Babel Dreaming
Told me stories of terrifying medieval machines springing to life on yellowed parchment with thin ink. Jumping off the paper, gnashing their gears, heaving and groaning and ravenous. Numbers, tiny figures, and scribbles of notes clustered around their parts on the paper like clouds of gnats around a great sleeping beast. Hungry, the machines rage blind, yet calculated, through the streets of night and day.
And tonight, the numbers and figures are flicking up around your face, your ink-heavy eyes, the shadows under your cheekbones pronounced with a few penstrokes. Measuring out your proportions, your ratios, putting equations over your soul. Oh, they're putting equations over your soul, pinning them up to the fabric, lacing that corset, getting ready to pull, to pullllllllll...tight. You are beautiful dressed up in those numbers and variables and graphs. You look so beautiful and mysterious, like you wouldn't believe.
Let's plunge back into those antique lands, that yellow candlelight, that warm, raw wood. Those antique tastes and touches, let us get them all back tonight. Let's become one with the little flame, let it take us back to when pain could be written on a thick, heavy page and rolled up and put somewhere no one can remember.
And, oh, God, when you sing. When you open your mouth, a gorgeous smear of ink forming and reforming itself on the page, letting out the zigzags and curves, it is like the miracle of life itself. The parabolas all inverting and reflecting themselves hurtle from your mouth straight toward me. Your eye blinks slowly at me through a heavy wooden wheel on a monstrous tangle of machinery. Time slipping through a funnel...straight into a teardrop. Oh, time pushing its reluctant frivolous grains through the mechanism, so steady; must keep rhythm, can't lose the rhythm. Time and its silly grains, silly shadows, silly teardrops.
God help me, I am impaled...on you, you and your thousand brilliant ink-slick sharpnesses. And you're not laying a hand on me. You are still on that yellowed page, your hand is resting on the parchment, all still and shadowed from his pen and careful eye.
Time slipping through a funnel into a teardrop...
Time is anorexia...or there would be no time; I mean, have you seen a cylindrical hourglass?
You dance through the machines grinding themselves to death (to life!) late into the night, you dance through the cathedral halls. Your shadows keep touching you, here, now there, they can't get enough. Your music slams me into the paper and I spray out into a hundred tiny dimensions, into everywhere, everyone. We fracture and fractalize, our penstrokes lit with Greek fire, and we are the perpetuum mobilis.
And I say yes, yesss, yesssssss....
--
Written on the spur of the moment. Rough around the edges. Critique encouraged. :]
And tonight, the numbers and figures are flicking up around your face, your ink-heavy eyes, the shadows under your cheekbones pronounced with a few penstrokes. Measuring out your proportions, your ratios, putting equations over your soul. Oh, they're putting equations over your soul, pinning them up to the fabric, lacing that corset, getting ready to pull, to pullllllllll...tight. You are beautiful dressed up in those numbers and variables and graphs. You look so beautiful and mysterious, like you wouldn't believe.
Let's plunge back into those antique lands, that yellow candlelight, that warm, raw wood. Those antique tastes and touches, let us get them all back tonight. Let's become one with the little flame, let it take us back to when pain could be written on a thick, heavy page and rolled up and put somewhere no one can remember.
And, oh, God, when you sing. When you open your mouth, a gorgeous smear of ink forming and reforming itself on the page, letting out the zigzags and curves, it is like the miracle of life itself. The parabolas all inverting and reflecting themselves hurtle from your mouth straight toward me. Your eye blinks slowly at me through a heavy wooden wheel on a monstrous tangle of machinery. Time slipping through a funnel...straight into a teardrop. Oh, time pushing its reluctant frivolous grains through the mechanism, so steady; must keep rhythm, can't lose the rhythm. Time and its silly grains, silly shadows, silly teardrops.
God help me, I am impaled...on you, you and your thousand brilliant ink-slick sharpnesses. And you're not laying a hand on me. You are still on that yellowed page, your hand is resting on the parchment, all still and shadowed from his pen and careful eye.
Time slipping through a funnel into a teardrop...
Time is anorexia...or there would be no time; I mean, have you seen a cylindrical hourglass?
You dance through the machines grinding themselves to death (to life!) late into the night, you dance through the cathedral halls. Your shadows keep touching you, here, now there, they can't get enough. Your music slams me into the paper and I spray out into a hundred tiny dimensions, into everywhere, everyone. We fracture and fractalize, our penstrokes lit with Greek fire, and we are the perpetuum mobilis.
And I say yes, yesss, yesssssss....
--
Written on the spur of the moment. Rough around the edges. Critique encouraged. :]