Reflections

Saturday, September 18, 2010

Do you ever look up?

Do you ever look up?

I mean really look up, cock your head back and gawk at all the shit over you that might all at once come crashing down in one immeasurable ka-boom before you know it. I imagine that it is what a bomb going off or a high pressure gas line exploding might be like.

First the sensation of the earth moving, of the beams holding the roof of your house flexing and a rumble like no rumble you’ve ever felt before rising up like waves through your feet first then your ankles, rising instantaneously, so fast you haven’t time to even register the wave as it shoots through your pelvis, belly and lungs before you become light headed for an instant and balance is all but a memory, hands grasping for the wall, for the refrigerator handle as your knees hinge and knees guide you to the floor with a ringing like a child’s strand of bells dinging in your ears. Then the sound erupts like breath against the hair on your arms and shoulders, against your neck, the slap of a thousand fingers all at once, equal parts discernable sounds and something else, something you can’t quite put words to. Then the walls come apart. Right before your eyes pictures evaporate and curtains puff orange and red and yellow then black out of sight. Furniture, the table that had been a gift from your long dead grandmother who brought it here on some shit hole ocean liner wrapped in jackets and thick quilts, it lifts as of its own volition and winks out of the room about as quickly as you open your mouth, trying to clear your ears, trying to believe your eyes. All this blurs from one room to the next as plaster and paint peel away, as the bare bone wooden frame of your house is splayed open, dusty nail heads ripped away, spider webs wadded up and inhaled by the maul of a force that has no face to speak of, no real voice or eyes locked on yours, but a hole that is at once warm then burning, caressing then tearing, and right there in the midst of an enormous span of birth and renewal, of death and never having been alive at all, is the ceiling of your kitchen and a spec of something dark, a tiny thing held there by a web of sorts very nearly invisible except for the way morning sunshine is pushing in all around it to form a shadow that might spell the initials of your name if you name was someone else’s.

Looking up; do you ever look up?

No comments: