Fatigue fallen on empty soles, walking it seeks what it has but often sought before, the boundless plight of our physicality at length. Severed by vows of continuity disrupted, the concordance of fate, mangled upon our seats. Send thee, if not to myself, the flickering forms of finality's discourse. The lighted raptures of patience, pardoned and pestilent, pronouncing non-vocal voices of silent discourse. We are but safe, here, in shadowed realms of figurative folly, fancying solidarity in symbols unjustified, jest not the remnants of unkept hope.

Collision inevitable, arrival impetuous, await not for the sake of thine own, if only but to seek further the nuisance of humanity's disdain. Drawn into its lineage of force, founded within but surrounded by its guards. Gone are yesternights and days of nighted rooms, captivity for the sake alone but to forbear its regard. Guess it so. Seem it so. Second to none other than one's own sanity's ward, fed upon verses of mispronounced beginnings; and yet to end with the promise of renewal.

Misguided Temporal Perceptions of the Heart

The details of someone else's life close to yours. You see them as you see memory, the way you look back at love instead of seeing it here, now. Why is it that I can not be here in the present? My mind refuses to acknowledge that time is not just something that has passed, but that is also something that is passing before us every moment. I can not be with her because I can not be with her now. I miss her and yet she is still here.

In dreams we venture forth into the space between us, like astronauts rehearsing poems to recite to the stars once they are closer to their light. Sleep isolates our hearts, and when we wake we walk back towards the previous night, trying to retain what we forgot.

And already my heart insists on speaking in past tense. Even the future has happened before, the touch of deja-vu on quiet lips, trembling promises unkept and unspoken. Words are outlined in invisible, embroidered thread, masking meaning in layers of unseen silk. Reality underdeveloped under our distorted perceptive lens, the corners of objects lost into the next, rounded pixels of color overcrowding the screen. To speak is to breath in silent sighs, to not disturb the frequency of air, itself sleeping amidst sleepless thoughts, standing between all the things we can not see.

proximity to memory

Encapsulated within the thinnest membranes, fragile layers of memory, of emotion, so close to where we stand.

The proximity to memory: the indeterminate distance to our past. A child's hands outstretched in time, grasping the shapes of light. Light, coloring in the walls of a familiar hallway, consuming its length, its form.

The exact length of our hands outstretched, divided by floors measured by uneven ceramic tiles. Tiles molded from the softest clay, the changing patterns of a pixelled past. That it was once a part of us. That it is still a part of us. We are mere parts and processes, pulled passages from children's fables, underlined by touch, by voice, reciting syllables instead of words, sounds so close to song.

To remember: the circuitous path to an alternate route. Unbroken lines that lead us home. Homes housed only in dreams, waxy, colored lines that outline the forms of dwelling. And we are colored in through sleep. We dream back to who we are in times past. We are defined by the amorphous shapes of a scribble-coded language, numbered shapes that we forgot to color in, again. We are unfinished coloring book ending. We are prince and princess, awaiting a child's reinterpretation of reality's biased color scheme. We are hands that cannot stay within the allotted space of predefined figurines. We are torn pages of mismanaged markers.

dangling modifier

"A dangling modifier is a phrase or clause which says something different from what is meant because words are left out." (from englishplus.com)

Why does this sound like it is describing my life? My sad, little dangling life. Participles pointing their fingers at the wrong nouns. At the wrong people. At the wrong me. Fingers long enough to be mistaken for Pinocchio's nose. Facial features that possess dual functionality: aside from their normal, biological function, they also operate as being a very reliable and self-incriminating lie-detector. We are all like Pinocchio. Our language extending back and forth, lies that are sounded out in our very speech, leaving behind the stale taste of last year's cigarettes on the tips of our dangling tongues.

Cheating on sleep

All along sleep awaits my return. Each day the wait feels longer. Sleep knows not what time means to itself. While we are there it lengthens our stay through dreams, entertaining us with pieces of what we have lived through, reshaping them into the unexpected narratives of our unconscious. In this way we communicate with sleep through dreams. By ignoring them we ignore that relationship, the trust that we have built throughout our entire life, severing the thread that connects us to what we need.

exercise in perception