ekleksographia

Visit to an Anticipated Place

I.
A sudden casting of shapes inside the eye.
The night of the day she left.
Reds and greens jerking along to her brain.                          
And probably before that in dirty sheets.                  
By rapidly making and breaking.
Right where the dreary park used to be.
Motion correlated with her pulse.
There were no other visitors.
She noticed lags between the lamps.
A wall of photographs parodied the visual field.                              
Dancing on the flat-black surface.                 
Who could she have seen it with?                 
Some rogue recollections.
She unmixed herself back to normal.
A kind of cross-fingering that the job was death to.   
So quickly after this early glimpse.
But for procedural memory, might not have stuck it out.     
Smeared the hills into the valleys.
The feel of what had accumulated from before.
If only to rip apart molecular bonding.          
In urgent talk with the caretaker, she sneezed.          
Since the eye couldn’t follow.
And so on, down to trash.
A species of triangle, pointing.                                              
As guileless as her smiling at the stoplight.               
It felt in the corner of her gaze like a magnificent star.
Blinked away the periphery.
Too mind-boggling if everything were visible at once.            
The Latin-inscribed public library.                 
Repulsion between each set of adjacent needs.
She once in a great while remembered the looks on their faces.
Parcels of air, powders and crumbs.
Inhaled through her nose the trapped knowledge smell.
Colors appeared around squeezed areas.
Sitting in a circle of women.                                      
It paid to wobble for as long as possible.      
All kinds of accidents smoothed the way for her snap decision.
Afterimage rooted to the spot.

II.

She jumped her eyes to the side of the road.                         
Now that someone she knew had been shocked from the dead.
Ignoring the helter-skelter ride.
The pleasure obtained from eating, sucking, biting.
Like a trip to steel herself for a transfer of energy.   
A firefly on every blade.
Normal saccadic blindness.                                                    
At the nexus of three valleys, the town.
Just a hole in the wind’s way.
End users. Endless eight.
Their secret divided up among many.            
Scattering produced a uniform design.          
When she waited tables at the coffee and donuts place, eavesdropping.
Sporadic contact with real hunger.                
Heaved her conveyances to a different plane.                       
Between driving force and driven object.
Or a hankering hard to keep under wraps.                 
She would prod a little event to force it free.
A sharp axial view from the highway.                         
Exactly the kind of wild recovery no one was prepared for.
Superimposed on fictitious straightaways.                
Unloading her fear, all the fences electrified.            
Thousands of frizzled choices.                      
Each night, as exhausted as a performer.
Power leaking through the held hand.           
Some magic balance between poverty and self-possession.
The tree righting itself, again and again, and then staying down.
Granted the transmission properties of the picture window.
She shoved the sunset hues over the cemetery, 13th Avenue West.
Image of a safe route to the ground.                         
"Seduction myth," she guessed.                       
The twin acts of feeding and depriving, with addictive results.
Like a replica of narrow Old World streets: only the souvenir shops were real.
Each time the circuit was completed.
Mosquito fogging after dusk, the Herald said.
To read events in the light of still-living exposure.                            
Touching the door, her fingers tingled.         
Everything constantly equalizing to stay the same.   
On behalf of unremarkable origins.
Loving and being loved in an otherwise dark room.
Simple reversible machine.
Pushed out towards the fantastic, throwing sparks.  

---

Spiral

Going down stairs clearly thinking of balance.  Move and the world tilts.  The house sinks sideways.  A girl in a red hat points at the hole we are treading around, elongated or elliptic.  Middle nothing in a cage of ribs.  Cage d’escalier.  That kind of stillness is peculiar, like a dangerous lover I can’t but return to.  For breathing always the same yet differently heliced, as a starling maybe.  Rain slick feathers, bright eyes through banisters.  Someone else’s longing can take shape on a precipice.  The galaxy’s curled-up center when I look down from the top.  History of avoiding.  Looking, if the railing holds.

---

What Would Cinderella?

Midnight in the blue café.  Drags on his Camel, plays with square-cornered calculations.  Inanimate sex objects.  Purses every syllable, teeth hidden.  The frame of the world.  I’ve lost faith in images.  Near-sighted mirrors fatten my gaze.  The eyed look, exchangist.  There are three of him, more eyes than I can keep track of.  He shifts, settles closer.  Lights me a mentholated.  My editing mind around other stories.  (You much-cindarella’d floozy.  Big old lecherous thing squashed up against.  Dontcha have enough sense?)

How smoking provokes.  The pinch, giggle of.  Men, a costly risk we can’t avoid.  Lick and learn.  Tobacco-tasting cheeks.  Navigate by haze of coffee, whiskey, acrid mineral odor from his coat.  Black boots squelched down at the ankles.  Pursue, persevere, all alarms off.  Horizontal urge ready to melt into bed.  Did he say love, say perhaps?  Some unreciprocated is or does.  Blue often stands for the simple tale. Left on the sofa, a discarded toy.  (Keep that glass slipper in a careful case, or velvet.  Any case will do.)