doomrabbit

My late, hazy summer was spent chasing another breeze-dancing leaf, this time over the Taconic mountains grasping it for a time, and then casting it away. These autumn days I spend monitoring the woods through my window for explorative bears, though it's getting less likely; they're all claiming earthen dens. When I'm navigating the sort of crystalline cold that seizes you by your ears, nose and fingers, they'll be down there, surrounded by the sort of complete silence where you can hear your nerves hum. I look forward to this, the moments of intimate, cleansing solitude, where you wonder if you can detect the impact of each fl

Trudging on the high-noon-baked concrete stomping on sidewalk cracks, he savoured the few hours before his shadow would creep out from under his feet to show him its daily disdain. He was moving but not going anywhere, walking an urban treadmill - stoplights and oilstains and litter and bone trees circling up, up behind his heels, ferris-wheeling back down to meet his step. Afternoon arrived with the smog mounting partial venetian blinds to the sun. His shadow stared at him, his face, but with all features machete-hacked-off smoothed with sandpaper flattened with a rolling pin and draped in a grey mourner's shroud.

It dawned (grudgingly) on him that he was the blank-faced, forty-year-old hyperbolically pedestrian farmhand, not wholly content but not quite contesting his lot in life; his needs were few, his wants were none, his imagination and hunger and dissatisfaction muffled under so many bales of hay and years of interminable winters and layers of dead skin. This new day, the sun rose blinding red, the pigments in a newborn calf's blood, and in increasingly foul-mouthed schizophrenic zeal he swore a new Apostle's Creed to trace hyperbolically exceptional hieroglyphics in the pale dust. These were his waking dreams, his emperor's-ne

One must wonder what people did to pass the time in the years 997, 998, 999. Waiting for a greatly anticipated event perceptibly warps the time before it warps the quiet before a postulated strike of lightning just as brighter sunshines only darken shadows.

Once, my nighttime headlights drew halos around the heads of two happily lost pedestrians. Once, there was a cure for philosophical disorientation. Then, I steered around the broken, fly-writhing body of a hare. Then, there were concrete, achievable goals for those whose various uncontemplated means were implicitly justified. I'm forming a citizen of clay, rhythmically lashing tendon to bone, braiding neurons. I'm not what my sculptors intended. To subject the overcast future to undue scrutiny would be to examine the midday sun with a magnifying glass. It would sear a tunnel behind your eyes.

Imagine if rent were paid by hour of occupancy, not by month. We'd abandon our homes for days we'd thrive on excuses to explore. We would be the most triumphant transients. We would swing from the masts and worship the horizon.

Rolls of thunder made the foundation tremble that night - the pantheon's judgement announced by its tympani and some vast Orwellian array of rumbling tank treads, an army dispatched to proselytize, over my crushed bones, the shameful error of my ways and the unequivocal weight of my indiscretion.

He hefted a long cedar spear uncovered in the still-steaming foundation of the arsoned synagogue his gaunt, heaving body and the strangely unseared shaft tracing a delta against the pitiless churning horizon. His steps on the ruined flagstones though weak, were deliberate the execution of his course seemed far more crucial than his imminent and wildly foreseeable martyrdom more tangible than air which held stormclouds together. The altar, a hideous gnarled pedestal of hawthorn, gristle, and tar reeking of rendered fat and kerosene loomed in the distance, creeping as a tapeworm, inch by inch out of the terrified lichen, ca