Sunday, April 17, 2005

Nailbomb

The sound of the highway
swells, blocking out the
speech of the well-groomed
man on the television,
whose soul communication
now is that grin that tells
me to just wait, and soon,
I’ll be likewise suit-clad
and rich enough for that
oily sweat to form upon
my brow as I do no work
and collect the pay that is
somehow earned with
trickery and woe unto others.

Another channel, no more
audible over the blast of
semi truck exhaust, and here
there are impoverished couples
divulging their darkest secrets
to sympathetic looking human
sharks, soon goating them into
fistfights with each other and
clothing loss which is blurred
to keep the worst of the titillating
view away from the innocent
kiddies at home, though the
wolf’s eye beneath the host’s
brow is surely the source for
nightmares, not some hint
of a naked backside as the
overweight man’s jeans sag
lower.

Now muted and displaying
the closed captioning for the
hearing impaired, any hope of
understanding the squawk of
the tiny speaker having long
since been abandoned, the program
shows police beating drunken
people with clubs, car accidents,
people being gored by elk that
have been driven into town for
lack of grazing land in winter,
horrors of the modern world,
far more real than any in myth
or legend.

I sit back from the glare and
flicker, my eyes as marble-hard
and glazed as a road-killed
animal’s, my soul bereft, my
understanding of my own people
worn thinner than the aluminum
sides of a beer can.

I have become all sharp shards
and dynamite, a nailbomb within
this slow-death house along the
roadway, composed only of a strange
suspension of disbelief, a suspension
of action that keeps me from
finding a firearm and doing
this cathode ray opiate unto death.

3 comments:

Risu said...

Holy man. Oh wow, my vocabulary feels repressingly limited right now. I suppose your prose invokes the cliched, yet very true, sentiment of 'speechlessness.' Impeccable.

My only critique is that it increases the intrigue factor surrounding you and your life, which, admittingly, is actually a personal lament rather than a legitimate critique.

I shall most definitely take you up on your offering of your college apperceptions when I find myself in need.

I also took your advice on developing some sort of super power. I thought I should perfect my technique even before I acquired a side kick, less I become the sidekick due to insufficient skills. So far my talents seem to be strongest in the field of dead mouse-seeking. I'll keep working on it though.

Thanks again for commenting.

Risu said...

Sounds like a very 'Shibumi-esque' life you lead. ;)

I most assuredly have priority access to all manners of classified documents, in thanks to my ninja and pope training.

Holy and divine...hehe...I like that.

And thus I keep things going in that vortexian sort of way.

Quick question that should not reveal too much about yourself should you desire to remain enclosed in the shadows of the internet: have you ever had any of your prose published?

Risu said...

I had a notion you had read 'Shibumi'. I cannot pinpoint the reason why, I just had a premonition of some sort. I think of all the books I've read, that one has had the greatest philisophical/spiritual impact on me. I suppose some of Orson Scott Card's works have had relatively similar effects, but no where to the same extent. Perhaps it was the way Trevanian presented the ideals he explored: sometimes the examination of concepts was vague when it served best to be so, ensnaring the reader.

Glad to hear you've had a few works published and I wish you the best of luck on your quest to publicize your novels. What sort of genre can you best categorize them as?

The literary world seems so brutal, but considering the magnitude of unmitigated drivel that is apparently worthy of print, I know that writing of your caliber has to be accepted eventually, unless the apocalypse is nearer than I had anticipated.

Cheers!

Across Inconstant Breath

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