Behind the window and through the blinds lies a man, who
stands and perches, naught but a silhouette outlined by the
brown, nicotine-stained glow of the sheets-called-curtains.
Anyway, there's a man there, peering into my window as
measures necessary to enable sleep are taken, but he's
not doing anything, I mean - I'm not sure he's even watch-
ing me, but the hour grows late and try as I might, the mind
runs
wild -
drawing demons from crevices and hands of memory
from the bizarre December thunderstorm winds, and
it's always hard but right now becoming impossible
not to draw lines between nonexistent floating points and
shadow the underside of spinning geometrics. I
don't know how people do it, although I imagine
this ******* guy that will not stop looking at me - ab-
solutely, undoubtedly, has some notiong of how to ..
Hey!
Listen!
I shout, but I'm starting to wonder if he's really there at all
or if maybe he's not a pseudo-******* floating dot-point
construct, designed and developed and implemented by
some crazed group of people to -----------------------------no!
that is unlikely, and probably impossible - really,
I believe that I'm better now and see ent8irely that said
lying-yet-standing isn't a man, no, but that he is
an
illusion!
Looking around at the soft yellow glow from the low-
yield/high-power bulbs as it leaps from sad chair to
stained and scarred electronics and into my
cerebral cortex, the lack of and maybe .. I can
see now a palpable, blood-like desperat-
ion for wont of any sort of human contact - it is
wretching, but ever-present - because, currently, that
cannot
be.
And really is there ever anything nearly as damaging
and damning and, I think I'd argue, driving as the desperate
drive that comes from knowing that what you know is impossible to
rationalize? The terrible tragedy is the way that vile
data manifests itself, corrupting and poisoning pure s
streams, but becoming aware of this wasn't half so bad as
realizing that man you just spent hours learning to hate was
never
there.
Published in UM-Flint Sigma Tau Delta, 2009.