The Wise Ry Guy

It happened instantly yet prolongedly – tarry not at any particular phrase! I will guide you through it.

. . .

Yellow careens into view, and I recalled the furious enthusiasm of a young child. The Tanzanian boy at play in the Savannah, a climate to which he is well accustomed, nonetheless strays away from loving mother to the outskirts of the village, discerning not the lion knelt in the still grasses. Perhaps it was a desperate season; whatever the scheme, the amoral predator tore the boy apart and caressed his pieces lovingly – an outcome indeed.

But the careening itself! Ah, how the aerodynamics recall in me the wind which attacked my borders lovingly and buoyed the urge of gravity on my cruise down from snowy slants. The peak was behind me, and it was now to focus in my crouch and skis whilst adrenaline & I rode the ridges toward the object of my eye, my goal and point, the place where the great peak plateaued humbly into the civil land. I had felt this sort of adrenaline before, when one’s discernable breathing patterns halt instantly into imperceptibility as the skin is whipped and the greater experience becomes the airy spirit of the animus. I had felt it before when in possession of a wooden pencil and in reception to its finest friend, inspiration. O sweeps this romance of the wooden pencil, the humble wooden pencil, employed by a man of the dirt, who, stricken from the graces of a civil city, scribbles & crafts & scrapes his eraser o’er the iniquities of his hand. For an artist long endured into a pattern of permission to the passing through of his spirit’s outpouring water to invigorate that birthright of his, that material medium, the grip of tried wood & dull lead recalls that soul of his itself which hath knit & persisted through each baptism of the word. There he exists & works, there, in his own hand! There is the romance of sweet lumber & blessed stone which smiles upon the nose and comforts the hand and stings the eyes & stains the fingers, that rebellious tool of tradition which shows a man his real self and all that which a reflection fickly refuses to yield. Despair for naught, yet unless it be upon a page where the cry might flourish, watered by the tear of whatever morphing soul clasps the wooden pencil.

No longer now the careening, for I witness striking appendages – all of whom strike equally distinct from their digital peers – that inspire in my mind the limbs & torso, buttocks, back & neck, knuckles & soles of a comprehensively tattooed man. A mystery to me, are the extensions of the portrait-painting ink pen, as are the limbs of man upon and afore whom they mark – can it be known what impassions the spirits of the nerves? How the ink winds about in silent theatre of lines and curves! My seeking skin evaluated his rippling fertile form, and o’er his left hip I breathed the cleansing breeze whipping off the tropical icy peak there of the lush & blessed mountain whose sides descend up his nourished torso and grace his springy cheek and thence on that high adorned spot glistens & ventures a fresh erotic stream outward – as third points in triangles do – along his stout thigh. At his right hip scented a tattoo not of another mountain, for instead I came upon a kingdom. This kingdom kept as polar ends a capitol & a cathedral, its pupiled foci who by their philosary opposition anchor the suburban face in a mode similar to the prominence of hockey nets on the ice rink; skaters shall skate & shove & strive and trace about the two ends all conceivable iterations of infinity while they compete with their fellows. Drawn between these powers across the length of the kingdom was a Main Street of people, tethering the irreconcilable gravities as countless individuals ordered single-file might bear their predilect to do. In each one’s possession sat a pair of objects, one in the other hand and the other in the first. Each pair seemed to bear interactive respective imports, but any relation between hands failed to cry out, “Here I am!” so that one could be confident such a relation was not imagined into being. A traipse down this line can unturn a woman intensely scrutinizing the bow in her left through the magnifying glass clasped in her right, a dubious fellow in a bowler cap weighing a mirror and a babe on his manual Olympic scales, a naked woman, a palm upon her scalp & a palm upon her breast, or even St. Henry himself wielding sword & steeple, cross’d orb & dove’d sceptre. To clarify, I myself did not traipse along this human tether; I am relating to you what was related to me by a trusted associate who did traipse this line – a museum curator by occupation, he was, a man with three hands, indeed.

I noticed the black & white, and it struck to mind a story of love. There is an Italian dendrologist, whose ivory form courts the calm trees. Drawn from his seat on the ribboned mylonite patio, there steps gingerly a Nigerian poet, saturated in anticipation as he approaches the scene. How often I take the ability of disparate souls to channel examinations both inward and out into divergent works, and – not considering it for the wonder it is – reduce it to its most criminal outcomes. But here live a scientist and a poet, the former motivated in romance and the latter disillusioned in expression:

“I don’t like it,” the Poet says.

