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Open Poetry #43
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Jaime Fradera
Senior Member
since 2000-11-25
Posts 843
Where no tyranny is tolerable

0 posted 2008-08-03 06:57 PM



Blind animals.


It is Morning.
I am at the school for the blind,
and it seems that we are graduating.
But we are not just graduating,
but graduating in some special way.
We sit around on the floor
and talk about it.

It is Afternoon.

It seems that, because we are graduating,
we are each supposed to get
a bar or two of chocolate.
I imagine hard, smooth squares of Hershey
Then I notice a hydrant,
and it is running off an ooey gooey stream of chocolate
like endless unrolling spaghetti,
and that the chocolate hydrant can not be turned off.
I have to pass out the chocolate quickly
so it will not be wasted.
I hand a classmate his "bar" of graduation chocolate
but forget to tell him how very, very messy and mushy it is.
He complains wordlessly about this.
I tell him that the world
is the way it is and get use to it;
and remember that, because we are blind animals,
it is sometimes messy.

It is Night,
the last sequence of the graduation ritual.
We are outside.
I hear a voice say hydrogen, hydrogen.
I'm holding a baggie in my hand, inverted, so it can hold hydrogen.
There is a high, metal tower called the Mother Ship.
When someone climbs the tower,
it hums and shoots out pyrotechnic energy and sparks.
We play on the tower to make it shoot sparks like fireworks.
I must tell a classmate good-bye,
and as she climbs the tower,

all aglow with fire and live, high-voltage sparks,
I climb beneath her so that she will not fall.
She reaches the top of the tower.

There is a whooshing sound

and she is borne away from it

as I climb down.

At the bottom there is a tiny window to a kind of music store.

It has a tiny touch screen, which of course I can't work with at all
but it's interesting.
A woman explains you can select music

by just touching the screen.
I do this accidentally,
touching invisible menus and boxes,
resulting in a jumbled blur
of mixed up music.
So I just tell her what I want to hear

and she just touches the appropriate buttons.
You can buy the songs you want.
Make payments with pay-pal.
It's fast, free and ....
This is all so fascinating!
I ask her whether it is possible
to select a year and then
have it play the top 100 songs of that year
in a smooth, uninterrupted sequence.
She says that, yes, this can, indeed, be done,
but I have to bring my own device to interact with the computer
because this is a public terminal.

I wonder vaguely

whether I have been keeping her too long,
that she has to work and I shouldn't be bugging her.

We are gathered together at the foot of the tower.
The instructor comes out

and says: Okay, guys.  You're on your own.

I strike off in some random direction,
trying to walk a straight line
against the wind and blowing snow.
I ponder that there is nothing to run in to,
just a vast expanse of snow.
Then it dawns on me
that I will have to stop sometime, somewhere,
that I am going to need food eventually.
I don't know where I am,
or where I am going.
Mechanically, I keep walking
and walking and walking and walking
through an endless, trackless waste of snow.

And I am on my own.

© Copyright 2008 The Sun - All Rights Reserved
Inspired-8
Member
since 2008-04-14
Posts 311
Pluto
1 posted 2008-08-03 07:47 PM


No words can convey how this write touches my soul... thank you.

vic

Inspired-8

Midnitesun
Deputy Moderator 1 Tour
Member Empyrean
since 2001-05-18
Posts 28647
Gaia
2 posted 2008-08-03 09:41 PM


Jaime, this is a tender song of reality mixed with notes of fantasy, all tied together with the rhythm of the heartbeat. You always make the reader FEEL your world. Never change, please?
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