Dethawing fingers
gleaning heat off toast just popped from toaster
stiff butter softening as I spread.
Late night winter snack after coming home
Heart strings
I vacillate, while you sway me through the full spectrum of an orchestral symphony, the entirety, with one pluck, unplugged.
Berlin, hands, triangles.
I love the grand scale of everything here, this city that spreads across the expansive flat terrain, these streets so spacious and generously so to let you take in the magnificent proportions of their regal buildings .
I love the architecture here, particularly the Neo-Renaissance apartment buildings which are pleasant but to the point. There are no flowery excesses or fru fru decorations here. Simply order and unpretentious design. A pragmatic restraint. I like that. And on a sunny day like today, the bright beams of high noon take these facades of flat columns and entablatures, and zap them through space time, carving out deep geometric shadows in the recessed windows, rows and rows of laser sharp triangles and rectangles like some hip crisp neo-modernist print.
And I was enjoying the symmetry and uniformity when suddenly there was a breach in the pattern, hit me like spit in the eye. A tiny tiny hand, extended by a tiny tiny arm opening one of the windows and punching a kink in the design, high up there.
High up there… and even higher up there on a plane today you fly over head. I won’t even see your hands, or your arms or your sleeping face as you scribe an ark through the sky round the curvature of the earth, right round to the other side. My days with you I took for granted. I let go. And some other unseen hand plucked you away from me. I don’t like that, but I’ll deal with it. It’s time to show pragmatic restraint here.
Nosebleed season
With the weather turning warmer and drier, it’s nosebleed season again up in Miho’s sinuses. Agh. Just when I’d thought I’d finally grown out of it!
That said, it inspired me to write the following passage. No, I’ve never been punched in the face before (nor ever will be, here’s hoping), but I got a flash of what it must be like…
Getting punched in the mouth:
Blood, fresh blood smells metallic, there’s a pungent note to it.
It tastes thick, dry, corrosive and grating running down the back of your throat.
It’s the rust, your blood turning to rust.
No longer contained inside your body, ruptured from the safety of its vessels and exposed to the elements, its iron rich cells oxidises en masse with every pulse pumped out from the breach.
When your face has been punched in. Nose broken, the fleshy pink insides of your mouth minced against your own shattered teeth, the stuff’s everywhere, and it keeps coming, it keeps flowing, red and hot, coating your lips and tongue to drip from your chin and tonsils, inside and out, all at the same time.
Back there the blood globs up your nostrils and all the way down your airway. Out here, in the open, it coagulates then crusticulates engraining itself into every fissure of your skin, dried by air and self generated heat.
And the heat, your whole face is pulsing heat, swollen heat, but you keep calm, because you know getting angry will only worsen the flow.
You are the calmest person in the room amid the screaming. There’s a woman crying. And all the people around you, crowding, looking down with clean unbreached faces, intact faces but they are faces crumpled with fear. Amid this you are Zen. You look up and ask softly, politely, if anyone has a clean tissue and some water.
