mood: raisins, almonds, red river cereal
fairy-sized tomes of
fairytales hidden in the
children's library.
lucent, lucent - the word is lucent. it slipped away and i sat abandoned in my english class, my mind wandering through the parking lot. there was no question to be answered, just a blank in the phrase i was thinking. and as hard as i looked (behind tires, the camouflage of snowdrifts) there was only a gaping nothing, a literary scurvy. i panicked (hysteria, a swivet, calamity), though i'd stayed calm all during this week's chance encounters, itineraries, fragile afternoons. the professor's hand waits at the chalkboard demanding synonyms, playing terrible guessing games with meaning. "scott's characters cannot communicate," he says. "society alienates them from themselves and from each other." we read 'the painted door,' where the inner monologues are broken conversation with voices too afraid to speak and nobody who listens.
i haven't seen you for weeks and moving toward you on the street today, i felt so motionless. our smiles do not mean anything, do not mean nothing, simply are. (were we always this stagnant, you and i?) you introduce me to your brother, i ask about your play, there is silence and the bus yawns by. tangible and almost february, i am not (do not want) what you have told him (once wanted) and this is strange. i look away because there are no lost words, nothing dormant or undiscovered.
fairytales hidden in the
children's library.
lucent, lucent - the word is lucent. it slipped away and i sat abandoned in my english class, my mind wandering through the parking lot. there was no question to be answered, just a blank in the phrase i was thinking. and as hard as i looked (behind tires, the camouflage of snowdrifts) there was only a gaping nothing, a literary scurvy. i panicked (hysteria, a swivet, calamity), though i'd stayed calm all during this week's chance encounters, itineraries, fragile afternoons. the professor's hand waits at the chalkboard demanding synonyms, playing terrible guessing games with meaning. "scott's characters cannot communicate," he says. "society alienates them from themselves and from each other." we read 'the painted door,' where the inner monologues are broken conversation with voices too afraid to speak and nobody who listens.
i haven't seen you for weeks and moving toward you on the street today, i felt so motionless. our smiles do not mean anything, do not mean nothing, simply are. (were we always this stagnant, you and i?) you introduce me to your brother, i ask about your play, there is silence and the bus yawns by. tangible and almost february, i am not (do not want) what you have told him (once wanted) and this is strange. i look away because there are no lost words, nothing dormant or undiscovered.
i spent an hour at the comic book shop, waiting for another 'persepolis' ticket to arrive (dad has announced a visit next weekend). at jwd, i bought a dictionary in three volumes (webster third international english, 1986) and a beautiful copy of baudelaire's petits poèmes en prose: le spleen de paris. (marbled paper, embossed covers, the mustiness of a book well-read.) there is such a promise of possibility i find it impossible to resist. historiette, historify, historio-, historiographer, historiographership, historiographic, historiography, historiology. it is $40 inexpensive for all the infrastructure of our past & every word i will ever say. i carry six thousand lucent pages home in my arms like the heaviness of memory, like the body of a child.
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