by Luke D Evans
narrative of a film
& the water table falls unbidden
beneath unconsolidated strata of stone,
sand, earthen fines
laden with precious minerals
the weeping willow sags
the weeping willow sighs
& the wind undulates the skirt of her
the belle of her leg
mutely
but the drag doesn’t stop
water bubbles, gurgles
across pebbles, down gullets
of woods, in grayscale
--in grainy afterthought
clouds that scroll 3x 10x
long (over) exposure
& blurred stars in an arc
water again, rising as in a spring during spring
lush, saturated green
colors turn to negative,
whites to black
but what is color
do we see it the same
do they
fade out or
shade out
is my red your blue her pink
…credit rolls finis
young pupils
view the world
not newly
fresh citrus intimated by a bowl by a dangle by a
squeeze
nay, out of range
birdshot on a canvas child that colors a clash
& is it over
or were those lines ties more significant
then
?
Schadenfreude
Measuring time by the placement of clouds.
A woman on the way,
half-dead by morning, and she'll pant in the doorway.
We all have choices,
the ones death imagines, lying beneath the shrubbery,
within dust clouds that spin in the road;
the dreams I wake from four-ought-seven
in the night;
across the room, where the deepest shadows
murder the now-still, now-waiting coat tree.
I see in hologram, in mental disruptions,
decoded into light and vibes, waves,
salty seas, open drains.
A tachyonic plague that spirals sideways,
colliding minds into these bionic bodies.
Colors trade places,
but the sky remains black,
speckled and smeared by the time-lapse of clouds.
I move pictures in the hall to cover old holes, use scissors on the sheets:
the children will be ghosts for Halloween.
It is a matter of mass over matter,
minds like so many digits marching in time.
I told them not to laugh.
They will wake the dogs.
There will be no sleep tonight if they wake the dogs.
See for yourself, this unbending of our lives,
conceptions scattered like so much resin.
Anguish comes in the forms of pretty smiles,
half-wrought and tied up in a plastic package.
They punch holes in the wallboard to distract us.
Leaves threaten to fall, rebirth before they're noticed.
I feel your pain.
I do not share it.
Self-immolation is a tool of separation, of individuality.
See, I am me. There is no great I am.
Turn the music down, it shakes me.
We all pretend no complicity in the act,
despite the neurons shared, discarded.
Applied Mathematics
The sum of our dialogues exudes pained angles to her face,
cases of mistaken anger
inevitably dividing hemispheres of the brain
between the rational,
the imaginary,
the crunch of numbers that consume her.
The formula of our survival--extrapolated from hastily scribbled chalk--
lay undiscovered,
crammed into parenthetical probabilities.
A child in the womb seen only in the specks of her irises,
a house in the trees found in her posture,
pictures
behind the brow.
Incalculable risks expose soft tissues, blood, tears,
expectations we never realized.
Absolute as a mere concept: breath, wind on the plains,
the natural progression of tangled limbs and shared DNA,
not even curvature of the earth could be relied on.
A cold colorless derivative
on the circumference of our lives.
She placed us on a logarithmic scale, an exponential expansion
only she could see.
Brand new
but fragile as falling snow,
and she said it couldn't last, this identity matrix
contrived for our own good. Still
she laughs.
Still her lips
with my own, hers glossed and cold, a taste
like glorious temporary.
Tomorrow, next week, mere integers in a world built on fractions,
on fractures and facts over truth.
I feel it in my joints, this ratio toward regression,
my own existence a too-long hypotenuse for the triangulation required.
Still we plod, hand in hand, up lonely dirt roads with the sun to our backs,
unknowing the end, intent merely to place,
like pi,
one digit after another.
Every concentric ring displaced by mutual tangents,
sheets mussed and blankets, but more than that.
Nay, a vector shared
greater than variables
and amorphous conclusions.
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