I sometimes feel my face freezing in place,
experience written across the eyes -- scars, creases, repetition.
The laugh-lines and frown-lines of laughter and heartbreak set into my face like an early version of a deathmask.
And I wonder how I will be seen, how I am seen, by the world as it passes.
I fear that my face is settling not in hopeful happy lines – although I have these, as many happy signals written into my experience as sad, as many silly as angry – but in a dumbfounded slack-jawed yokel expression.
I spend so much time drawn into myself.
I fear I will make an ugly corpse.
All the sparkle, all the electricity that is in me and through me and with me is found in my eyes. That’s where I spend the best of my time, in the inner reaches of my private self. In my mind.
So the flesh that hangs on my skeleton, on my skull, my jawbone… hangs on with a loose, even slackness as the electricity is pulled inward, burning fires in the deeper hearth beneath my outward appearance.
Brain waves are my stock in trade, not smiles and waves, not happy to see you how’s the wife and kids --
The fuel that burns the energy that is me, and the flesh that hangs dumbly, awaiting instruction, do not often connect. My mind has turned inward upon itself. It’s mostly memory centers with me, logic not laughter. It is thinking through a problem. In solitude.
And so in solitude, the flesh hangs dumbly, the jaw goes slack. Its long pointless jowels lengthen and release.
My thoughts send me skyward, cutting into the night. Gravity pulls me earthward, down with the ever present pull of weighted experience. I am a slack-jawed yokel thinking thought of the heavens. Slowly being crushed until ending in dust.
And it is around the weight of that contrast, the soul of that electric spark fighting to break free, to break through to that loose-hung flesh, warming it from the inside like some universe of its own, threatening to collapse in upon itself like some tired supernova, that my world revolves. The spark will be lost someday when the flame is extinguished, leaving only flesh, only the loose appurtenance of the worldly flesh. A corpse.
And in my case, perhaps, an ugly one.
experience written across the eyes -- scars, creases, repetition.
The laugh-lines and frown-lines of laughter and heartbreak set into my face like an early version of a deathmask.
And I wonder how I will be seen, how I am seen, by the world as it passes.
I fear that my face is settling not in hopeful happy lines – although I have these, as many happy signals written into my experience as sad, as many silly as angry – but in a dumbfounded slack-jawed yokel expression.
I spend so much time drawn into myself.
I fear I will make an ugly corpse.
All the sparkle, all the electricity that is in me and through me and with me is found in my eyes. That’s where I spend the best of my time, in the inner reaches of my private self. In my mind.
So the flesh that hangs on my skeleton, on my skull, my jawbone… hangs on with a loose, even slackness as the electricity is pulled inward, burning fires in the deeper hearth beneath my outward appearance.
Brain waves are my stock in trade, not smiles and waves, not happy to see you how’s the wife and kids --
The fuel that burns the energy that is me, and the flesh that hangs dumbly, awaiting instruction, do not often connect. My mind has turned inward upon itself. It’s mostly memory centers with me, logic not laughter. It is thinking through a problem. In solitude.
And so in solitude, the flesh hangs dumbly, the jaw goes slack. Its long pointless jowels lengthen and release.
My thoughts send me skyward, cutting into the night. Gravity pulls me earthward, down with the ever present pull of weighted experience. I am a slack-jawed yokel thinking thought of the heavens. Slowly being crushed until ending in dust.
And it is around the weight of that contrast, the soul of that electric spark fighting to break free, to break through to that loose-hung flesh, warming it from the inside like some universe of its own, threatening to collapse in upon itself like some tired supernova, that my world revolves. The spark will be lost someday when the flame is extinguished, leaving only flesh, only the loose appurtenance of the worldly flesh. A corpse.
And in my case, perhaps, an ugly one.
No comments:
Post a Comment