bonsaikitten
Greenlighter
I thought I could hear the faint melody of distant music, an accordion's romantic song wafting in the breeze and spilling in through the yawning window, open-mouthed like those gagging side show clowns of carnivals, their gaudy faces peeling off in the sweltering heat. That sound filled the air and spread across the room like the many golden tentacles of sunlight that poured through the windows. The wind rocked the leaves outside my window like a newborn baby in its cradle, and sent the sunbeams undulating with the softness of wind chimes when a passing breeze ruptured the amniotic fluid of their stillness and sought to wake them gently with fond strokes. Those rays of sunlight swayed hypnotically across the rich brown of the timber floor; a kaleidescope of gold.
Hearing that beautiful and faraway music, it mesmerized me like the snake charmer's eerie lullaby, and so I left my toy soldiers at the mercy of their enemies, and stepped out from behind the bulwark of our front door, and into the open fire of broad daylight. The heat was thick, and entangled me like a great cobweb – invisible and yet sticky and somehow inescapable. The bees buzzed vociferously, their bad tempers fermenting on days such as these, where people seemed only ever to be tired and dazed, their eyes glassy and their feet mechanical; their walk idle and heavy-shouldered. Like dizzy sky writers, the flies took to erratic and drunken courses of flight, or instead hovered forgetfully in midair, affected with the common dementia brought on by the summer's torrid heat.
With the same petulant disobedience of young boys threatened with their mother's wet kisses, the brows of the bystanders crinkled and puckered objectionably to the baked lips of the sun; their faces sunk and appeared to melt like oil paintings in the delirious hot of that day. I ambled down the pavement of that one-way street, riddled with cracks that ran like swollen varicose veins, the cement split by an intricate web of jagged lines and crooked cuts. Colorful parrots, the strange and exotic fruits that ripened perennially on the branches of the furry green trees, clucked and twittered knowingly to one another, and were catapulted spontaneously into the air as though fired from an enormous canon; the hysteric flutters of their rainbow wings lasting only so long as it took to land again upon a parallel branch. Their squawks echoed and other shrill chirps rose up from the sagging branches like the rapid fire of a machine gun. Marinating in the heat were the hunchbacked daffodils, their blonde heads bowed like meditating monks, resembling the drowsy nods of my yellow-haired brother when he hung on the shore of sleep. How in contrast was their fatigue to the wide-eyed petunias, gazing in awe up at the burning sun. I could still hear the lugubrious hymn of the accordion and yet it seemed somehow further away, muffled as though under water, and I began to count those cracks in the cement, where the tree roots had grown and burst the surface. I skipped and jumped lithely over them, maneuvering myself carefully and strategically around those dangerous chasms, imagining the perilous consequences that luck may hand me should I dare to defy her and trod fecklessly upon the cracks in the pavement.
I bounded over a particularly large wound in the concrete, busy as it was with a swarm of ants that ran hectically across the ground, frenzied and in a desperate haste as the cement singed their feet; pausing only occasionally in order to kiss one another, before hurrying along on their way. It was then that I was frozen suddenly in my place by a shrill, panicked chirping emanating from a dreadlock of weeds and bushes to my left. I hesitated in indecision: torn between the selfish pursuit of that magical and evanescent music, and the pitiful cries of a baby bird. I made a rushed decision to investigate those tiny, silver screams, for I found in them a palpable despair that my compassion could not ignore, and my curiosity fail to dispel.
Bending over, I peered skeptically into the tangled orgy of leaves and twigs, the matted mane of prickles and thorns and wild red flowers that blossomed like a contagious, itchy, burning rash among the body covered with burrs and thorns. I crouched down, and listened to the metallic shrieks of the frightened creature trapped inside that feral jungle; before, finally, I got down on my hands and knees and crawled into the wild undergrowth. The smell of dirt and earthy decay embalmed the humid air as blindly, I crawled forward, feeling the twigs claw and scratch at my face and my arms, the cuts stinging sharply as those tenuous fingernails scraped and bent, before breaking off completely; the thorns snagged on my clothes and dug into my sensitive knees. My palms ached with splinters, those patient thistles that waited like secret land mines on the soggy earth. At last, I reached the yelping siren that had lured me there. Nestled in a glove of rotting leaves, a puerile bird sat, yelping helplessly and flapping in vain an otiose wing.
