flyderkov
He flicked his finger as if to shoo away
a fly of just a speck of the world
that landed on his arm at rest. It was
a small gesture make in a packed room.
To the people on the otherside with ink
stained fingers, it meant something
we will never know, they ran off to call
and to write. The next day the papers
all printed something about the end
or just an apocalypse, but we walked
on not bothering to take a paper with us.
The faint remains of a few words could be made out
on the chalkboard. They were written over equations
and theories of where we are to fit in the world.
Onto pages they were copied, and into minds the seeped
while the students listened, while their minds wandered
through the window to the world where the birds made nothing
that could be expressed so elegantly on a chalkboard.
Another class come through before the old writing was removed
the sit and admire the scribblings left by an unsteady, excited hand
the symbols meant so much to those that just left, but to those
seated now in the lecture theatre they were something of mystery.
We spotted him easily within the crowd. He was the one dancing to something other than the sounds of voices talking simultaeniously, over the calls of parents to the stray children and the laughter of friends and lovers. We saw him when he moved differently, like one of the voices was for him, somewhere away from the other people. We saw him sidestep, we saw him trip, we saw him twirl. We saw him dance like all the voices had found their chorus and were singing as one.
We kept on marching through the tired and the needy splayed ontop of each other on the side of the street. We had no choice. Every direction we turned more appeared as if to salute our parade forward through the streets. There was little to distinguish us from them, except that we were moving and they were still, they were begging and we were perfoming. We continued moving towards the setting sun, blinding oursielves in its rays.
He thought about slicing his fingers in half just so he could cover the keys, or have any hope of covering all the keys. Each time he looked at the keyboard there were more keys there they managed to sneak inbetween the ones that were the previously, between b and v and n and all the others. before he knew it what he was typing became nothing but a collection of alien sounds and irregular words, somehow hinting at a greater need for communication. Poets woulld look at his work and see hints of eternity stretching out as his words took on meanings of their own.
There is was infront of him, stretching forever, the flattened expanse of suburbia, the road, the single, or double story houses, the cars in the driveways, the lawns, the ten dollar a trim lawns, the stench of petrol and decay, and occasionally a bird flying over. He bent over and pulled at the rip chord, but nothing happened, the mower shrugged a little, and turned over a couple of times, but lay cold in the hot sun. 'Start, damn you' he said trying again, but the same thing happened.
He was there on the celing like a fly, walking around on sticky feet. I called out to ask how he got there and what he thought he was going to accomplish wandering around up there, and if he fell he was going to hrt himself a lot, the floor is a long way away in these old places. He just buzzed a little cleaned his wings with his back legs and his face with his from legs, and continued on wandering around on the celing like the world was all alright and outside there weren't armies marching through the streets and planes flying over dropping bombs.
All those things bitten off, chewed, absorbed, and passed through. Those little bits of life that pass like lovers or memory, or sand, unable to be kept, just passed through, unlike time that theif that take so much of us and leaves so little. Each chew is a gift of life for life.
He revealed everything at he doorstep like a flasher. And she smiled, invited him in saying 'I wondered when you would realise that is all I wanted.' He couldn't understand what she meant, he could only wonder if this is what it felt like to be born and naked for the first time in the world, cold and shivering and looking for comfort, if this is why all babies cry when they are brought from the womb into the hospital ward all slimey and dirty in the steril place, scared and feeling that the only thing they are able to do is cry out.
The stood at the stern looking out to sea. Any who saw him thought not to disturb hime because he look deep in thought as a man tends to looking out to the horizon of the sea, but if they would have walked up and touched his shoulder asking 'what are you thinking?' He would have responded 'nothing, isn't it beautiful.' He'd been rehearsing that thought while looking for his reflection in the sky, among the contours of the clouds and the distant crests of the sea's movemnt, which sketched lines and creases he knew were his, which he knew the world was trying to use to sculpt the creases and lines on his face.
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