“I need more words and less words,” the Poet continues.

Moving forth, he breached the scene, now amidst the trees. He followed her, an acre between them. As she wound contentedly along, he strategically put trunks between them, stepping between the ground’s leaves and gradually lessening the distance. Depending on one’s eyesight, things an acre away appear of grand import. She certainly did to the poet. A half acre now – her impression still mystifies. Never moved a man so unoccupied so employed. A twig cracks under his boot. A bird heralds his stalk. She turns around. Silently, the half acre dwindles to a few meters.

“Tell me about the trees.”

“You tell me.”

He paused, thought, composed.

“In spring I watched green shoots don armor to drink of soil and flower serenely. Now summer cools like hot coals on a harlot’s pelvis; while their limbs had stretched and beamed in the sun, soon in autumn I shall witness each one undress and lay itself bare. Fall sees a tree’s clothing flicker to the ground, and her brave spirit consigned to winter confronts it naked. That is why I love winter, for in it I can see how her limbs had stretched in the summertime.”

They walked through the trees in all relations but side by side. Turning from the bark of an apple, she expounded:

“Over many wet seasons, the seed of a tree will venture out of sight to coax moisture from the soil and nutrients from their hiding places. These green shoots do not frivolously pursue the earth; rather, it is a microprocess of a higher desire; life desires growth. Clear away the life that is no more, those dead leaves and debris; trim away the lower limbs and unruly twigs. And the plant will indeed stretch in summer.” She adored the subject of her study.

“Blooming,” the poet interjects, gesturing, “begets blooming,” he gazes at her.

She smiles; he continues:

“When the substantive imminence of death is realized, the spirit departs out of synchrony from the body. When the prospect of becoming worthy is realized, most men become content to steal. I have realized worthiness, and I despair. I have realized love, and it is like realizing death.”

“Could not love fade? Have you not stalked me through my subject matters on account of my physical beauty? You have fallen for transience. Bind to me through instantaneous decades, and vanity shall cackle at us both.”

“Highest physical beauty does not become so by its own virtue; and as nature curses herself, so a smitten man wishes not to age with a woman he loves.”

“Cease your realizations, and participate in your passion. Attack my borders; trace my lines like a light wind; finger my skin ever softly and define me.”

Trees will twist, gnarl, stand to die.

“Tear the skin from my lip like a laughing panther tears a birch’s paper from its trunk; inspire an ecstasy delete my lungs. Let me bury my eyes in your dahlial neck and grip your collar in my teeth and occupied so in this fervor my form will heave and your blood will tremble and your pupils will flick as your chin worships the sky and I will not know nor comprehend but in animi we will be life and understand it for only a prolonged instant.”

They got to it – a brevity downright Strunkian!

So the yellow, the careening, the appendages, the black & white, but the exoskeleton now, it reminds me of the raging fantastical necrophiliac, who as a child loved to play with dolls. And his parents, passionate in business and in bed, lauded his enterprise in story. Imagine now the necrophiliac as he makes love to the corpse of his latest victim, the tattooed man. Watch as he, with the finger of his murderous hand, rubs gingerly those precious lips. And as is such for a twisted complacent, the dead-flirter would not predict his impending end, how in an astonishing moment of poetic karma he was raped to death – no less by one much like himself.

But to return to the victim’s victim, there’s written by the ink pen behind his presently abused form shining coins, ships & vineyards. Two ships, sailboat and motorboat, struck upon epidermal waves, transport a shrewd master and a foolish master, respectively, both of whom prior this journey o’er the watery frame had left their dear talents in the keeping of their workers. The motorboat’s master boasted a labor force of plenty, of whom he assumed much and spared no care, persisting in debauchery, wide-estranged from those beating tragedies that inform what it is which a man considers beautiful. The master on the sailboat through no unnatural effort kept his workers few, as he loved adventure not for how it could flatter him. And the instant he blinked out over the oceanic horizon, the fool’s great body of bodies stole away each with the whole of his soul, the wealth of his state and all the pieces of his genitals. The sailor predicts such fate but thinks not of it, focused on his own horizon. He honors his collective, wont to thrive and mindful to attend the confessional. The oceans sailed by these two men color the pelvis; sailor and fool alike crest the same unnegotiable currents; some never learn the synthesis of being, passing in passion and boredom; some sink in hellish ideals; others, like me, just assume themselves to have tasted the rim of the pectoral cliff.

