tom taylor - I’d come too far

I’d come too far to this ironic flat to think of being alone any longer, so much for the well-intentioned past floating through your brainstem in repute no stranger lingers in the mists around your head…. They’d been there and done that, as the saying grows along the rafters of your own deceit. This is the focal plane of shutters and windows which open out along the parkway overlooking the river below, the famous pathway of the rich and lame-dust on the sands of time itself, a shattered elbow or a broken sentence, no matter in the lanes of the village itself a small destination permitted by truce and eloquence. This was the place I’d come to, satisfied by only one small survival in this destiny of sorts. No color. A room unburdened of its purpose, a small plastic card to be used in the event of my death to summon the bakers and weaners from their dark coven unintended consequences, collateral and damaged at the same time.
And yours was the message hardest to understand yet I fully expected it to contain the beauty of its simplicity, you being you and me being me, there’s really no other tack to maintain in these waning days of the history of everything. There’s even a path to follow, but it leads to the same quiet space, a possum skull perfectly cleaned by the erosion time brings to its passages, the gray-white polish of the emptiness we all inhabit. Perhaps it was still thinking, ‘no, this way out…’ but probably not, possibly an intern had left the remains of the day for us to find out, not a warning sign but a welcoming presence for the others to note as they wandered by on their way somewhere rather than nowhere…. A hard lesson to understand, a lesser mention to withstand, a nether region to contemplate, the dirt of it all, what we are reduced to in the empty moments after….
Yet the continuing clears the air of its unwillingness to interact without pity or scorn. It’s another busy, empty day when the very teeth of it are left embedded in the clay jar you drink from…. Plates emptied by the door, the food all put away into the cold storage locker, it’s plenty of juice on the gates of plastic and rhyme, it’s a cool air around your head that makes you lift up and stare out into the flowery summer winds around the cabin, as neighbors come and go in their huge, metallic rooms which move under their own power down the lanes of this beachside community where everyone comes to die.
The power lines are running smoothly, piping tiny electrons into the screen of this machine which allows me to write on the lighted, vertical plane before me, the silent tap of the keyboard a relative silence in the morning of the day ahead of me…. No, I’d thought not to be alone any longer, but there you go, it’s still the same movie running through the credits and the previews of cosmic attractions – the space, the emptiness after fullness and the rival tempos all screaming through the air like radio signals the day of the earthquake which resemble nothing in particular so much as a signpost for the cars to follow on their way out of the city. Refuge here, soup served every day at dawn, a carrot and fish head stew gleaned from the beach tides, no manner to the movie, it’s a blue balloon again, a gran faloon husting on the outskirts of memory, their renovated skins recall the day ahead in its warning signs not to escape but to line up on the side of the kiln where the tiny houses bake all day and emerge finally into the shopkeeper’s studio behind the book store and across from the building which bears my name. A lesbian book store going in, who’ll shop there, surely not me. I’m the last throwback of the year, a fossil mental case encompassed by doubt and history, laying the cornerstone for whatever follows into the night without warning signs or any particular agenda, it’s still the same layer of meaning that scoops and trembles, which slowly finds the words for what cannot really be expressed in this similitude of acts and postures which finally claims us finally.