It seems time,
my restless,
gives me too many
songs
with restless,
sad guitars.
The brain struggles
to encapsulate any
other forms or tempos;
they're all dead, strumming,
distant, like a waterfall
crawling down unseen cliffs.
Vaulting me to visions
of my panegyric,
spoken softly by
no one I like. And
forth and back,
to the doldrums
that always were,
but were most
significant when
a man died; strumming
his last breaths,
smothered by his
invisible past.
Because I learned then,
Whitney was the single
most frightening being
I'd ever met,
such happy, straw
husks in her eyes,
(her face, her emanation),
that if you felt them long
enough on you, you
cowered until you
saw the silence leave,
and then time after that--
(gone to strum, languidly)--
And any time you saw her,
you hid, any time you dreamt,
you awoke shaking, any time you
thought of her,
you vomited
hoping to effuse
all memory
of those beautiful,
perfectly-manicured, straw husks,
woven wistfully by the
thin, brown fingers of what
seemed like
ritualistic pagans.
Later you would see pictures,
or hear stories
and shudder briefly;
Hearing an E plucked
in successive quarter notes,
and watching the straw
husks unravel in your mind,
and unconsciously trying
to weave them
back to normalcy
as the tune grew more
complex and slower, slower
still.
And you realized,
after too much time,
it was all an illusion:
an allusion to some
future past
where the man had
actually died,
and his descendants
deigned to press
their fingers
on restless
guitars.
