affect

There is a weight worn, a countenance whittled with thoughts and burdens born, all the various sorts of worry and weather that a face can carry right there in the middle of the frame. The sore eyed sights, the busily bundles metaphors, the unconscious cold reads of prophesy ready and waiting for these furthered complications. What fills the mirror, what fills the seats, what is turned to words and worms by the dull repetition of the conversational clock, upfront and forthright despite our obligatory feints and obfuscations. The recorded emotion etched into the flesh, carried on and on through our long and awful lives, waving like flags or the relentless pounding of the sea. 

The moon waxes, the night wanes. The room rings with the shade of dreams. To wake is to turn a light off. To breathe is to flinch at the touch of the blade. Vision woven with what the mind would make of it, aware as you weave the very air of this entanglement. No one watches while you mark the moon. No one sees you as you rewrite the rules. Is there a redistribution of emotion while you try on your next expression? Do you feel it in your face? You are seen by the masks and the statuary. You are witnessed by creatures that you would not care to know.

It takes a lot to move the needle. It takes a lot to leave a mark. All that is lost to lay a trail, all that is abandoned to render a road, uphill with the heavy load. We part ways in familiar places, close folders and watch the sky go wing struck, the freeway beside the parking lot long after the scent was lost. Violins threaded through the vocals with the west a burning branch. The feather weighing down the scale, the scene framed in a roil of smoke and obdurate verbs, the now and then a little heavy on the now. Here as light touches flesh, footfalls where the imagination once was, the words slip away unfelt. The circle moves slowly, the feeling doesn’t care a thing about the fit.