Mood: In an old story a father of great means spends 17 years trying to find his daughter a ping pong ball with pink spots (in the world of the story they don’t exist – and it doesn’t make sense for the father to just get one made because logic). She dies at 18, unsatisfied. Desire is cruel.
Welcome to the mind of the one who whispered in parseltongue at the conductor who refused to give him change for his 50 bob note. Here, in these lines, reside the vengeance of a godless prophet, a prophtetless god and a people who have forgotten what it is to believe. If you take a closer look at the sentences you will begin to see yourself take form. As the words mesh themselves on the page – an image. A capsule of memory disintegrates in a time crystal, the image here,
then not,
here,
then not.
In constant oscillation causing you to question whether the image is really there. It is.
You know it is because you have seen it. You know you have seen it because there it is again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
You are no longer aware of whether it is the image that keeps disappearing or whether your lack of belief creates alternative realities for you – only to be consistently shattered by the relentless factual nature of the image.
It does not exist.
It does not exist.
It does not exist.
There it is.
It’s hiding.
Right there in the space that does not exist between letters of a single word. The space that is as undefined as it is definitive. Squeezing its form through the cracks to somehow create a visible image. Just outside reach of the page the image sits. As if it is afraid its appearance will be its own downfall. The harder you grasp for it the further it goes. And the second you tell yourself it really isn’t there – it shows itself.
This tussle.
This endless searching and unsearching has you caught in a vortex. You wish to prove that the image exists that you may destroy it. And so the nature of the image itself seems like a taunt. Like a giving and taking. As if it somehow knows to hold, right there, right at the edge – and no amount of scrutiny allows you to distance yourself from the serpent tongue of the ungrateful. No amount of searching gives you reason not to be – gives you the clarity you seek, or the closure you need.
(There it is again)
And so the tussle will continue,
and the poet will rage,
and, somewhere in these lines,
you will find the image.
And lose it.
And find it.
And lose it.
And