Friday 3 December 2010

Lives in a low-down shoebox

Of course you're compelled
by the perfect
storm of black words on
white page with which
the book opens,
or which you open the book to find,
and of course, once those
words have settled in a
right-seeming
order,
you ease back into your
chair, your pillow, your
mattress,
transfixed.
The perfect storm gathers
into rougher, stranger shapes, an
almost mechanically intricate
typhoon, and you note
all of the things that
the gusts of it blow and beat back and batter and
you are astounded that such things as this can
happen as the weather-
bringing pages turn,
turn, turn,
and you watch, of course,
the typhoon build up into
a maelstrom - you know,
the galaxial kind,
the standard-issue universal type -
with colours that human eyes
can only touch through
the telescopes and kaleidoscopes
we make,
spinning like Scylla's
vortex water,
pirouetting dazedly and drunkenly and delightfully
between the opposing
cliff-faces
that make up and are made up of
the soft-cardboard
covers of this
book, this book,
this flattened-shoebox
object,
this thing that is, of course,
a perfect form.

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