a small town a cluster of buildings, really visible from the train and everyone who passed it must have surely wondered whether it always sat looking as they'd seen it for me, that was under gray & dismal skies my logical mind suggests that the village's situation changes daily but, really, it will never cease to be that hazy hamlet i viewed through running rivulets of rain that day on the train.
Clouds roll over the low hills, enshrouding the vast plantation, crawling down into the valley, filling it like a bowl, until it drifts toward one like horror show death mist, or like the mustard gas that sank into the trenches, once upon a time. But without the threat of death, except for death of that view of rolling acres of tea trees that stretch out to the mountains.
I'm in a special mode of mind. One in which nothing is ahead or behind. Everything is shades of a me that doesn't exist. So, maybe I'm a reflection of all that is -- in as much as there is an "I." I don't know how I slipped into this anti-solipsist stance -- believing everything exists, but I. I'm a figment, but since I can't be a figment of my own imagination, I'm not sure what flavor of figment I might be.
They called him "the Emperor of Pain," the they who didn't know his real name, a name that was comically disjointed to his reputation, a name that was to this man as that gentle lisping voice is to Mike Tyson, and so they gave him that ridiculous name, and he became both more and less than what he really was.
I vibrate wariness at the approach of strangers, and have a face within my Janus repertoire that is labeled: "off-putting." An approaching stranger, having passed by those cues, will -- at some point -- realize something is off, as if I'm holding my breath 'til the conversation's end - but not that, precisely At any rate, they will yield to whatever it is, in due time. [Maybe, I seem contagiously itchy.] Remarkably, I went decades without realizing any of this. To be fair, I never get a good look at myself at the moment I'm meeting a stranger. [And, if I did, I wouldn't have the brainpan bandwidth to do anything with the information.] Now, I'm training myself to behave elsewise, but the score is still 50 years to 1.
Where we born with an infinity of lives at our feet -- chosen by how one steers all the forks in one's road? Or, are all those alleged forks false gods?
In the lunatic asylum, it's quiet after the meds round. R's mind was in the madhouse, but his body was in a lifeboat, or maybe vice versa, he couldn't tell for sure. He only knew that he was floating, and, sometimes, it was too choppy, and if life got too happy, he felt that it was fake. The open sea 's a harsh place, but no worse than the where he carried everywhere he ventured inside his dense brainpan. A fatal, futile option was selected with a button that may -- or may not -- have resided within his very soul. So thirsty and so lonely -- side-effects of something. It might have been the meds, or, perhaps, the salty air. He chose to think he wasn't bounded by a nutshell; though his brand of crazy was quiet before the storm. One day his kidneys gave out. Who could've ever imagined that such a thing could happen in such a place as that.
I am not the fallen, but the falling -- he who never hit the ground. And you may hope to know my call, but I was never there at all. I was sitting on the tower. I was dropping to the ground. I never emitted a flash of light, and never emitted a peep of sound. I am the falling, not the fallen. The one who never hit the ground.
I roam the old city, gazing at Gothic gargoyles and touching stonework made by men long since dead, wondering how I ended up in this chunk of time, rather than one in which this land was all just forest or marshland, or one in which we all wait amid the rubble to blast off to some secondary hive of humanity.
Rain sidles up in a commanding cloud -- early -- And so it waits in its cloud, like the awkward party guest who sits in his car, waiting to be fashionably late, but - not having decoded what "on-time" really means - arrives early, nevertheless.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 