Verve and Fervor

Lisa asked me to lie until the experience became memory. I said that yes I would try, but I may fail to reach back and move the truth.

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It is a summer evening in Sydney, a Tuesday in November, and I am watching someone mine their own reflection in a giant pane of glass. They are lining themselves up, assessing angles and light, their arm outstretched, balancing a little glowing phone at just the right height to capture their face as it tapers into digital oblivion.

I am in a gymnasium that has swallowed me; I have entered its Cetacean mouth. The warehouse lights above buzz mechanically, adding to the noise from the ceiling’s speakers. There is no stillness here, no balance. I feel the seams of the thing inside me stretching the leather of my skin. Each breath is an act of refuge for the air it contains.

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Speeches in a shower, sentences for no-one. Legs that carry me from breakfast nook to balcony cradling a mug of warmth and promise. Eyes that watch as a city wakes, steam literally billowing from the tops of buildings like in old films selling dystopia. A future, here, today. It is two-thousand-and-thirteen, six years and some months away from the Los Angeles of Blade Runner. Time remains mechanical in its passage, and all I have is who I am. Read the rest of this entry »

A great purple landscape, stretching out toward the world’s edge. Twenty three people walking in single file, their momentary leader twisted twice at just the right time to form, from a distance, a perfect Z, one that moves over a mauve desert, timelessly.