Napoleon once breathed this air.
My fingers were tethered to the pages of the book, as smoke wafted, as would be expected, down the Soho street. The sun was hiding behind the building against which my shoulders touched as I balanced on the back two feet of the French provincial meets Andy Warhol mod inspired patio chair. Thirty feet away, in the alleyway which one cannot see through designer sunglasses, a schizophrenic homeless man was crying over a dead rat, bludgeoned to death by a terra cotta pot fallen from a fifth floor window ledge after a young woman, who moved from Santa Ana to teach Spanish in a private school on Prince Street, tried to pull off a bit of the aloe plant which had been in it.
Gucci, Prada, and Chanel - they hide the undesirable. That is why, when I am wearing them and we are talking about peace in Lebanon, you cannot see my eyes.
I flip to the last page, my finger catching on its edge like the fibers of a grasshopper’s leg on a plume of wheat, and I see the last paragraph. The last sentence is absorbed into my mind before I can stop it, and the quiet ending had become rushed. The slow burn shot into the sun. Life is over before you’re prepared. I think of this as a plane goes overhead, and its shadow on the building’s shadow makes me wince.
I left money on the table, and the book there as well, where I finished reading it, which is what I always do, which is why I cannot get books from the library. I figure it’s karma, or some sort of intellectual cyclical exchange - a mulching mower of the mind.
As I stumble into the street and narrowly dodge a bike taxi, I remember hers. I remember hims. The men and women who thought they were the one. And each of them was. Many had such innate goodness, and this goodness was water which flowed to my stone heart and froze in its coldness, expanding. In the way that mountains fall, they cracked the rock beating in the center of me. For what good, I don’t know.
But I’ve taken to coffee. I’ve taken to cigarettes. I’ve taken to art and knitting. Now I’ve taken to keeping a journal. I’ve made my house bright, though sometimes I want to paint it all black with deep, blood red crosses strewn about liberally and chalk white saints scrawled with pentagram halos and swastika eyes. And these things float, spinning in my mind until I realize that Project Runway is about to come on. That Vincent guy is crazy.
Gucci, Prada, and Chanel - they hide the undesirable. That is why, when I am wearing them and we are talking about peace in Lebanon, you cannot see my eyes.
I flip to the last page, my finger catching on its edge like the fibers of a grasshopper’s leg on a plume of wheat, and I see the last paragraph. The last sentence is absorbed into my mind before I can stop it, and the quiet ending had become rushed. The slow burn shot into the sun. Life is over before you’re prepared. I think of this as a plane goes overhead, and its shadow on the building’s shadow makes me wince.
I left money on the table, and the book there as well, where I finished reading it, which is what I always do, which is why I cannot get books from the library. I figure it’s karma, or some sort of intellectual cyclical exchange - a mulching mower of the mind.
As I stumble into the street and narrowly dodge a bike taxi, I remember hers. I remember hims. The men and women who thought they were the one. And each of them was. Many had such innate goodness, and this goodness was water which flowed to my stone heart and froze in its coldness, expanding. In the way that mountains fall, they cracked the rock beating in the center of me. For what good, I don’t know.
But I’ve taken to coffee. I’ve taken to cigarettes. I’ve taken to art and knitting. Now I’ve taken to keeping a journal. I’ve made my house bright, though sometimes I want to paint it all black with deep, blood red crosses strewn about liberally and chalk white saints scrawled with pentagram halos and swastika eyes. And these things float, spinning in my mind until I realize that Project Runway is about to come on. That Vincent guy is crazy.