Stretching forward, I picked the tiny thing up and cupped it in both my hands, its chirrups becoming more manic and afraid, as everything took it further from its home. Beneath the irresistibly and marvelously fluffy cloud of its tabby feathers, I felt the berserk pounding of its frail heart against my fingertips. It flapped its useless wings and cried, trying to bite me with its sharp beak, and for a moment I shared with it its lonely desperation – wondering how I would ever find my way out again.
I wrote this a while ago. I guess it's 'experimental' or something. %) Think of it as... ambient... writing... or something...
Hearing that beautiful and faraway music, it mesmerized me like the snake charmer's eerie lullaby, and so I left my toy soldiers at the mercy of their enemies, and stepped out from behind the bulwark of our front door, and into the open fire of broad daylight. The heat was thick, and entangled me like a great cobweb – invisible and yet sticky and somehow inescapable. The bees buzzed vociferously, their bad tempers fermenting on days such as these, where people seemed only ever to be tired and dazed, their eyes glassy and their feet mechanical; their walk idle and heavy-shouldered. Like dizzy sky writers, the flies took to erratic and drunken courses of flight, or instead hovered forgetfully in midair, affected with the common dementia brought on by the summer's torrid heat.
With the same petulant disobedience of young boys threatened with their mother's wet kisses, the brows of the bystanders crinkled and puckered objectionably to the baked lips of the sun; their faces sunk and appeared to melt like oil paintings in the delirious hot of that day. I ambled down the pavement of that one-way street, riddled with cracks that ran like swollen varicose veins, the cement split by an intricate web of jagged lines and crooked cuts. Colorful parrots, the strange and exotic fruits that ripened perennially on the branches of the furry green trees, clucked and twittered knowingly to one another, and were catapulted spontaneously into the air as though fired from an enormous canon; the hysteric flutters of their rainbow wings lasting only so long as it took to land again upon a parallel branch. Their squawks echoed and other shrill chirps rose up from the sagging branches like the rapid fire of a machine gun. Marinating in the heat were the hunchbacked daffodils, their blonde heads bowed like meditating monks, resembling the drowsy nods of my yellow-haired brother when he hung on the shore of sleep. How in contrast was their fatigue to the wide-eyed petunias, gazing in awe up at the burning sun. I could still hear the lugubrious hymn of the accordion and yet it seemed somehow further away, muffled as though under water, and I began to count those cracks in the cement, where the tree roots had grown and burst the surface. I skipped and jumped lithely over them, maneuvering myself carefully and strategically around those dangerous chasms, imagining the perilous consequences that luck may hand me should I dare to defy her and trod fecklessly upon the cracks in the pavement.
I bounded over a particularly large wound in the concrete, busy as it was with a swarm of ants that ran hectically across the ground, frenzied and in a desperate haste as the cement singed their feet; pausing only occasionally in order to kiss one another, before hurrying along on their way. It was then that I was frozen suddenly in my place by a shrill, panicked chirping emanating from a dreadlock of weeds and bushes to my left. I hesitated in indecision: torn between the selfish pursuit of that magical and evanescent music, and the pitiful cries of a baby bird. I made a rushed decision to investigate those tiny, silver screams, for I found in them a palpable despair that my compassion could not ignore, and my curiosity fail to dispel.
Bending over, I peered skeptically into the tangled orgy of leaves and twigs, the matted mane of prickles and thorns and wild red flowers that blossomed like a contagious, itchy, burning rash among the body covered with burrs and thorns. I crouched down, and listened to the metallic shrieks of the frightened creature trapped inside that feral jungle; before, finally, I got down on my hands and knees and crawled into the wild undergrowth. The smell of dirt and earthy decay embalmed the humid air as blindly, I crawled forward, feeling the twigs claw and scratch at my face and my arms, the cuts stinging sharply as those tenuous fingernails scraped and bent, before breaking off completely; the thorns snagged on my clothes and dug into my sensitive knees. My palms ached with splinters, those patient thistles that waited like secret land mines on the soggy earth. At last, I reached the yelping siren that had lured me there. Nestled in a glove of rotting leaves, a puerile bird sat, yelping helplessly and flapping in vain an otiose wing.
Stretching forward, I picked the tiny thing up and cupped it in both my hands, its chirrups becoming more manic and afraid, as everything took it further from its home. Beneath the irresistibly and marvelously fluffy cloud of its tabby feathers, I felt the berserk pounding of its frail heart against my fingertips. It flapped its useless wings and cried, trying to bite me with its sharp beak, and for a moment I shared with it its lonely desperation – wondering how I would ever find my way out again.
I wrote this a while ago. I guess it's 'experimental' or something. %) Think of it as... ambient... writing... or something...
