Woe.
Art.
Thou.
Whoa.
Art...!
THOU?
WHOAARTTHOU.
I need less time.
God has been all too generous to me.
I need to write a compilation of 12 short stories and poems with a contemporary twist on the theme of Realism. The idea is simple. It should only take 3 weeks to compose these 12 works, given the amount of cookies I consume and the hours of sleep I don't get. With those circumstances, all is simple.
The difficulty? My reflexive criticism. My inability to achieve the quintessence of literature--such a high honour! All that had come in time's past has had the opportune Age of Reverence. An age where anything goes, anything is new. Nothing is new now. And now poor old Plato, deep within his grave in the Measly Way, is stirring for his rightful Nobel Prize in Literature, dated to the appropriate years that we could only surmise. But the late, great Plato has more of a sporting chance than I, or anyone, ever will. To be considered influential or talented. To be written about in a literature book that bored, glazed over students in a tiny, first year school will receive. They won't care; it's 8th hour--they want freedom, not the facts! Give me that air to breathe, man! But no, no. I'll be sifting silently in my own grave with the pure pleasure of being an afterthought after the afterlife. Afterthought-- what a connotation. I guess you could look at it in that way...
AFTERTHOUGHT--> It occurred after the original thought.
"So, would you like to go to the dance with my tonight?" a boyish smile hints from behind a telephone. But I cannot see this. I can only insinuate from the tone.
"No, your girlfriend just moved away and now you're lonely. I know it. I'm just the runner up." Honesty is the best policy, plays the record in my head.
"You're my closest friend who's a girl, and it'll be fun." The smile is growing weary with my inquisition. The final blow is coming...
"Honesty is the best policy, and you've proved to be a fine citizen of morals." I wipe the sarcasm off of my tile floor with a used towel. That damn fluid never ceases to exude.
I hang up.
I'm the afterthought.
AFTERTHOUGHT--> It occurred as a stemming of the original thought, in a reminiscing sort of way.
The phone line was dead as a doorknob. The boyish smile robed himself with a soft robe and nestled in his bed, left to stare at the cottage cheese walls of his room.
Here in the silence, everything turned to something else. Dressers were Australian wheat fields that shifted with the patterns of the sea. The clock was suddenly made of duct tape and coconuts that fell from an nestled deep in the East. The floor was a sky with white, white paint and blue, blue clouds made of bugs with shilling wings.
Here in the silence, he let himself muddle with insanity. Slowly, they waltzed on the broken shards of a reality... Break, break. The shards dripped through his ceiling that was a floor.
Break, break: went the plates downstairs. China's finest china was sent to its demise on a twin set of cottage cheese walls in the downstairs kitchen. Each night ended this way. His storybook of the civil war of mental capacity and the lullaby his mother supplied with her talents spurred by fury.
Furry fury. He turned the phrase over in his mind like a blueberry he had picked last spring, until a bee had stung him and he tossed it into the bush that conceived it. The bee flew away; job well done.
And suddenly he remembered-- blueberry shampoo. Who makes that? Who the hell owns that? Blueberry shampoo? What the hell kind of a...
She owned it. She smelled of it.
He turned her over in his mind, but the bees with shilling wings were frightened by the lullabies his mother kept resounding. The bees stung him at all sides and he was once again alone, with the scent of blueberry somehow on his lips.
She would always be an afterthought.
Funny, isn't it? I guess Matthew was right: there is nothing that can be looked at in only one way.
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