Dialectical Encounter

And how do you find me? he asks, beautiful in a tragically worn way? he hopes, suggestingly

Perhaps, she thinks to herself, perhaps there is beauty there somewhere, that would be heroinic of me to uncover amid the smell and dissheveled nature of the facts, after all, he is well-spoken

At least well-spoken, reflectively thoughtful, of subtle interest? he asks as if planting tiny seeds

I want to give him that, she muses, that he’s not dangerous or threatening in his approach, aside from his appearance, which one might surmise cannot be helped but were his lot

Ah the world a fickle thing so often colluding beauty and beast as if ’twere a fairy tale, so prominent and prevalent as to be romantic ideal, like myth

He is saying – ? Is he asking something of me? she wonders, is this monologue intended dialogue or am I giving benefit where none is due?

Bewildering collisions, he mumbles, quite obviously mistakes in the arrangements of things yet so common and continual that contingencies might point to odds, advantaging abnormal

He’s losing me, occluding, incantation, I wish to return, reorganize, retreat

I can see you’ve no further thoughts on the matter though, clearly, many there be at the tip of your every apparently avid brain, the adroitness of your eyes

The looks, the looks, always with the looks, ugh

I’d rather you think on your own, as accidents are unfortunate and impertinent. Grace be to you for peaceful easy feelings and times that would allow. No use beating bush without berries – enjoy and be oh so well, as I would be, arranged just so (grief entering his breath like tenacious little office clips)

I believe that is adieu, a baffled contradictory sort of bon voyage with accompanying melancholy of the beleaguered and accustomed to wary entertainments, he who knows where limits turn distress or ill-humored, thank god, she sighs, letting blood flow a little more freely

He turns to go and takes steps mumbling about the bizarrity of mice and their traps, cute haggard mini-rodents lured by bait, offered and tasty, but with secret intentions of pain, even elimination, not even a slap by the hand that feeds, but an almost complicit lure, disorganism’d, wonders if that’s a metaphor for public masking, to judge by appearances, he thinks

Whew, that was taxing without effort, she deflates, only now realizing how long her breath had held. What is it about hideous beauty that so spasmodically intrigues? Neither heads nor tails but the effect of the toss that unsettles, a perturbance and half-feigned interest in outcome, that it fall behind or ahead, only not now, she thinks, only be done, that is, outside present

As the pebbles tumble into cracks, inner speech hums, so encounter, his feet drudging loose bits of gravel on sidewalk, heart hoping else, legs sure of circular motion, a traveled sphere, a hamster’s wheel of wish after wish after a further furthering, each stepping distance, he whistles, he hums

Returning to the matter at hand, so distinct from what happens, she works to regain her fiction of what she was doing, but it’s those singular cracks that cause the walls to give, eventually, it turns out concentration and illusion are sometimes hard, headphones help

like the chatter of birds, the way the moments rush in and evolve noise, a void, his memory already blurred and rascally, the foregoing of who’s who and where’s that and what’s what, just some numb direction that becomes a track or path, he believes, or once thought he believed as he began, beginning again wishing the mind were silent, absent like the deafening city, submersible

as if there were an assignment, an order submitted to or taken, what remind could provide, arbitrary instruction, a purposing, a matter, at hand, only the same things as before, which were there to fill time, promote process, becoming ends

and fades

sits, and stares

N Filbert 2012