death. God damned retrospect.

His unfailing admiration toward me. His slow deception, a final joke played upon me. He had seen in me what he had not in himself.

Yet here I tell you, he had what I now wish most. A life at peace. To turn the other cheek. To grow into my own skin; that, achievement makes him far greater than me.

I wish that he knew I have caught on to his final prank, the genius but now time will not allow.

Lockdown Lull a Lie

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Days turn into weeks

Weeks turn into months

And now a little more than a year everyday is the same.

My coffee maker sounds like a raptor. Clicking at my presence I’ve come to delay making coffee each successive morning until I dare enter the kitchen.

The units above my apartment flush toilets; that, sound cascading down through my walls, it, for a moment, feels comforting like nature splashing over me at the base of a waterfall, where a raptor quite possibly watches me within the rainforest.

I feel beaten like many batons have bashed me in the night as I slept. I stand solely to shake off the ache of hours of long, lonely days and nights of rest. Sedentary for hours. Then standing, staring out at the concrete, as the cascading waterfalls flow, while the raptors click a communicateè of prey.

I take my daily cup to a flat long table that pins me safely into the corner like a ten foot tall tortoise shell on my back. I push three buttons to zoom out of this sterile square box through the ether into a computer screen filled with six other square boxes all looking back at me in a conference call.

As I stare not at my distant, pained colleagues who try to muster some intelligence, to work, to breath, smile or function, all I see is my neck. My old, sagging flesh, it hangs from my chin.

I want to think, “well you’re finally losing some weight” but the charade can’t conceal it, as I sit still in the screen, my god I look like a lizard.

Zooming through their comments, tasks, their facts, I can only nod, silently, yes to my colleagues.

My mind wanders. I haven’t seen a fly in ages.