Tag: dewey decimal system

When you circle someone for an eon, you undergo a gradual process of self-awareness. The aura of the beloved, normally two inches wide alongside the body, grows to a foot, sometimes two. The eyes of the enchanted are pliable, plastic, and they cannot be relied upon.

So she picks you up and hangs you out on a rafter, out to dry, swinging like Foucault’s pendulum, an object oscillating in a circular plane. It’s common after an eon of self-awareness, albeit self-awareness that arrives much too slowly, and much too sporadically. Your head’s making a sine wave in the air, the rush of blood, a blitzkrieg of blood, breaking into your brain barriers and flooding every single memory except those related to mathematics. Mathematics, as everyone knows, has nothing to do with her and, thus, neither does it you. By imagining a right triangle extending from your arms to the floor, and to the wall, and by estimating lengths, you have a rough picture of the space between you and imminent doom. Too bad it doesn’t really change the fact that your cranium’s the most pathetic lie concocted on mankind, foramina at the base of the skull cracking open upon impact, imploding like fruit stepped on. The heads of the enchanted are hard, hollow, and they cannot be relied upon.

Shortly afterwards, the hard vacuum starts. It’s even more common, after an eon of self-awareness, than the cruel treatment of the beloved, the hanging of rafters, pendulums. Decompression sickness sets into legs, bubbles forming in solid tissues upon descent. You do not automatically boil, nor do you automatically freeze, you do so at the rate of growing self-awareness. Mathematics proves this, with formulas, and it is not afraid to tell you what’s what. Or rather, a mathematician isn’t afraid, but do you know any mathematicians? The containing effect of your skin helps, but that has its limits, and you’ll get pimples if you’re stressed anyway. The skin of the enchanted is uniform, yielding, and it cannot be relied upon.

Sometimes, stuff works out. Chambers are re-pressurized, the aura of the beloved shrinks to a an appropriate (while somewhat indulging) size, a blitzkrieg becomes unconditional surrender. Your sine wave is now a sawtooth wave, and she’s plucked you from the rafter, tucked her arms around your back so that her hands rest on your stomach. Hey, beautiful, hey. What’s not to love? Somewhere, a mathematician is going mad in a box that decreases in size at the same speed it takes the mathematician to find a way to get out. At least he’ll die with an epiphany, which is more than we can say for you. The reason of the enchanted is empty, submissive, and it cannot be relied upon.

Spine, support of the body, support of mathematical functions, will probably fail you when you see her. Perhaps your bowels as well, and you don’t need a mathematician to tell you just how unattractive that is. The aureole of hair, framing the face consumed by aura, colored deep orange, twisting, twirling around you as she packs! The clammy stare, the eyes, stinging you at the back of your throat! A Polaire, a Mata Hari, there’s a graph made, detailing how fast she can strip you of possessions, dignity and dental hygiene (it’s well documented that the heart-broken forget to brush their teeth). Perhaps instead of Polaire, polar bear? In any case, the mathematician will not lend you a shoulder to cry on. Mathematicians care not for the weaker portions of the anatomy. Self-awareness always comes a split second too late. What can you really expect, after an eon? The universe enacts its revenge, lovely loving umbra. If you want to appear jaded, I suggest you take up Schopenhauer. Or accounting, maybe then you can recover the funds she stole from you, and maybe a mathematician’s grudging friendship. The hearts of the enchanted are rigid, fragile, but they can be trusted entirely.

As the Earth rotates on itself, so the axial tilt draws and sucks at the sun, so the atmosphere expands and retracts, and so change, change they do, the colors of this boy’s hair.

This boy and his seasonal hair, chartreuse green to maize yellow to vermilion, sprouting bundles of freesias. This boy is the descendant of Phineas Gage on one side and Mendel on the other, this clean boy strokes a proverbial beard from which vanilla orchids burst forth.

