curvature

by Monkey Leap

  Flavor of the mind

  New York sidewalks are smacking with lunch hour movement. Her stilted legs drift cloud-like among the panted legs, interweaving their gesturing with objective. The skirt is high, floating slightly with every swing. Her pug breasts lightly touch the fabric of her blouse, teasing her nipples to erection, but she is uninterested, as she knows that comes with the cast. Everything is Emphasis. Some men stop in their tracks to dramatically emphasis their response, while half-jokingly pitying their obvious rank of worship. She removes her sunglasses, as she reaches for the door handle. Hand rushes in augmented by a protruding face with pasted peaked smile, and with much animated gravidity pulls the door open for her. She acknowledges with a fleeting smile, and his ‘self’ jumps a jig to his brain. He will ride this memory perpetually, grinding it into his worth. But for the moment he is a cook and on his way to work, and now has much to rebalance in his psyche, as this moment has provided just the self he was looking for, and all possibilities are once again open.

  Et cetera

  Above the doors of the viewing room is a brass plate engraved with the words “This remains.” Grace stops the moment, a drawn out breath’s length, to absorb its exactness. Pushing the door to the side she suddenly feels its affinity with the air, the spiraling rush of inhaling force leading in, an opening movement. The air is electrified with flickering sparkles of dusted light. She has trouble breathing it all in, and feels caught in-between its spark. Charlie’s body lay beautified and numinous, leaving her with the impression that if she were to touch it her hand would simply pass through.

  She notices immediately the perfection and tribute in the work.

  She runs her fingers lightly over the lace of the baby shoes, transfixed by their whiteness and beginning-ness. This seems to be all in the same.

  During that final time she is with Charlie’s body, she reads to him, like she used to read to Charlie all his life. She has chosen “Alice in the Looking Glass”. As the book carries it’s own gravity of life from moments shared, the words now carry their own mortality. She opens to the passage and begins: “Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft, like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it’s turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It’ll be easy enough to get through------”

  Morpheus stands in the shadow of the doorway, then moves quietly on. Grace knows when he’s there, and when he’s gone, as she continues in this wave.

  pendulum effect

  The evening air layers in fog. Helios, exhausted, has cleaned himself up and dressed in fresh clothes. Frying up his eggs, he notices a blood spot clinging on one of the yolks, and stares wonderingly at it, as it disappears into a white cloud. Unexpectedly he finds himself crying uncontrollably, and moving hand over hand pulls himself along the counter’s edge to the sink, where, gripping the edge, fingers pressuring red, he strains in this overload. His strangling towards this startling behavior peaks - then stops. His strangling towards this startling behavior peaks, then abruptly stops. Suddenly he is filled with an inexplicable outpouring from the base of his spine. A fire builds, moving slowly up, burning each vertebra, as if charring it black. Each portion of his body starts to alter, and as it reaches his lungs he is left gasping for air. Pockets of oxygen enter, but it is only when the metamorphosis has reached his brain, and is complete, that he is able to regain by concerted effort the remembered rhythm of breathing. He feels as if each breath is new; an utter stillness holds.

  Suddenly Helios hears his heart beat external to his body as though a drummer is in the room. This strangeness of displacement startles Helios, and for a long moment he floats dazed between this split. He can feel this echo, fathom these contractions, this moving in and out of existence with each beat, each inhalation and exhalation – spirit into matter.

  Weary of his psyche’s attempts to arbitrate in-between, he pulls out a kitchen chair and drops down on it. Now surrendered and resolved fully in these newfound saturated effects, he observes what surrounds him.

  Everything…has instantly undergone the alteration of existence as a living, pulsating organic structure. The walls and floors appear insubstantial and transitory. The space between suddenly fills with pulsating wiggles, white strokes of discerning, refracting light - a being of becoming. Helios reissues his focus back to particulars, and abruptly comprehends that this is all an aftereffect – a stretching of a conscious revolving process to a ground. He stands, carries his form outside, and enters the barn to the colt’s stall. He sits opposite her, against the wall. She is looking at him. The space is alive between them, and is defined only by his and her point of reference. It is the sameness from different space. Now he sees clearly she responds equal to his feelings, answering each of his experiencing emotions like an echoing mirror, giving and receiving. There is a peace between them, a oneness of sorts. Now he watches, understanding every shift and small movement. The colt’s attentiveness abides willfully until, overcome with sudden exhaustion, she closes her eyes and sleeps. Helios sleeps.

  religare

  He dreams he is opened from chest bone through. His arms outstretched, his vision cast down, Helios watches his beating heart. All those that approach have open chests. No words are spoken but thoughts, few and succinct, are known at once. He knows himself. His Self knows the whole. Then Self dissolves…

  He stretches his arms further, opening broader the chest and vision of beating heart, and dissolves his Self into the light. Dark enfolds.

