cloudless
I’d love to play with Pink Floyd. - C. S.
Cloudless everyday you fall upon my waking eyes
Inviting and inciting me to rise
And through the window in the wall
Come streaming in on sunlight wings
A million bright ambassadors of morning
- Pink Floyd, Echoes
Loud disco beats drum their way from the deejay to the floor, up and above the crowd that twists and sweats and writhes, through the slit beneath the doors, slipping past the bouncers unnoticed and making their final touch-down in the shells of his ears. He recognises them; they speak to him without logographs or letters of the alphabet. Tonight they are young and amiable, heavy-footed children clamouring for attention. (He obliges them with a smile.) At other times they are older, larger, Rorschach cumulonimbi threatening to envelope him, seductive (he gives in to self-fancy) in the same way his brows hang over his eyes when he looks at you, long and dark and drinking deep from the questions he asks you (and the answers you will give).
He walks down the street, pulls his leather jacket closer about him, zips it up so that the collar meets his neck in two neat sounds.
This is a mystery you cannot solve. The solving takes your attention away from the mystery, where it must be firmly planted, like a look, or a kiss, for the breaking of the case to begin. The dissolving occurs elsewhere, some place, he thinks, where his ears (in strict 2/4 beats) meet his heart (skipping in triplets; he is after all still quite young), fleeting, fleeing.
He will not seek it out. He lives with it, a shadow sometimes chasing him, sometimes lifting him so that he hovers above the ground just so (if you would look closely). In moments like these he resigns himself to destiny, simulates breathing behind a desk, words forming themselves onto the forms he sifts through one by one.
On days bereft of them he is lost. He becomes secretly convinced they are the only indication that he is alive. He walks around, anonymous, surprised that people still recognise him as the same person. There must be something he can take with him, something constant that can be brought to every situation and yet is never tainted by the baseness of abstraction, something that drags him from the trough and carries him up a little closer to the sun.
The neon lights blink at him, pink and green and yellow and cyan, looped endlessly all days of the year. He turns away to the darkest corner unsullied by this man-made light and there is a boy there, loafing against a wall, his left sneaker base meeting brick, his right hand coming up to his face as he draws deep on his cigarette. The boy has felt his eyes on him and meets them now with a handsome face soured by hatred and disdain. They are two different things, you know.
Feelings, he reminds himself. Feelings.
He walks on. His watch says it’s three in the morning.
Cloudless everyday you fall upon my waking eyes
Inviting and inciting me to rise
And through the window in the wall
Come streaming in on sunlight wings
A million bright ambassadors of morning
- Pink Floyd, Echoes
Loud disco beats drum their way from the deejay to the floor, up and above the crowd that twists and sweats and writhes, through the slit beneath the doors, slipping past the bouncers unnoticed and making their final touch-down in the shells of his ears. He recognises them; they speak to him without logographs or letters of the alphabet. Tonight they are young and amiable, heavy-footed children clamouring for attention. (He obliges them with a smile.) At other times they are older, larger, Rorschach cumulonimbi threatening to envelope him, seductive (he gives in to self-fancy) in the same way his brows hang over his eyes when he looks at you, long and dark and drinking deep from the questions he asks you (and the answers you will give).
He walks down the street, pulls his leather jacket closer about him, zips it up so that the collar meets his neck in two neat sounds.
This is a mystery you cannot solve. The solving takes your attention away from the mystery, where it must be firmly planted, like a look, or a kiss, for the breaking of the case to begin. The dissolving occurs elsewhere, some place, he thinks, where his ears (in strict 2/4 beats) meet his heart (skipping in triplets; he is after all still quite young), fleeting, fleeing.
He will not seek it out. He lives with it, a shadow sometimes chasing him, sometimes lifting him so that he hovers above the ground just so (if you would look closely). In moments like these he resigns himself to destiny, simulates breathing behind a desk, words forming themselves onto the forms he sifts through one by one.
On days bereft of them he is lost. He becomes secretly convinced they are the only indication that he is alive. He walks around, anonymous, surprised that people still recognise him as the same person. There must be something he can take with him, something constant that can be brought to every situation and yet is never tainted by the baseness of abstraction, something that drags him from the trough and carries him up a little closer to the sun.
The neon lights blink at him, pink and green and yellow and cyan, looped endlessly all days of the year. He turns away to the darkest corner unsullied by this man-made light and there is a boy there, loafing against a wall, his left sneaker base meeting brick, his right hand coming up to his face as he draws deep on his cigarette. The boy has felt his eyes on him and meets them now with a handsome face soured by hatred and disdain. They are two different things, you know.
Feelings, he reminds himself. Feelings.
He walks on. His watch says it’s three in the morning.