“A wound of prismatic clarity becomes emotional coinage.” ~J.D. Harms
Emotional clarity becomes coinage wound around prismatic confusion, if one would split the light fantastic. Dancing on the spectrum; they shoot hoarse voices, don’t they? Well, maybe they should.
She crows for just caws, does the raven haired beauty. From that roughness springs rainbows of feeling. We only think we know what we emote in gods’ eyes…holy perspective escapes us.
The veterinary nurse purchases a faceted piece of glass at the Children’s Museum. Not too far away is the Boston T entrance…
Prismatic sounds fracture and blend into white noise…to the nurse it sounds like the yearning of his heart. But the tunnel smells like a poultice of disinfectant trying to cover the stink of feces, slick as shit it is, sliding into ears like pythons into pits of hell.
Scales are tipped over off the edges of cliffs, bursting into flames on impact with the third rails; ruin weights for no human. Runes peer into mirrors to scry, to spy, asking why Armageddon rushes toward us roaring like a freight train full of lions…frayed lines drain us of coherence; from such stuff perfect poetry cannot be drafted or crafted.
Prefects regulate the halls of memory to censor what we remember and dismember to rearrange into non-meaning….from such mammaries spurt scarlet streams, the milk of human unkindness. Or is it kindness to negate illusory shards of meaning that shatter panes of comprehension?
The nurse wraps small box in white paper, ties red ribbon into a bow.
We spring from wounds between thighs with cries of rage and terror! We become wounds between I’s, migraines of sense, gods willing.
The lovely veterinarian unwraps the prism, reads the card, says she is flattered but has a fiancé back home. Later in a car in a crowded back seat the doctor presses her thigh against the nurse’s, moving sinuously…this could mean nothing or everything…nurse tries to slide away but is trapped, tenses up forever, then lets his body go limp…immediately the doctor’s thigh is withdrawn. Unrequited it is, then.
The card reads:
To a scintillating lady
here’s a scintillating schism;
ain’t it strange how light is always
breaking out of prism?|
The car pulls up next to his Jamaica Plain apartment. He gets out, walks upstairs. Next day at work, the doctor says “It’s okay to be angry, you know.” He says nothing, walks to the caged animals with their medication. Thinks about medicating himself.
To the intern from Angell Memorial Animal Hospital in the seventies. Did you keep the prism?
~ Wry Welwood
17th of February 2022 published in Scrittura on Medium.
republished in Shadow in Light, March 2023.