Poems and Curios

These musings may as well be stashed away in a tiny diary beneath my mattress, in between the wooden slats that function as both boxspring and bookshelf. If I were to deliberately share them, my words would influence themselves, embarrassed victims of that particular psychological effect where you behave differently when you know you're being observed. A public outer circle is a strange but comfortable audience for a private diary.

The woman gently placed the broken toaster on the cluttered back table, the endless to-do pile. The pawn shop was filled with priceless artifacts. She had individually salvaged each item from the neglected shipwreck of retail-centric society, including the original shop itself. Where our collective appreciation dissolved, her personal vision of beauty was instilled. Her young but calloused hands began to dismantle the toaster, preparing to replace its fragile parts with trustworthy equivalents. This merchandise's very existence defied the human laws of planned obsolescence. There were no customers.

Exactly 9,306 miles away, a butterfly flapped its wings and killed 129 humans. Countless other wings flapped innocently until death choreographed each unique pinwheel to earth, free-falling without the weight of destruction on its conscience. In the end, you were always going to read the word arbitrarily selected for the end of this sentence: Mandelbrot.

It is always with the first chill of winter that I long for a summer soak, after which the sun would dry my skin of every drop until I shrivel into a decorative starfish mummy to be displayed at the local combination museum exhibit and seafood buffet: the Kitschy Kitchen.

The weary man rested his hand upon his friend's shoulder, careful not to crumble her hollow bird bones to dust. A book resting on her lap contained several faded photographs, proof of an unimaginable era when the fleeting moments of childhood were rarely captured, and in purely physical form nonetheless. "We were so young and innocent back then. Now we're old and murderers," she whispered.

Memories, ignorance, bliss, et cetera. If sunshine was eternal, you'd miss the stars and even moreso the blackness that holds them. Our memories will be erased by time, replaced as surely as we shed our cells, our shells, our selves. Remember while you can, forget that you can't.

There is a momentary yet forceful desire to share myself with the world. I leech onto it, before it fades as quickly as it appeared.