28 July 2008

luca penne

feet of clef

Miming the silence, mining the silence, mini-silence. Trying to ignore your presence, your arms crossed across your arrogant bosom, I prong the dark for a definition I can take to bed and console. Stars excite themselves unnecessarily. The television gloats like something a gourmet has left uneaten. I pluck a string, but it’s actually a nerve. You knew that, didn’t you? You knew my clef was G, while I mistook it for B-flat. Flat flat flatty-flat. You want me to learn the sharps, as well, but my fingers trill along the white keys and stumble on the black. We know so little about each other that our clefs clash and jangle, and my G trips over its triads, triggering accidental fifths, and your D-sharp regrets nothing with a laugh. We’re successfully ignoring each other’s more aggressive features, yet we inhabit a roman รก clef of aggressive forms and de-forms, and the other characters are watching, hoping to catch us at play.

loon laugh

Did a loon laugh that loony laugh right here in public? Traffic jolts along with shouts and waves. You’d think someone was naked the way the tourists are crowing. I slurp a pint of ale and rehearse my dotage. Chuckles and chortles, but I can’t risk a loon laugh of my own, not here amid the Friday afternoon crowd. You, of course, adhere to the hippy beads and peasant dresses of an adolescence so fizzy it should have been bottled. I’d advise you to delete the flowers from your hair, but the guys who sweat for a living love your bare legs and fast-forward posture. They buy you so many drinks the beer glasses line up before you like trophies. I want to tell them they’re wasting their dough, but I’d better not get involved. I’m reading a novel about a man too terse to express the failure of his internal organs. His life story represents the failure of the Versailles Treaty. As I purse a timid greeting your loony laughter skitters through the alcoholic haze and sparks a brush fire in the part of my hair.

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