The views expressed in the texts do not necessarily represent the views of the artist.
In night, your strained vocal chords form a glowing band around the moon. You do not know what you are asking for this time. Shapes assemble at the perimeter and call themselves fingertips, cheeks, inkblot torsos. They have been here before. People you love are recycling names the way the world recycles seasons. Bees with frequency, voices turn on spokes, slow in the days, adrenal dive through the green substrata, decade roulette, but what is the true indicator of new life. The future sits across from you in the greasy spoon diner, saws into pancakes with ketchup on top, wields a steak knife, lectures you about making better choices, the long hall of unintended consequences. And if you can. If you looked harder it would come to you; if you could just focus for once, this wouldn’t be so hard. Clavicle and tracery of eyes would make themselves present, no diagnostic mist, this time. Shutters tumble around your fingers, rising in the darkness. You understand something about tone, about how to lie down in a throat and fall asleep like you own the place. You have always excelled at Rorschach tests, can read suggestion in the shift of shoulders, some air seeping from a mouth at a specific tilt, a thread you can grab and twist. A mimic fish spreading over eyes, cheeks, collarbones. Every face, a display plate on a simple white stand. Star gazer. When you were small, a big kid taught you to cut a slit down the luminous belly of a green blade of grass, break it open with your breath, and make music, and it was the first weapon you ever made. You aimed it at the sky, blasted an escape hatch. But now there is a shift, a settling. It’s dark. Portrait game. Voices turn on spokes, more slowly now. The faces carousel around the small hot triangle of your hands. Milky light seeps through the seams in commuter traffic. When you narrow your eyes, your fatigue blurs into the tactile future. Haloes, overexposures cast into the deep pools of other minds. Butterflies pressed behind eyelids. Drape all the mirrors. Learn how to pray.
these words by Alex Leslie were inspired by the work of Kevin Calixte
wordandcolour 