Saturday, June 05, 2010

In spread-out beds of sprawling limbs

they had surrendered the shudders and moans of private devotion to the dog-eared victors of words, books of words, and words of books and that was as it should have been. Tongues were tethered to well-weathered spines and scarce was the day that they sought other, far more warmer and wetter venues to explore; yet the nights were nuzzled with velveteen, high above the princely sounds below. When they came to the last page, she had finished first. Or perhaps she saw the ending coming and began perusing the shelves for a more satisfying read. For when he looked up she had climbed down, down into the heat of the Big D, where other books and other words burned mesquite-slow and lingered longer in her memory. Amidst more dim and distant digs his pages foxed and fell from their brittle binding, spilling, spitting, spewing down the littered lanes. As the days piled into months and heaped into years his hopes were wrung out and hung out and left to fray in the wind like the white flag of a war where news of the treaty had never reached the trenches. Letters and desires went unanswered, unopened. But one afternoon, in the nook of a dark and narrow nave, he dipped his fingers into the font and found the faith to ask for someone, anyone, to help him bind his scarred and scattered pages.


Copyright 2010 max jukes/brian edward hack. No quotation or reproduction of this material without express written permission of the author.

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