Elan Mudrow
Smidgens
Summer Forest
Summer plays with you in the forest, running mad in a meadow, hide and seek with a creek, foot race with a river. There are times when you’ll lose the summer’s sun, under deciduous and evergreens. But you will turn a corner, run into a bunch of arguing flowers who point the way back to a blaze of daylight or a ray of heat, the sun laughing its way through the canopy.
Summer places the forest in a still quietude, no rain tapping upon fallen flora, no snow who corners all sound and makes it its own. In this solitude, your memories lie the shade. All you believe and don’t want to believe surrounds you. You will turn a corner, look at the flowers. And they are always, pointing.
Alice
She sets a folded towel upon cool sheets, her ass makes a depression on the mattress.
Silence is never a full-proof method of understanding each other, even if hands are involved.
They touch, then they talk. Talking is never a full-proof method of…
His leg dangles off her bed. She gets up, opens the closet door.
There’s a mirror attached to the back of the closet door. She sees my reflection and doesn’t know it’s her. She touches the mirror, thinking, as she always has, that it will lead somewhere.
She leaves fingerprints.
Words
Sometimes I feel like murdering them, squashing them under my feet, watching letters bleed out, separated from the word they are attached to.
Other times, I place them in an incubator, checking in on them from time to time.
Some go in a special box. I wear the key around my neck.
On occasion, words sting me, knowing just how to punch my buttons, which aren’t that hard to find, since I come equipped with all kinds of buttons, switches, and on and offs.
A few have lost their way, trying to find the morning from the depths of night.
Others become feral. I’ve been told not to feed them, though I’m too sensitive. Now they’re hopelessly dependent upon me.
I’ve broken up with a few. They either get mad, sad, or crazy. A few have broken up with me. I either get mad, sad, or crazy.
Really though, I can’t complain. All in all, they’re pretty solid, clearing things up when communication gets hazy, commanding peoples’ attention when they’re not reading me.
Actually, I think, I kind of like them. I know you do too. (But don’t say it out loud. They have humongous egos.)
My Father’s Mouse
Amália Rodrigues
—-“Is it her singing that enchants us or is it not rather the solemn stillness enclosing her frail little voice?” -Franz Kafka
I know the place he visits…those melodies. Songs like children that make sure you never forget your heart.
I’ve tangled with them, led others to wrestle with them…let them run lose in streets…bare… with lovers and lost loves, even ones who harm you as they love you so deep that it seems you bleed internally.
For them. You do.
This I know…
Once a song enters you, you’re not responsible for the havoc or desire it creates.
I watch old themes take him.
Not down, not up, but into the sphere the singer knows and she knows this only when she’s singing.
She is Josephine? Amália? Their children?
Yes, but no.
They’re in all of us who have touched hearts…ran with them and away from them.
So, both.
That’s the closest of times… when we’re all singers, runners, damned lovers.
Lucky lovers.
Lucky to have so much damned heart, unrequited to the point of passion…
Then compassion. The heart’s last look at itself.
That child. That melody.
Tough Daylight
Chiado District, Lisbon Portugal, May 2019. (Click on image to enlarge.)
More images can be found here.
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