He Sits
By MPTGraves
He sits, with no ideas and no direction, vainly searching. Yet another rambling vignette with no framing, no context, and no point? How about another random and disturbing short story about murder, or loneliness, or failed friendship? No? Perhaps rhyming will help. Maybe some of that witfull quipping he calls poetry that is ever so popular with the intellectual crowd?
“No, none of that will do.”
He turns the trance up from background to foreground, and begins to write. He starts with facts. No thought, just an ardent desire to get something on the page. The trance takes him on its rhythmic journey, and he tries to lose himself in the bass, to allow his fingers to do the work. He stops looking at the screen, closing his eyes and visualizing. He longs for imagery.
He sits within, the sanguine glow from the cold cathode fluorescent lights in his computer giving the illusion of warmth in the chilled room. Without, the ever deepening night falls forever further into the abysmal depths of an icy darkness as impenetrable as a glacial lake, all sharp angles of cryogenic crags and grinding slag, lifeless and chaotic like some primordial ocean; a perilous plunge, shattering the bottom of the thermostat as the mercury plummets. He feels himself slipping, the state of mind he has so meticulously created, the writing conducive conduit through which he had hoped to give vent to his thoughts sliding through his unspread fingers like liquid gold. The harder he strives to grasp it, the more escapes him, until he is left with only a dampness to remind him of a sea of possibilities drained dry and devastatingly desiccated until it is devoid of dreams.
Where now will he turn? The door bursts open, the blue-white blinding of the adjoining room burning his beleaguered eyes as his suite-mates take their positions.
-click-
The irony is not lost on him. The photograph, like his creative juices, is frozen, now, in time forever. An overt symbol of only what was, a hallowed haunting of times long past. “C’est la vie,” he mutters, sloughing his serious countenance and stern visage in favor of a cooler calm.
When words will’nt wind with one’s will
And all attempts are e’er asunder
Time tick tocks to tuneless trills
Beholden blithe by blessed Blunder
For frangible flights of fancy fling
King Chaos’ craft corsair-ing.
Speak sibilant; so softly sing:
“What worth is wind without ’ny wings?”
He smiles, satisfied. He stands.
-mg