And Now For Something Completely Different

Drabbles Tuesday, June 26, 2012 3:47 AM A tall lanky figure dressed in burgundy 511s and a faded blue denim shirt peers curiously at the sudden light of my headlamps with unsure jerky motions, the flat slick octagon of its head craning squarely as though around a corner, but really only compensating for its shape and size, obscene in contrast to the beanpole body casting pointed flickering shadows on the concrete. I blink at the suddenness of it all, but when I open my eyes again, nothing is clearer, and the slim angular man is just a stop sign. She loves the taste of her sweat. But not in and of itself. Because her lover is special, different, considerate. Always clean, her lover never tastes of body odor, or dirt, or any of the other things associated with sweat. Instead she tastes only of pure water and salt, with a hint of sweetness from her freshly washed skin and their sex, her body so purified that no impurity mars her perspiration. She thinks briefly that it's what it might taste like if you could fuck saltwater taffy, the minty kind, with the same softness as she bites down on her lover's skin that she would encounter with the confection itself. Some days it's impossible to feel like I've been given anything but half a gift. There are moments of flawless clarity, shining like diamonds in the dark. But expression is the difficult part. Because making words from a perfect moment, a transient epitome, a sudden image that is whole and so full of intent that it can not be misinterpreted is difficult. Sometimes the disconnect between what I am able to say and what I mean is so large a gulf that I wish with all my heart I could touch palms with my audience and have them see as I see, hear as I hear, but more than that, feel as I feel, and perceive as I perceive, so that they could feel the import of the stop sign men and the taste of saltwater sex skin. Because I know I have no gift with images, I get stuck on a simple and perfect spinal curve, or the strong angle of a jaw before I can even start to represent what lives in my head. Just so with music, too, I get caught in resonance structures and rhymes and forget how to paint pictures with the sound. But with words, I have some brief moments where I am able to not only create images, but whole entire moments, complete with the passage of time and the perspective of emotion. Not merely personal feelings, but the emotion that lives in certain instances, the pathos captured in the best of still photography. I am no writer though, and glad of it. Because I feel as though if I were like this all of the time, I would catch myself and others in an infinite loop of happenstances with too much meaning, and all the perfection of transient seconds would be too much for me to ever leave the maelstrom of my own thoughts on the matter.