A Mealful of Slop

Never a day deserved to die without a word count. Whether by the crooked crook [‘ere it make me strait, and jettisoned beloft ungirded to the craws of piracy, to whittle the saber of an arabesque] or the unstaffed staff [vacancy: vapid void voluminous vaguery; v-axis vestigially vivisectioned], a pixel becomes a paragraph becomes a page becomes a partition that, unsung in words, seeks to bridge rather than to divide. This solitary creature enisled Greekly, slavishly chained to her rock, waiting for erosion to set in. If she can just wait until the quintillionth turn of the tides, perhaps she can breathe water again. A salty quench to a parched songbird. Her voice is dry and cankerous. As the ships yaw by the horizon line, her call is no more than a hushed and raspy squawk. Even the birds aren’t fooled and drop upon her. She chews at the seaweed fronds of her tress, but like a fish, cannot close her eyes, for the sun bakes and cracks her scaly skin. It was for her moist lusciousness the men had once come—why can’t she hear the vessel’s warning?, a boisterous foghorn that lifted the very spume from the sea and washed over her, but for a moment, Jason won’t you come… Jason won’t you come… ? But he couldn’t get up in the mourning. And the wine has darkened the Adriatic. Whether the blood of innocents, sacrificial virginal children dashed to the rocks from cliff-height, or the sour mash of old age, sucking a jug of poison to eradicate the endless vomit-gush of lies and emptiness. He stumbles down crooked to the beach where he once found glass in the form of bottles, inside of which were always hand-scrawled love notes in a foreign cursive.

Do you want me as much as I want you?

“Of course! I am only human!”, he would cry! But! It never once occurred to him they they, the writers of the note, were not. That they were the wind-swept deserts, begging love of the shoreline. So much more isolated than a grain of sand. Never huddled amongst his brothers, unforeseen to him the vast array of human lives stacked on top of him. For what is a lifetime to the mountain? An ant is the same ant regardless upon which we step. A resurrection. Humankind would look no different to the sea, each bathing leg, each bottle tossed, each belong to the same human, genetically connected to one another, packed, massed and huddled together, yearning to be together. Freedom is a farce. Freedom is an empty bottle. To be discarded once the sweet nectar is drunk, waiting for some greater force to place a note.