  Kenosis

  She lies on the polished aluminum table, opened from chest bone through. Arms outspread, swollen lily-white skin with liquid mauve undertones, her pupils pale blue clouds of gray. Morpheus stands over, looking at the course ruin before him.

  She stares empty.

  She has been a point of purpose, a cross-referenced map of time and space and outcome.

  He holds this gravity.

  Morpheus pushes her ribs together, and drawing up the folds of separated flesh sews with delicate stitch her center. With warm water bathe he sponges her feet in deference. Gently he washes her legs, pelvis and breasts. Holding each hand in turn he pulls the soft living sponge down her arms. Elevating her tenderly on her side he washes her back and tailbone, lifting the last residue of salted water. He applies a soft lotion. He gently returns her to gaze upward, a yielding sigh breaking her lips.

  He draws his glass case from his pocket, and while squintingly observing her face he’s snaps back the glass case lid, unfolds his glasses, and puts them on. Next to her head he places a small wooden bowl. Into the warm water he pours lavender oil. Saturating a small sponge between thumb and forefinger, he pulls it softly down her cheeks and across her temple. He closes her eyes, and anoints each with lavender oil.

  He moves out of light and reappears with a high stool, positioning it at the top of her head. The silence is now settling, and carries a tone of depth. Morpheus sits, and then pulls from his pocket a brush, and with the delicacy of breath, he slowly draws it through her hair, finishing with a hushed smoothness.

  He quietly steps out back, and compresses himself hard against the outer wall. He listens to the crickets fill the crowded, pressured void. He breaks and cracks this easy in his chest, his previous being now containing much more, swelling beyond to its own consuming edge. Between his heart and mind a torrent surges and resounds. The words feed strings of mayhem. Strings of uttering forms and blatant unsoundness, pulling and pushing and stretching and tearing…

  You can sew it up but you can still see the tear.

  Breathing deeply in, he turns quickly back and disappears down a darkened hall, reappearing in the gravity of the same moment, to her body. He holds with the cloth between his fingers, grasping ends, and unfolds a multi-colored silk square of butterflies. Gently waving it up and over her body, it’s lightness hovers momentarily, and floats down, settling on her.

  THREE

  Stochazesthai

  The waiter moves jerkily away from the table, representing
his annoyance with the behavior of his affluent patrons, who have, as far as he is concerned, rendered public their emptied consumption through questioning the bill. The woman is primed drum-tight, and the cast shell seals her hollow shadow within. She adds new layers every needed moment, although an eclipse of distressed pain flashes sporadically in her eyes. She decries herself in thought by declaring that evolution demands survival, and she must acquiesce. The man sitting next to her is course and murky, overweight and undernourished. He signals the maitre d’, to submit his marked indignation over his waiter’s coated censure and she escapes him by concocting a diligent leveling to a nearby busboy, instantly fulfilling her require.

  The busboy enters the kitchen ending his shift and stressfully pushes aside the dirty dishes while attempting to weigh the empty words he has just been imparted, and, as it is at his tender age of sixteen, they split apart into a thousand fragmented pieces. He feels shafted and soured, and concludes that he must defend himself. The cook intently nudges by, and leans to his ear, whispering “Women are god’s decoy from sanity”, and moving round back to station, thinks vexingly about the rent, his pregnant wife, and his live-in long-suffering mother-in-law, in that edgy order, while his fingers run through the plating. He delivers them up to the heated platform, and strikes the bell repeatedly, in a line of emphasis outside of himself, wishing each strike would bring forth a series of instant magic commands. He has grown weary of himself once again, quickly transformed from his earlier serendipitous congealing, now bottomed out, once more unable to distinguish the difference between his identity and his life. They look rather similarly strikingly empty. A phone call from his mother-in-law has stung him because of a choice he has made, through a lie, not to go to the hospital to be with his wife, now in labor. He is gaining little from this experience of being a “man”. There is a dark chasm between this image of man-body and human soul. He is aggravated that his sense of true soul is not more forthcoming, his penis being far too emphasized and branded and distracting. He feels sometimes like a confined performing circus animal unable to break free of the expecting audience. He often dreams of having no defining sexual traits, just an undefined wholeness. He envies the gentle whole life nature within women. He senses all sexuality as really outtakes from the original whole. He wishes once more on the beckoning strike of the bell. He wishes he could be born whole.

  His wife screams at the nurses as she’s wheeled down the hall towards delivery, leaving behind her mother who wails towards a primitive god of pain, anguish and power. A nurse, standing by counting minutes, is checking her watch to confirm that her shift is coming to closing and starting to navigate towards the locker room. Once inside she grabs her purse emphatically, strikes off down the hall, rifling through its blank shapes as she reaches the emergency doors. A man is moved by her with a large knife protruding from the upside of his breached belly, balanced on his side to prevent the expulsion of organs. He is close to age eighty, and he speaks softly repeating the whispers that are left of his thoughts.