This boy, who subsists by the good graces of Japanese agricultural subsidies, spends sixteen hours a day rice farming. His brothers tie back his hair with twine and stuff it underneath a burlap sombrero, but still the bees and the butterflies, they come. His mother, bald now from a combination of anemia and a variety of fungal infections, wishes he could invoke workers instead of insects, or at least a pretty wife. This boy has black eyes hidden by hair hidden by fat caterpillars and bright spring strands, the wife, she never does come.

When this boy attends school in the summer, he is a running whip of orange hair against a rippling mountain, followed by a torrent of birds. He sits next to the girl from the Yamaguchi Prefecture, this deaf girl with fins branching from her head. This girl slices the shiniest of her scales to give to him, and in return, this boy builds towering flower arrangements on his scalp. They admire each other from simultaneous and symmetrical peaks, bicycling in the dark with a sea of fireflies in the boy’s hair. Blown glass fish and ikebana until the day this girl grows gills and is thrown unceremoniously back into the ocean.

This boy’s hair falls out in taupe gray armfuls as the squalls approach and the ships leave, hair left on snow beds, left on paddy fields. Migrating animals grab his shirt collar, a souvenir, ripping away blossoms and fibers, carrying their feel and shape to nests, to dump in caves where hibernating bears lay. What good is it to be left without the pleasure of a trace, a salt path, a carcass, a folded-up lightening bug, a dried fin? As if not having a past tense, as if not coughing back bones up, as if not reacting in pain, as if not screaming in love. This boy searches for samurai swords in rocks and maps fault lines, but neither he nor the Philippine Sea Plate choose to subduct, sinking is not the option they seek.

Telephones poles and paved roads, they come up, even to the hills where these flower boys live. This boy babies a rice bag underneath both arms, taking the slow scenic path, waiting for the train track lights to switch. Locomotion starts and stops for him, the conductor staring as this boy smiles, wind nabbing his sombrero, a wave of sparrows and wasps, light striking the surface and hair striking back, this soft green fuzz underneath.

Your name is no accident, your face is not the work of God. You are fashioned from fresh water and cellophane, you are wearing a shirt with tulle cuffs. Your body is a buttery electrical current, freckly enough, lively enough. Your brain is a cushioned receptacle for who-knows-what, I sure don’t know. Of all possible onomatopoeia, you are a pop, but inspired pop. You are hardwired to my heart, you’ll explode if the rate ever slows down. So call me in the evenings when you feel the adrenaline leaving the gravity between us. I’ll run for you, always.

This is the company I keep: long-limbed, tree-climbing ankle-biters, sugary sons and dangerous daughters of the fruit canners.

There they are in the mornings, sprung from the mud of their forefather’s factory, a plum firstborn holding a string of rose hip sisters, rough mulberry brothers. Sweet-talking fire-breathers, bright as vegetable skin, intestines clean and dark purple, organs encased in endocarps. Feeders who reach into golden boughs, feeders of flower ovaries. Some, maybe a plucky baby or a pair of pomegranate twins, will live forever.

You stand in the front where you can be seen, carrying oranges in the folds of your hiked-up skirt. A sea captain leagues away will open his window and smell you. Your scent cures homesickness and scurvy, your scent makes summer month festival gypsies fall in love. None of your sibling’s superlatives fit you; you are neither the prettiest nor the wiliest, neither the snake-charmer nor the double-crosser. Pithy, you wake up the lime burner’s children and the tanner’s babes with your harmonica. They will wade through salt solution and rawhide to get to the citrus of, the citrus in your hands.

I see you sometimes, seated on school steps, when you are peeling fruit for the young. Your eyes are on the mountains, and your hair is in your eyes, and the pucker of your lips is steering you off-tune, you who are tone-deaf already. That knife finding the core, both mine and the orange’s, you hum hurruming jazz, a harp bop, double drums, alto sax. The juice that stays on my neck when you tip me back, catching me in an alleyway, holding me upright as the oranges tumble and strike the backs of my knees. You cup your strong-smelling, sticky-soft fingers around my ear and say let’s blow this city.