Saturday, May 22, 2010

secondary derivative < 0

 
hell and heaven sit by each other, their toes in the warm sunshine, their bench cold and clammy. fingers linked, heads bowed, as if in church, for a greater cause. they understand perfectly only one or the other will grow at a time, they will feed on each other, there will be stretching, breaking, blood and scars. they will feel every breath of the other with their ears so close by.

heaven's a taste, an intangible hint of cinnamon, that bites just before it leaves. a fleeting allowed awareness of ecstasy to keep us afloat. with an aftertaste to let us know hell exists nearby.

heaven is a voice so pure it turns into powder at a touch, into tears in a song. a delicate precious creature of vast imperfect delight and negligible time. that is swaddled in white noise, loud and bass, to make sure it doesn't get too loud. to protect it, to showcase it, to breed it.

hell is harder, it is an absence, it is a denial, it is seen only in the stretch of space around its contours. it is not, as we imagine, loud painful and hot, more plain cold and closed for view. more like heaven ought to be in all the rulebooks. its an easy mistake, we most of us can only see one of them, the one we choose to grow, and we all like to name things. its hard to understand how close they are to each other.

hell isn't a prescience of weather, it's the feature of a heart that cannot be explained. it's a strain of poison, plaintive and endless, that cannot be quietened without feeding on your voice. and cannot be quietened after your voice gives it new strength.

all it takes is one life to turn hell into heaven, or otherwise. we can fire it off quick, rocket launcher, covert analogy, quick, or we can drag it along fifty sixty years and try to have some fun with it. either way either side, we're here to choose. and of course, we can be fair, move our wrinkling hands back and forth, back and forth, and hope with our fingers crossed, we're living right, we're growing only one, the right one, we're growing both, we need both...

this hell, this heaven, this is life, there is no rulebook, there are no choices, except the ones we make.

sometimes when the day is cloudy and the signals crossed, we have a chance to hear beyond the white noise. and other times, we are meant to leave ourselves the hell alone, for heaven's sake

 

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