Before the cataclysm

It was a structure to be clambered and surpassed. Because the pause, the fallow days. Because we wanted. The language never idle. The tide had passed, the monsoon, the hurricane; a new weather gripped the horizon.

It was magnetic and mysterious. It was to meddle. Or live trying. An artery pulsing or a
tuning fork vibrating. It had been silent, pliant. A stillness that wanted motion.

It was a fragment that coveted development. To move a concept across a page. From mouth
to mouth. Impression to enunciation. Utterance. Upsurge in the chest, fullness in the throat,
a swell and overflow.

Between an always yet and a not quite yet, we hurled our solitudes together. A phrasing and
rephrasing of the body’s language. Suspended in the fierce desire of potential.

Time had faltered. Or we had fumbled with its workings. For time was and would always be
time, ever present, ever gone, ever coming.

How pungent the impasse. How vertiginous and abyssal the uncertain next. How we wanted
our ventriloquism to defeat you. Or perhaps to absolve you. Absorb you. How we fared so
poorly.

Once we were melodious. Motivated. Hollows, having vented all stifling letters, all
burdensome consonants. Yet the mouth yearned for a fullness it couldn’t quite achieve. Or
perhaps imagination had ventriloquized itself and stalled.

Once we were a garden. We were undergrowth. Moss and lichen, trellises of ivy,
clambering tangles of foliage. Yet something obstructed our allegory. We were not
sentimental but intended a trajectory towards some kind of tenderness. Yet our movements
had become robotic. Mechanisms randomly controlled by others. We did not yet know what
would be our trigger.

In the mirror, the scene was distorted, askew. Our capacity for concentration had
diminished, though we kept articulating. In the mirror, the scene was vapid. Or the desire for
a lush wood. A bit of fornication, of fomenting, of terrain where life was busy living. The
discursive had no place here, ill at ease, even irrelevant. In the mirror, the scene was
volatile. About to burst or implode at any moment.

Illicitly, we traced the procedure step by step. To consume its every mark, its every gesture.
The opus and raison for its existence. Our trace was subtle but unequivocally present. We
would not be outdone.

The throbbing abdomen of the clearing, its verdant pulse, pursued us beasts who ventured
there. We licked our appendages into lichen. In our slothful pose, foundational, we oriented
towards the thicket. Roared our mouths into verbiage of a different kind, a flora. We bit and
beckoned.