10.14.00 - 17:01:30

You do not know me. You are now a voyeur. You are listing port, you are edging closer, my words are in my mind, but they are no longer my own.

If you have already left, these words do not exist. You do not know me, but at this moment you are closer to me than a lover and you are inside me, coiled within my soulheartmind, a bitter black seed of possibility, a parasite, a hidden potential, an uncontrolled uncontrollable variable, a voyeur.

Without is an alien concept, an exile, an emigrant. You are within, now - until you glance away from the screen, until your mind drifts to the slant of sun across the salt salt sea, until you remember the feathered shadow of a rustling maple on a day so tangibly autumn you began to feel you were composed of nothing more than slanting golden light and woodsmoke and a hint of energizing chill.

You are mine, I am yours - whoever you are - until you remember the distinctive, distinctively satisfying crunch of acorns - scattered across the sidewalk and grass - breaking beneath your feet.

My neighbors once had a chestnut tree, and every year the chestnuts wrapped in their green spikey shell, would fall into our yard. Each movement was tedious - dangerous - for green they lurked witchy in the grass. The season faded, and the winds rose, and the acorns fell

crunch crunch crunch

(I still have a visceral thrill when I feel them splitting beneath my weight. Sometimes you catch them at a strangely resilient angle - and you roll-slide-gilde until you find the peculiar point of structural weakness and cruuuuuunch they split beneath you, smear the mast upon the sidewalk.

I like sidewalks that are broken. I like sidewalks upon which someone has painted in red or warning yellow - beware. [Here there be dragons of concrete, and they will devour your toes, bark your shins, send split-blinding fire through your spine.] I have split more than one toenail upon an some jagged upwelling of sidewalk, lifted, of course, by the surging roots of a nigh, thick-trunked tree.

Once upon a time, I deliberately sought out broken sidewalks, just as I had certain things in town at which I liked to look - I would hope my mother would take this route and not that other one. I even had a certain unshakeable pattern I followed, in this little thrilling glances.

For example, I would strain for a glimpse of the curving blue and white loading dock of the little Broughton warehouse on eighth - then turn around quicklike to catch a glimpse of the rapidly receding little railroad bridge at the end of a single, lonely siding along the great wide swath of track that cuts our town absolutely in twain.

There was always a lonely Chessy System boxcar rusting upon that bridge. I preferred Chessy System railroad cars to any others - the Chessy System logo was a round, moon-silohuetted cat, and it pleased me to see it. The Chessy System is no more. I doubt they have any remaining cars, but now I think I'll lurk and watch, watch and lurk, hoping for a glimpse of the moonshaded catling.)

crunch crunch crunch

and the acorns fell (you are my voyeur. you are in me. i am in you. i am no more. i am not here. these are leavings. these are breadcrumbs on a moon cast night. these are shining white pebbles, and they only tell you where i've been.

where have i been?) the acorns fell. The season went dry, sere, the dessicated season, the desert season no matter how much it rains slanting silver needles across the cold cusp of air. The season went dry, and the greeny chestnut husks resolved themselves into needle brown things, sharp and dangerous and ever-splitting open to reveal the mealy prize within.

To eat a chestnut you must roast it in fire, you must sear it in flame, you must broil it beneath a redhot coil in a stove until the skin is dry and snappish and easily pulled from the sweet core of meat within.

So many things require fire.

So many things require flame.

You do not know me, and you are still reading, and you have burrowed so far inside me that the wound of your entry is receding to a faint dull itch, a small scar of skin. You do not know me, and perhaps you are a stranger who has suddenly swallowed me whole.

Perhaps I am a stranger who has suddenly swallowed you whole. Perhaps I am never whole.

You do not know the weight of my breath. You do not know the slant of sunlight across grayed eyes, lighting them intensely glancing blue, a horizon gaze. You do not know my small vices - the slender marks of my teeth in every writing implement I own, the faint, breathless singing that accompanies my every step, the way I toss wet towels upon the floor and leave them for days and days and days.

You do not know the secretive curve of my smile, the way it shies away from a full bloom of a grin.

You do not know me, but now - right now - you are nothing but me.

You are a voyeur, but I am not an exhibitionist. My words are within you, invasive. My words are now buried within you.

No matter how hard you try, you can never dig them out again