Anton The Ear Eater
Attending concert halls and enjoying music in the intimate nineteenth-century salons of London would have been pure entertainment if it was not for the uncertainties of a bizarre and macabre phenomenon.
Anton, a ghost with an oddly shaped skull, protruding teeth, popping eyes, and a cross carved on its forehead, appeared in the middle of concerts and music gatherings to have a taste for the music. If he liked the sound of it, he would nod his head rhythmically. But if he didn’t like it, he would lock the doors and start the blood and gore. Anton would suck the eardrums and eat the ears of all spectators.
Nowadays, Anton wears a pair of supernatural headphones capable of connecting to your music devices and search for bad songs. And he is hungrier than ever for ears.
I read this poem at EAR EATER #15, part of the EAR EATER series held at Paratext Books, during the bookstore's last night.
Nothing
What separates you and me and me from you
What separates us from them
is nothing.
Nothing separates us.
And that is a problem.
Because nothing is more solid. Nothing is unbreachable, unbypassable, unsurmountable. Nothing cannot be sidestepped. Everywhere, there is nothing. Thick and unbound, sliding into all mouths like syrup.
When daydreaming at work you imagine yourself furiously scribbling poetry in your notebook or on post-its. Or maybe you imagine yourself typing. Or on a sunny beach, Ray-Bans on, sun changing the color of the hair on your body and brine smelling strong, sour, and lovely. But you don’t imagine the nothing that surrounds you, in the dream. That comes on its own. It fills the spaces in the imagination. You don’t imagine the nothing, but it’s there.
It fills the places between your fingers and between your fingers and the pencil and between you and between me and between us.
As children we are shocked to learn that 70% of the world is made of water. And that 70% of our body is made of water. But no one ever talks about nothing. Most of the world is not made of water. It is made of nothing. In living rooms, in bedrooms, in buses and trains, mostly nothing occupies most of the space.
There is nothing in the bedrooms of the people we sleep with. And their living rooms. Or cars, where there was room and we made our bed and they made their living. Even in rooms with high beds and low hanging ceilings, nothing.
In those rooms and in your room, most of the space is nothing.