  And they wheel him around his last corner. His mind’s eye fades to black, and reawakens to white…

  From a distance he hears ringing. He grabs this space but he cannot reach. His daughter picks up the phone. Her breaking tones crack. Her husband responds. He vaguely relays the news to their child. She is small and shrinking, unnoticed by her numbed parents. She retreats to her room where she instantly becomes very large, filling the space. As she reaches the ceiling she breaks through by becoming a thousand tiny specks. She expands into the night and captures the scent of her grandfather in an ocean of space. Uplifted on its surf she is with his whole soul essence. Together they race instantaneous miles from earth. In the mere thought of its leveling size she returns instantly to her room and chair.

  The busboy enters her room; she knows him as her brother. He sits on the bedside, and waits, a sense of nothing. He has been weakly dismissed from his mother’s kitchen for his assumed child stature. Suddenly he recalls the sense of dislodgment at the restaurant earlier, and for the first time ever an invisible wall goes up between his him and sister. His makeshift anger fortifies as he thinks of his grandfather. He scours the skin of his arm with the nail of his thumb repeatedly until it chaffs and swells and begins to bleed. He covers it with his hand and reenters the kitchen doorway. His mother wails. Women neighbors caste their arms around her. The men are in the adjoining room. They utter deep tones. His father sheds hidden tears that he scarcely acknowledges and later he will forget or hollowly retract.

  He wanders out onto the street unnoticed and in blankness arrives at the hospital. He sits in the waiting room and waits. His mind has a faint echo now. Some wide berth around the perimeters is where it echoes from. It’s repeating something although it’s not to be reckoned. His mind is dull and dim. An edge forms. It will gradually become sharper.

  Nautch

  “The difference between intelligent substances and that which is not is quite as great as between a mirror and the one who sees it…”

  another degree

  Pilgrims to Mecca stampede, crushing and killing thirty-five people. Three years previous one hundred and nineteen are killed. Eight years previous two hundred and seventy are killed. Ten years previous one thousand four hundred and twenty six are killed. All caused when crowds surged forward for a symbolic stoning of the devil. Construction of American Embassy in Russia halted when Russian bugs are found implanted in walls. American Embassy exposed in digging tunnel to Soviet Embassy in United States. Cost already reached several million dollars. School in China explodes killing thirty-seven students and four teachers. Students as young as eight years old were assembling fireworks, an expected curriculum and income of the school. Man beats dog unconscious believing him to be homosexual. The dog is later euthanized due to extensive trauma.

  load line

  He moves through the streets and people now as if they are all nameless blanks. Banded with his grandfather’s death, he blocks most all reference to living. He listens intently and unnoticed to divided sermons. He appears and disappears through a keen sieve, leaving no trace of coming or going. For the next five days he spends all day throwing a hard ball against any form of cement simply because of the annihilating, dead thud it produces. He looks for a way out, but somehow he faintly believes out is really in. He has to run this around his brain in an endless circle a few more times, until it leaves a scoured track that he has trod but not beaten. He will not ever go to his grandfather’s grave. He has intended never to visit him, but he is being forced to go to the funeral service. He wishes he had some way out. He stands in front of the full mirror in his room, and stares up and down his image. In his eyes he sees exactly nothing reflected back. He adjusts his suit, to give the appearance of a body being present inside of it.

  The long car ride down to his grandfather’s birthplace and now burial place is uneventful, except for being unrecognizably serenely empty, with none of the usual divided sermons being spoken.

  Edgily coerced into the front pew, he presses and twists his thumbs together in hopes that it will shove time along by his forced will alone. He’s getting a headache now, one that throbs and reflects his angered heartbeat. He hears muffled tones from speakers, and is intent only on their coming and going leading closer to finish. Afterwards people mingle, and he, tired and edgy, sits at the back behind the door. When people approach he stares them down, and they quickly turn away to deliver their condolences where they will be more hospitably valued. He listens to the room’s murmured drone and in-between he sees his grandfather’s body. He notices a change in this perception, an exposing, when the funeral director steps in, straightening a very little nothing, and retreats. He follows him, moving outside into the hallway, and down the stairs, slowing his pace now so as not to be so obviously anxious. Now confronted with an empty hall and a choice of direction, he turns sharply and moves down to its far end, sensing an intuitive relief of his boredom. He finds the door. Above are e
mblazoned the words “vita somnium breve”. He tries to decipher them by association, but exchanges that for interest only in their weighty purpose on this particular doorway. He pushes slight on the door, and the smack of coolness of the room upon his forehead breaks his listlessness, and he is drawn the rest of the way by its inducement. Within, an aluminum stage carries a form caste with butterflies modeled in a soft blue light. He moves closer, and reaches out to touch its ethereal semblance and suddenly hears words. From around the backdoor Morpheus appears. His words are not like all the others. They have not warned him, or tried to possess him, or thrown a weight through the air. His words are satisfyingly clear and telling.