It will run straight through my head. I resolve to turn my head, so it might burst through my temples, for I should like not to witness our meeting, nor would I particularly savor an eye-puncturing. I suppose I shall know soon, though not but for a split instant and I guess also but for naught I’ll have known it, but how must it be for this spike to penetrate my whole head through the temples? Would it deflate my soul so quick I’d not feel my cripple skeleton crash & crumple against the ground? For if it were a greater horror even simply tenfold to witness than to experience then I’d almost be inclined to have leapt for the prank of it. I cannot recall whether I was pushed off that pectoral cliff or whether I jumped from it – I assume those are my options. Alas, I am subject now to a bitter clock of no rewinding. Perhaps if the fall were quicker – and if I could not see intimately the gleaming iron spike toward which I plummet – then there’d be not time to regret. I’ve never experienced such unbounded speed; I’ve never experienced such slow monotony. Th’divine unnatural stalagmite and steadfast instrument of my forthcoming impaling has locked my eyes into a static focus upon itself. Their watery stinging sensation initiates in trompe l’oeil the fore-stepping of my secondary reality from across the veil which separates the spirit from the material as I lapse into final contemplations, contemplations adjunct to & contextualized by the patient image of the spike, the spike which transcends the veil & splices the membrane as no other thing or reality could, not even my intermediating self.

At least it will be over quick, instantaneously – no prolonged pain, “I won’t even know,” he thought. The fall was almost peaceful – a life of striving, suspended in the void. He recalls a time of pain, real pain, prolonged pain: a love lied & lost and a self shattered and redefined – by necessity, yes, and ice. The pain of mortal love itself yearned for company – pressing physical illness tantalized his morphing mind, and creeping through his nerves it tortured the soul of his flesh; there was no stillness; there was no sleep or diverting escape. And yet, pain of the heart & body both is small, the immobilized eyeball, a disregardable trifle; it is the consciousness of his own miserable state and the awareness of all those versions of himself which had existed without these tormenting blights that actively enrage his whole being and prod him to wish for the spike toward which he falls eternally now. But transcending the sterile stinging lock on his eyes, he quite enjoys now the light soothing of wind on his skin – it defines him and provides a sense of location & facility in the grand scheme – he forgets that the wind is but the taunt of his own breath circling back around. Or perhaps he does not forget, but instead considers such a thing a wondrous fortune, a blessed miracle, a revitalization of the self from the self. There exist things in this void, between him and that spike, which even now he can embrace and nurture, things embedded in a world which speaks but has not been heard.

I become something apart from my vessel, ejected by that sensation of the locked eyes, a sensation which vades not yet. Falling frightens only those who have a sense of their location and assume the reality of such a thing. Although, a sense of uni-ego might make a simpler plummet – and perhaps a more enjoyable one. What lies implicit in this sense – a unity of inner orientations & outer direction is it, of being & world? The sensation of the locked eyes implicates somewhere certainly, for it vades not yet. Clear not away the eye sand – shove it back in! Retract thy sedimentary tears! Sense then what the sense is.

“I struggle toward & lack yet the astuteness to decipher to a satisfactory extent,” the psycho says.

“What it is to distinguish between my imagination and- that other thing!” the psycho continues.

complacency.. is to lose a life – to dilly-dally’s no way to penetrate!

. . .

I spun excitedly, running a few meters as I watched it cruise & swoop toward the berry hills, toward those wild things beyond, rhododendrons & roses; I wished it the love of my gaze all sincere and sincerely unsatisfied, though sincerely content. My spirit’s accepting posture inspired to mind a broken man, too young yet to have integrated the passions of conscious living into a system of efficient being, broken as an apprentice breaks at the dissipation of a dear teacher’s breath, as all our dearest mentors are rocks in our foundations & studs in our walls, driveways through our lawns. His chest knew suddenly that his grandmother was fading now to ascension. A second of panic, a rush of virtue, and he dashed on the sandals of Hermes. He arrived, departs to her the utmost gift to bless a grand departing soul, indeed, a long-held word of love and thanks he departs to her. She smil’d away; he wept. He wept; he wrote:

That thing which has kept me up
Keeps me up no longer
‘Tis a phrase not of the dim
But of the peace ‘fore slumber

Then he lay his form to peaceful rest in preparation for the day.

. . .

Thus concludes my attempt to describe a dragonfly, a momentary inspiration upon whose yellow exoskeleton hinged striking appendages and black & white checkered wings. It careened overhead toward the berry hills in no more than three seconds. How long did it take to read this? That’s how long three seconds can last.