Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Suburban Swampcity Blues

This is a fragment from a short story I'm currently working on. Constructive criticism is welcomed, as always.


When Santiago removed the knit skullcap from his head, he felt a blanket of goose bumps rapidly form all along the nape of his neck, as if Aphrodite herself had been the one making love to him all night. The sensations his mind had identified were nothing but vertiginous pleasure spasms; he could not make sense of any of it. Rationality was a tiny vessel of mute seamen, and it was long gone by now. He tried to compose more thoughts, but this only made him dizzier.
He laid down on his bed and began tossing a hackie-sack up toward the ceiling and with his thumb and index finger, catching it each time with ease, as if it were the stem of a feather floating back to him. His hands appeared to be rough and aged, unlike the rest of his body: an immaculate machine throbbing with a youthful urgency. Then again, this was commonplace at the studio. It was filled with the buzzing of the young, and each palm was scarred and calloused. The people he shared his space with during the day were there for the same exact reasons. They, too, were thirsty for malleability, for creation. And they loved to sculpt, just as he did.

Friday, December 4, 2009

Five Dense Minutes

2:58 am: My feet are almost as calloused as your hands always were. These hands are virginal apparati with a texture similar to that of honey or warmed dough. Virtually unscathed. Clearly, they do not make nearly enough.

3:02 am: My head is buried in my pillow now and I'm thinking this can't be healthy- being reminded of your life by the faintest sound of music that you will never have the opportunity to hear. I'm wondering if I'm sick for never wanting to forget; for fearing Alzheimer's at age seventy more than death at age thirty; for wishing for any physiological malfunction over amnesia. I'd like to always be able to recall the inflection of your voice when you would ask what it was I had learned in school that day. At twelve, it posed as a hideous question. But at twenty, not so much.

"What did you learn in school today?" Now, that's a poem.