No Little Envelope

I'm lucky there are things to do with sadness and loneliness
like writing them down
drawing them inside hamlets of words
built upon large interstices of white

so they can be seen outside.
sewn into a penumbral corner
and watched for movement inside
after a bit of rain draws interrupted lines in the air
draws many interrupted lines over many interrupted lines
over a text of stitched air
where the ink needle could go
and make a finer tailoring of reality.

Dinner at Half Past Seven

I walked across the parking lot car-weary, stepping to the side to let my dad pass me and not through me. Inside I corridored like the upstairs architecture told me to. Further inside, plants of an artificial green burst out from pots arranged like so, and I'd later realise the left wall was painted as if with fish scales, gave me feeling of being digested slowly while digesting slowly the food we were about to eat.

It was about the right time, when he followed right behind me and verticalled a finger in front of his lips to my sideways turned head, when after I went to the birthday boy and warmed him with a hug and the extra gift wrapped hours before, when he surprised the birthday boy because he had told him he wasn't going to come because he was feeling sick and I noticed the desks had corners and menus were in front of every chair and on the far wall friendships were sitting like so, deciding or waiting to decide what they would pick to digest. I complimented his her and she wasn't listening, her head wearing hair to the shoulders like a cape with the selective hearing superpower. My head turned towards some other corner of the room, then she said her hellooh and asked if I noticed the clinkety red and white leaves vined around her neck which I'd complimented her on.

Although almost everyone who came I was familiar with, I wanted to sit down with her, so we did; after waiting to see where the birthday boy would sit, so we would be proximally arranged near him. Other bodies weighed the seats down in front of me, beside me, at the other long table. I don't know what it is, but there's always clusters, rules that govern which bodies are seated where – must have to do with the sense of gravity, how bodies couple together and a phone comes out and those coupled bodies are stored in a removed memory bank away from just being there. Memories fleet. Among these bodies, there is a peculiar sense of porous silence that sludges over and through flesh, holding in words inside mouths and attaching particular concentrations of weight to foreheads so as to pull whole heads down in between sentences. There were two clusters of helium-filled balloons strung with cheap ribbon, one on each table. Conversations satellited around them, revolving several times through top and bot lane. I think for the first time in months I noticed how planetary I had become. I knew that asteroids and moon rock after a collision drifted through space, and I knew that I was being pulled by a different sense of gravity, but somehow I'd thought I'd not gone so far so as to have left the orbit.

Dinner came around half past eight, my linguini a too cheesy marsh of alien tentacles feasting on the scraps of dead poultry. A mise en abyme of digestion.

He sat a seat away from me but later swapped with his she so that he then sat next to me but at a distance of chairs probably explainable by his want to be closer to her than me. He pointed out a Swedish drink on the drinks menu he'd mentioned to me a month or two ago. We got three. Mine came first, then the message that the two they'd ordered the place had run out of, so they offered two other flavours. His tasted the best out of all three, hers the worst because the aftertaste reminded me of eating the little legs of white bacteria. As I was standing next to him at the bar while he was tapping in his eftpos pin, the boundaries of space seemed to polarise. My head flitted around after my suddenly claustrophobic gaze as if to catch and restrain it before it did something socially unacceptable. Later I'd accidentally hit a girl in the face, though not so much accidentally as not having considered the consequence of exerting force through a flick of a balloon. Suddenly I went from feeling like I was among the familiar company of friends to being the alien disguised as a human being.

I don't recall him talking about Jax or something that happened last game like the others moving around the helium maypoles; but sitting next to each other and him looking away a bracketed second before I thought he would. The continuum had stretched out long before he said he hadn't seen in me in ages and asked what I'd been up to. Me, reading mainly. He'd seen me walk and read The Forrests days before. Him, work and parties. The universe had expanded and the past few months our fibrous lives had unravelled away from each other and coming back like this, in this room, for this occasion, was like looking out from the edge of one ocean at the landmass that could be glimpsed just just past the miniscus of the horizon. Continents drift apart centimetres a year. I got the sense that we were far quicker. In between us lay an asterisked calm.

I felt something that later would manifest itself as the need to apologise. I was the one that left, that said I didn't want to text because I was too busy and felt too interrupted. I was the one that stopped going to Summoner's Rift. I left with more conversation between my teeth than cheesed monster. I hadn't realised our lands had drifted so far apart that the possibility of him spotting me standing alongside my beacon after maybe just one more day's navigating to my shore became the possibility of seeing an entire planet in the sky. Only at night, and then.

I walked off to be picked up by my brother around half past ten. Inchoate hazes migrated across the darker sky. I spotted a not quite fully thought out face up there looking towards me, but probably not seeing me in the empty parking lot.

All life depends on the opening of a window

Life is lived on a platter;
surface with accumulations of desire
that is spent
desire that is twisted
(the side of a Rubik's cube)
into another set of colours
different combinations of want
squeezed out from the tube
of truthpaste;
harsh thumb marks on the tube.

Life is gargled on a platter;
sat on a toilet in wait

Life is uncertain weather coming in;
inhaled by a child in want
child in an adult adhering to gravity
with the force the water 
pours itself into the lake
and stays.

