Man, I have been feeling so lyrical lately! I've been talking to myself all evening in between studying. I love JP Java now. I love the lighting and the location and the music and the quietness. It's my new hang out. It's hands down the best coffee house for studying.
The Unordinary Raindrop
It happened today, in a most unordinary way, that a raindrop fell on my head. It was as large as a cantalope, but not shaped like one. It was eventual as death and slow as a turtle and viscous like slime. As it melted over me, it lost it's rain-drop shape, slithering down my forehead, unbroken, it covered my nose, my cheeks, my ears, my mouth, my neck, and finally, my entire body was inside of the raindrop. I was scared, because ordinarily raindrops don't do that. For what seemed like an hour, the raindrop held me in. I thought about my mother. And then it broke, and I stood cold and wet for a long moment in wonder. Finally, I noticed that there were no clouds in the sky,and that my clothes were not wet. It occured to me that I must be
alive.
Doom
Once we stirred cinnamon into
our coffee,
seriously and sensuously
looking up at intervals
and looking away at intervals,
clicking our spoons against our cups,
metal against glass,
barely tickling our eardrums,
absorbing all of the tinniest details,
remembering every bit
for later analysis.
Remember the kiss?
Remember the smells and the weather?
Remember how the potential between
our fingertips rose,
precariously climbing higher and higher,
before we touched for the first time
and closed the circuit?
The flow was amazing, instantaneous
and wonderful and plummeting.
If only we'd known the consequences.
I have learned something new from all this.
We are disposable.
We are homogenous.
We are negated.
All terms cancel.
The reality is not half of a sine function
squashed to steep amplitudes of ecstasy.
It is the average of all eventual outcomes,
a line.
The battery dies because there is no longer a driving force.
The energy of the universe is a constant.
I learned to embrace doom.
Joe
His shirt has stripes and his ears
are only partly visible to me,
from here,
His jaw, up to his hairline,
which dips below his ears,
proclaims the existance of an 8 o'clock shadow
of hair
on his chin,
it's also on his wrists and forearms,
but I can only be sure about one arm,
the one that holds his face, that I can see, that
is pushing the skin on his head into wrinkles,
as he works on something
on a piece of paper,
with his other hand,
in front of a laptop
on a square table.
He looked up at me and I stopped writing.
And his eyes seem brown.
And of course I looked away.
If I had been on drugs,
I might have approached him in awe,
and touched his face,
and felt thrilled by the presence of a more connected reality.
But I am not on a drug.
And boundaries don't just fall away.
They help us deal with the uncertainties of everyday interactions,
with people we don't know who are hard to trust.
I don't think I'll ever see him again.
The Gorilla
Hold me! The woman proclaimed
to everyone in the room.
It is music to us,
this up and down motion of her vocal chords,
biological and physical and transcendent.
Gaze into the eyes of another,
and her words
become emotions
and thoughts
and hormones released
and hearts beating
and life wanting to create more life.
She sang for us.
He sang for them
the bullfrog in the pond,
desperately desireful,
because there were other bullfrogs in the pond.
Their croaking reaches a human ear
Their croaking reaches thousands of small ears,
Their croaking joins the chaotic chorus,
the rustling leaves,
the honks and exhaust-emitting mufflers,
the rumbling engines,
the grackles at dawn,
the conversations and footfalls of walkers,
the cacophony, the melancholy, the painfully visible silent suction of
space
pulling us in,
the intense joy of vibrations
How can it be?
How could we have missed the Giant Gorilla
making his way slowly through the darkened room,
his arms swinging forward, purposfully and carefully?
We were consumed by our own thoughts.
That's how!