the sky is hazy between the smog and the smoke; so bright the sun pulsating white hot. it's been on fire longer than we've been alive. fire so hot that it would absolutely incinerate us, made palatable by distance and atmosphere.
the river runs northward underneath the moonlight, against gravity, against the polar minimum as if the moon does not pull back and forth on the oceans to beat them out on the shores.
the picket fence is twined over with plants that do not grow; leaves that turned brown and brittle—in the resting relative peace of restive twilight—petals turned to dust, as if they had never existed in the first place.
you find it's like a fun-house mirror at times, where you can press your fingers to the glass and see in it your own reflections, and then it diverges, reopening old wounds and winding back time—back and back and back and back and back and back and back—until that fence had not been built. so far that the fence was never even thought of; where the fence stands instead was demarcated by the boundary of the lawn, if you could call it that, turned over from Bermuda grass and the last few leaves of the clover that prevent the little hill from just sliding away into nothingness and then its abrupt end where dusty topsoil is raked overturned to dry ashes for sunsoil.
Yehuda Amichai says that:
From the place where we are right Flowers will never grow In the spring.
and that:
The place where we are right Is hard and trampled Like a yard.
it makes clear there is no right here, to be found. there is no easy answer from the mirror; your mirror will never tell you what to do. choice and motivation has to come from within—if you use the motivation from without it will eventually cease—and change from that motivation rather than to please.
there is no easy answer, no direction left to go.
But doubts and loves Dig up the world Like a mole, a plow. And a whisper will be heard in the place Where the ruined House once stood.
our houses, our safety, are melted away into the aether, northward into the river that carries us; no easy answer gives us escape from the northbound waters, the only direction left to go is down. when it releases you spit out of the fun-house, no longer in the circus but the middle of the roar of an intersection that should be an interchange, as if you are Frogger and must cross to safety surrounded by all the words that make you small, darting between cars and under wheels.
remember—none of it matters at the end of the night.
when the morning comes, the sky is hazy between the smog and the smoke.
#Astral #AmWriting #Disclaimer #Golem #Mazeldon #Fiction #Funhouse #Original #Poetry #ShortFiction #Story #TheInvestigator #TheMoon #TheRiver #TheSun #WhateverThisIs #YehudaAmichai