5:15
By Simon Barget
- 346 reads
Inside
Desk beyond desk. Fans burring heat into mice-clutching hands and dappled light slips through obscured hidden windows, all enclosed, vacuumed in, and our soles rasp on floor tiles, then a wan sanitised desk, highlighter and lone sheet of paper, stunted stillness, odours faintly diffusing, everything capped suspended in a plain dearth of motion, forward, eyes forward: crisp idle, alert, ogling the screen, refer/observe/monitor/respond, pixel shift and pupils adjust instantly, light from screen vs. dead light from room, scant people passing cradle late lunch with some renewed purpose but still no truck, purchase, no value, no talk, no love, just idle air stunting the cells in the body, she behind him, back-to-back motionless, inert but all sorts of internal fine movement, even thought but not saying it, shtum, for what, whom, a routine, a safety, know-where-you-are, things to set watch by, she astride him, her, them, well I suppose in the end it keeps the wolf from the door.
Outside
Simple joy of the body responding to stimulus. Air, moisture, light, air, breeze, juice and sap. To perceive shadows, to vibrate, align, and the force that makes arm hairs wave in the wind. Face and then body, skin in contact, feet on the earth, the mud ceding to bootstep. To feel air breeze and light, apex of nose and skin blazing the trail, air encircling the nostrils light shifting, cloudy then cloudless, a drop of rain here or there, felt starkly on the crown of the head.
- Log in to post comments