Heavy quiet of the deep night
hangs around me, do not disturb;
I ease the wheels over the kerb,
gently push into the
streetlight’s
glow, and go; fast wheels, cold
hands tight
against the steering wheel, I
feel
like a stolen moment, unreal
like a blurred dream, and dark
scatters
making patterns with the
splatters
of my headlights; I grip the
wheel.
As published on Fiery Scribe Review
Blanket sky, white frost,
breath clouds hanging past chapped lips,
fir tree wrapped in light.
Bright day, sunlight spilling like liquid from a tipped pot,
staining the ground a light and dark marble; we sit
outside the Bauhaus school and watch as a group of students
raise an unspooled film of plastic, how the breeze fills it,
how it billows and curls organic, like a sea creature; in the park
we make a game of naming trees, birds, flowers, and waft
between the rippling walls of a cloth house: learn it's an artist's
response - feminist, environmentalist; postcard streets drip
with locals, with tourists, and we trickle through, find water,
find stamps, read out googled answers to our many questions,
leave laughter falling behind us; later, after mopping the last
spices from our plates, I free a fervid cry, this howl I carry
in my chest, for a limp future--
but boarding the return to Leipzig we're ebullient again,
trading chocolates, thoughts & anecdotes on opinions, living,
society, health - twittering children in a private sphere
while evening falls and Germany rushes past ever darker;
I think again of the plastic film outside the school, how
it reared and surged, how it breathed as it heaved,
organic.
When tapped, laptop keys sound like small glass beads clinking together;
when dropped on wooden desks pens and pencils sound largely the same
only the quality of wood on wood is denser, the plastic on wood more transparent;
when opened, bottles of fizzy liquid hiss, unimpressed at the impertinence;
when placed on wooden desks elbows can make either no noise, or a small
whuffing thump depending on the force used to put them there;
when opened in not-silence a chocolate bars' wrapper will shout unabashedly;
when swung outwards doors will emit a hallways' muffled chatter
like a small child desperate to lighten the mood;
when pushed backwards instead of lifted chairs will moan;
when drawn open or closed zips will whine or drone
depending on the speed with which they are pulled;
when dropped on the floor a book will give a hearty flap of complaint;
when floating in the cavern of a library, whispers in a foreign language
sound much like the unintelligible secrets of the universe;
when surrounded by studious young people there's a tendency
to wonder if you have ever taken anything seriously at all.
I thought I found a spider's web
glistening silk and diamond in a corner of an open window
but when I looked again it was gone