From: Kafka Dreams <kjc@[OLD RUTGERS ADDRESS]>
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 93 00:13:04 EDT
To: void
Subject: Lethal Cleavage


This post has nothing to do with lethal cleavage at all.  It has to do
with being online, eating oreos, listening to ZOOROPA and watching the
lightning out the window.  It has to do with being indescribably sad
about small and large things.  It has to do with laughing fully, with
a giant smile and oreo crumbs sucked up into the back of my nasal
passages, at the thought of elbows flaming about the void's
"what-can-be-posted" reality.  It has to do with the simplicity of a
really worn out old blanket bought at Sears when I was 11 and the
comfortableness of a chair inherited from my dead Great Grandmother's
gloomy house.  It has to do with Levi's jeans and warm feet and making
up words that work better than the proper choice.

It is a strange peace one makes with oneself -- to decide, each day,
that it is worthwhile, or at least, worthwhile enough not to chuck it
all just yet.  It is an unusual position to hold, this off-balance
song-and-dance act.  Utter sorrow.  It is so much more the stranger to
wake up, sort through the confusion and choose to be happy with this.
With the carven image of one's self upon the altar.  Not the
sacrifice, not the god, not the worshipper.  The church.

Some days... I do not dream.  I have cut my finger nails and toe
nails.  I have bathed and dried.  The air is pregnant with rain and
light.  This is the flower I unfold, of my fingers and the tickle of
my palms.  Here is the cool metal and the dancing images trapped in a
box and soaked in bloodurine.  Here is the bear, wearing his collar
and dancing.  There is the turtle, hidden in plain sight.  Truth is
deeper than sorrowjoy.  Thought is truer than the images of others and
dream is truer than thought.  We wish in the flame of a candle and we
grieve on the stone, when it should be the other way round.

The car dies.  The cat dies.  The computer lives.  I cannot describe
to you the color of truth.  It is white, like a bone pushing through
skin.  It is black, at the bottom of a deep garbage pile, where the
smell of mint cuts through the stench.  It is gray like a pale car in
the fog.  It is blue like a perfect sky, and dark, like the air just
before rain.  It is bitter, with a sweet aftertaste.  It is too
beautiful to look at and so ugly, we cry when we see it.  They do not
cry for joy.  For them it is pain.  Hardness, solid, with no way to
grow.  Nothing to do but stand trapped or crack the stone and begin
again.

They do not cry for joy.  I do.