Orts

Peeling the pod, skin by skin, layer by layer, till you reach the kernel. What’s left? Heart of the mandorla? No, nothing. It would be simpler to let the hand do its work, the hand freed from its precipitates – emotion and the mind – roaming across the page without rhyme or reason, not bound for any particular destination; merely chattering, recording motion like a palm grazing the surface of a lake and hoping to hang still. Without any concern for the trajectory of sense yet not exactly senseless. Abiding and biding its time as the embers crackle and endure the duress of endlessness.

Fascination: no means of gauging how little or how long has gone by.

Tempting, then, to forget how cantankerous the heart. Mine and that of others. (Always another’s not mine). To forget the scheming, the hierarchies, the cockles and ventricles carved into a block of ice. And the scenes of solitude. The nascent sorrows. And the absence of a soul.

Context exonerates us and desecrates us one mask at a time.