Life is just a ripple
bouncing into the glass
of a windowless room;
collecting comfort in corners
and measured on a line dragged from the ceiling
(a stolen edge)

Life strikes me as a 720 degree cornea
of lost attention.

Walkinguistics

The future is the words that I anticipate will come before the full stop, but I'll never know them. As soon as the end of a word in my sentence has ever been pronounced, it has always been followed by a gap, something to bound over, something to tell me that a word had ended. As soon as I knew that, there was suddenly another word beginning just over there, an Atlantis that suddenly rose from just in front of the horizon. While I had been moving through the letters of the last word, the tectonic plates of grammar had rearranged themselves to float another noun or verb close enough to the last one, close enough to leap to or with a jutting preposition to help. I was thinking that I was able to predict, with my assumed growing knowledge of life syntax, the word that would come following those of this semester. But I was reminded that I do not control the continent of language; I but walk it, plain to plain, until the pencil that draws the horizon is lifted from the page.

I believe that older humans, who, with experience and maturity, grow taller in upsight, can stand upon letters and at least try to squint at the words immediately proximate. If that is true, then I am not tall enough yet. But I have so far lived a sentence that has not required me to peek at what atolls ahead.

I told myself that obtaining a summer research scholarship was necessary in order to go to Romania next year, as I had promised my grandmother. Although my parents had money enough in order to fund this trip, they also want to renovate the bathroom and my going to Romania would cost them a chunk out of that funding significant enough to delay their plans. My mother especially would have been upset by that. But, I am pretty sure I did not receive a scholarship because this is not the word that has isled, and I am waiting now for it to be formalised by the end of the week by a rejection e-mail. I had thought it was a necessary word to preclude Romania, but no. Not only that, the word scholarship had provided me with some security of happening over summer, some structured activity I would undergo in order to feel fulfilled and to warrant my affording the trip to Romania. But that word was a shadow in the water, something I had projected upon that space that I assumed would come after this word. Now I stand at the end of undergraduate university, my legs dangling over the edge and I can't yet see far enough to know where the next island or continent is.

Once the mirage of scholarship island dissipated, I felt uncompassed and consequently directionless. The horizon which I had always tried to see in the shape of writing knot suddenly unwound itself as if its two ends were being pulled to make it flat. A flatline, in medical terms, means death. It isn't quite flat though; rather, it is vibrating, forming an oval of possibility much akin to the shape of a mouth not quite closed, ready to utter. The words to fit in with the syntax of my sentence will sound from there.

I remember now what I learned but had forgotten recently: that my task is not to utter words, but to listen to words being spoken, given to me, and pace through them with my whole. Undergraduate university is a three-year-long word that is nearly over. High school, the previous word before that, took five years to meander through. The word I heard will come next is honours. I may have misheard, and if that be, I will hear what I need to.

Romania in June-July next year, though, I thought to be a word hyphened to the scholarship, but it wasn't. The flight deal I was given yesterday that I have to purchase by Thursday, the 8th of November fits spectacularly accurately with the amount of money I will have accumulated in my bank account by this Thursday. If I wanted to buy the flight today, I couldn't. Thursday, I would be able to, however, if my calculations are correct - and without help from my parents, without their strain. Before this incidence, I was watching my money accumulate, and wondered if I truly did need to receive living costs from StudyLink. The answer, apparently, was yes, even if I didn't know why. I wanted to buy my friend a birthday present that would have potentially been quite expensive and chunked a little out of that amount, but I had a feeling that it didn't feel quite right, and it was confirmed by my girlfriend as not the most suitable. I am glad I didn't buy it. Regarding money, something I didn't think very much of because I trusted it would not be part of my sentence, I wanted there to always be enough for what I need. For the past few weeks, I had concerned myself with thoughts about how writing would have made me money, but struggled to find an answer to that. Perhaps writing may not make me money as I had intended - yet I recall earlier this year when I questioned if I should write, that I received a positive answer. I wasn't told that I would make money or live from it, but that I should write. So, I will, and I do. Money is besides the point. To write, I have to have enough to live in a space where I can write from, so I leave that to be written for me.

I didn't think of these words, these semantic archipelagos. I wouldn't have been able to. I started NaNoWriMo with an eye to reach 50,000 words as I had done two years ago, but after the third day, I stopped trying to reach that number. The writing was becoming very laborious, as if my body were hung on a meat hook and at the beginning, the words would pour out of me as blood would, but then the flow would slowly cut to a trickle. Novels disappeared from the knot I had tied in the horizon, at least, novels in the way that I imagined I would write them and would make money from. Quickly, worded possibilities I had thought would come soon were effaced.

And yet I am not lost. Without knowing exactly where I am going, I am left to hear that voice that utters words as landmasses and tread on the ground it lays before me. Even if it be one dirt clump after the other, trodden or not, there is solid ground stand on, words to understand. Countries may form in my sentence that may break off as I walk them. I can only stand on earth under my feet - the past has been subjected to continental drift, and the future I anticipate to be nothing but words I know nothing of. I can only hear the earth below me speaking.

This Morceau of Jazz

This song came up on a Pandora radio playlist that started with Kat Edmonson. Something about the summer coming with this relaxed jazz.