Shadow Verbs

Tea on trays, torches en fuego on the patio, women, faint outlines on the wall. Night nigh and one-by-one the stars, the itchy rasp of crickets in the grass. With each sip, three lines on his forehead, thoughts: Oh, the pleasantries of peasants, bare tree-tops in the fall. Everyone a stranger. The last goose a serif on the V’s very top.

 

Picaresque Variations

I lived with an artist who painted tambourines for a living. My job was to mix his colors for him and the life was very hard. I lived with an artist for his colors. The life was a living. My job was to mix who painted the tambourines. I lived the life my job was living hard, his painted colors mix tambourines for an artist. I lived the mix of artist living colors with hard life tambourines. My hard job was his for him. I mix my life and his very living. I lived tambourines for him, artist painted colors. And when I saw myself so well dressed, I told my boss to take his donkey; I didn’t want to work there anymore.

 

Animal Husbandry

The cows’ hindquarters were mythological quotations. Men lined up in rows, ready for afternoons to overtake them. All of this was then; they’ve yet to see what the present holds: the cow with calf or the one slowly dying? A frayed rope draws the bucket from below. The fence posts, roosts for tiny swallows.

 

Some Notes on the Preceding

The artist above is a starving perfectionist and whispers to himself.

In those times, time was kept by counting one’s own pulse, distance by the width of one’s two fingers squeezing the sun.

The story’s neglect of a minor character left her to mope the margins.

They called dreams forecasts; imagination, memory; ate the bird’s whole body but they threw away the heart.