Ars Poetica

Ars Poetica


He gave me a book and I opened it. The first line I noticed was, The child with the blank face of an egg. Then, I felt my face erased to its skull.

There was a missing space. So I peeled off a piece of a letter from the next page. And I nudged it carefully between the i and j.

She said, How does it feel to have your head stuck in a zero? Silence in a moment is imagination and I replied, It is my halo.

I erased a zero and it appeared in someone else's thoughts. The sum of a zero and zero is zero. I wrote it again; this time it made sense.

He said, We raise it to the lips of the nearest ear. So I began to open books, listen for ink boiling, the scent of words; coffee brewing in my ear.

I watched the clock as if reading a sentence. The numbers were letters. The short hand was a subject, the long hand, a predicate, and the seconds, a verb.

We both stared at the ceiling. I said, My eyes feel as if their inside cups. Then she said, Shall I pour your eyes back into your ears?

I heard a circle as if it were a clock. It did not tick; instead, made the sound of an insect: it was a number in the shape of a cricket.

Language structures what we see without saying it. But I began to pull bones from sentences, and rearrange letters into skeletons.

I opened an envelope addressed to me. I pulled out a blank sheet of paper, unfolded it. In the letter: no message, no sender's name, just a white space.

I like that you exist, she said. Like the lowercase i, my body felt present on a page: fitted in a dark suit, white necktie, and inside the black dot, a smile.

But it was the way her skin felt as she dressed into a black outfit. The way her body slipped into a long dark dress shaped like a shadow.

He picked up a stone; held it to his ear. Shook it like a broken watch. He opened it, and inside were small gears, shaped like a clock.

I am a skeleton. I am a sentence, too. Although like you, I am neither a meaning nor a structure, just a silence in a complete thought.

Orlando White