Singularity

Singularity

Douglas Nyback

 

It’s an infinity thing

how we learn

to do this

again.

We fall

like a reflection

in a window,

harsh shadows

pulled through prisms

cast

over dark faces,

your old selves

seconds behind.

 

And you look

beyond,

past

the shadows you cast

and

into

the eyes of someone new.

 

I look,

it would seem

and I swear

on

the

perspectives

I’ve changed

that

the inside of your

iris

is

infinity

for me,

a world

a galaxy

a universe

ever expanding

in

my understanding

of the thoughts

that grow it.

 

We fall

how stars kiss,

catalyst and consumption both,

ultimately,

becoming one.

 

 

Music and Dreams

I wonder.  Who among us isn’t haunted?  I wander, often, and I’m shocked by just how much of my heart belongs to pieces of my past, to people who have taken up residence, perhaps leaving their place in my life but never in the specific ways they’ve helped shape me.

Thanks to the continued inspiration.  You know who you are.

 

Music and Dreams

 

I am standing on the shoulders of giants.

 

More and more

I

look in the mirror

and it’s a man

I see there.

He stares back at me

the way

fire burns

alive,

fierce

like it could consume me.

 

That man

is

what was,

what is

and what will be.

 

I wonder,

sometimes,

if the first love

I had

is

the only love I’m allowed.

 

In my dreams

she dances

to save the world

and I weep

because

in those moments

she is

My World

and when

I

wake,

It ends.

 

She is

a fine bow

pulled

sweetly

along the tender thread

of my imagination

and the music she makes

I

will never forget.

 

Her hair

was the brown

of oak trees,

her eyes

were an ocean,

deep and complex

and she cried,

often,

but

every tear

was morning dew

dancing on the

mist

of

what dawn

does to nighttime.

 

But,

I am standing on the shoulders of giants.

 

You took my heart so early,

my love.

 

 

Tiny People In Picture Frames

The fruits of tonight’s wandering.  Found this amazing wine bar called Swirl.  Got two poems out of it, this is the second one.

 

Tiny People In Picture Frames

 

She has a bow

in her hair

like,

“Hey.  Look at me.”

And I do.

I’m staring at

pictures of

her silhouette,

trying to

figure out her profile

because something

about

the way she

grabs attention

hits me like

a

cat getting killed

and I feel

like she’s a bad idea

but I don’t

know.

 

It’s harder now

than it was

before

because

people are tiny,

they live in

picture frames

and

I’m

sure

that if I stare

at them

long enough

they’ll

drive me

quite mad.

 

There’s something

about her,

like a

Dead Sea,

like you’d have to

walk on water,

like you’d have to

manufacture a miracle

to

truly

comprehend

her.

 

I feel like

if

she found out

this poem was about her

she’d feel

quite

justified

in it.

 

 

Love Happens

Wrote this yesterday afternoon after a 3 hour creative meeting for a film I wrote.  Obviously, love was a theme.

 

Love Happens

You don’t push love.

Love happens,

like a jacket in tatters

on a day

where you

just

can’t

get

warm.

 

You touch someone

so intensely

that no longer do you

exist

you’re rubbed raw

the places

where you touch

patched over

by your lover’s wounds.

 

You share fluids.

You say,

“Here I am.  All of me.”

 

You don’t push love.

Love happens.

Happy Halloween

Well.  It’s Halloween tomorrow.  Got the idea for a short story.  Here it is:

Alone.

By:  Douglas W. Nyback

Creeping light reflects off the crystal chandelier making the ornate tin roof crawl.

I hear street noise somewhere, softly, so no way can where I woke up be too remote.

It doesn’t smell like a basement, the ceiling is too high.  My eyes strain, pupils widening, one glance at the half clothed Mannequin in the corner of the room kicks tears close, but I beat them back.  She’s dressed in a gray jumper, her skin bleached, her lips painted the darkest red, her hands rest casually in her pockets, the fingers slumped, losing shape and if it weren’t for the varicose veins in her calves you’d swear she’d never been alive at all.

Gravity does funny things to blood and somewhere, somehow there’s a man named The Tailor.

I close my eyes, breathing, willing my arms to relax, cut already almost to the bone, the arms of the chair made slippery from what the piano wire is doing to my wrists.

I have been taught to keep calm, to breathe, to count to ten.

Behind me a clock chimes, striking the hour hard at four, giving me a fifty-fifty on how busy the street will be when I start screaming.

The Tailor pulls you apart and I have been chasing him for over three years.

Somewhere, a room away, a light clicks.  Instantly a doorway is framed, forty watts floating across the room in jagged slivers.  My eyes turn back to the Mannequin and instantly the piano wire bites.

In the soft glow I can see the stitches climb the back of her lower legs from where the muscles were all cut out and deveined.  The skin was pulled a little too tight in the stitching in an attempt to hide the stretch marks made from the struggle.  Piano wire doesn’t have much give, but when you’re being skinned alive, you’d be surprised what your adrenal stores will allow you to do to yourself.

I hear footsteps to my left and the light plays.  I force my eyes up—memorizing each detail—past her legs to where small patches of liquid stain the pockets of her jumper.  She’s been dead for over seven days.  Those stains mean her fingernails have rotted off.

What he does is individually remove all your muscles one by one, then shrink wraps them in preservative and sews them back into your body as he goes.  This process takes weeks and is made possible by his expertise and the I.V. drip stapled into my forearm.

It took us the longest time to figure out he wasn’t using a scalpel.

I follow her arms from the pockets up.  Here and there, unless you looked closely, you’d never notice that her forearms are jagged from lost tissue, you’d almost not see the careful seam work put into where the hand marries the wrist, you’d hardly make out the bruising from where she must have fought and fought and fought, you’d almost not see how exactly four millimeters had to be cut out of the bones in her left forearm to make the seams match.  You almost don’t think about how much marrow being shaved would hurt.

You almost don’t think about it, but you do.

In situations like this, what you do is focus on the small mercies.  You think to yourself:

At least my skin won’t be literally torn apart.

I marvel, sometimes, at how intensely we can look forward to a technicality like that.

In situations like this, you tell yourself to count to ten but you only get to eight because he doesn’t us a scalpel, he uses a seam ripper.

The door creaks and the light I know is coming washes over me.

His footfalls are deft, sharp and specific.  His aftershave is sandalwood, his cologne is Tuscan Leather.

His jacket, among many things, is impeccably fit.

The door closes behind him but it’s only dark for two one thousands before the chandelier sparks to life.

He’s framed, for a moment-perfectly in the death of my night vision.  I’m aware he’s wearing a top hat.  On his hands are a pair of custom driving gloves, it’s apparent they’re leather, but it’s difficult to tell from whom.  He crouches down in front of me and he says my name.  His voice is polite and precise.

“I deeply admire the work you do.”

For a long moment he studies me and I swear to God his eyes are violet, like pulled velvet on a spool, his thoughts are unreadable and I make my living reading thoughts.

The thing about behavioral psychology is that sooner or later what they’re thinking starts to feel normal.

It makes perfect sense to me that he would walk over to the Mannequin.  I understand that it’s his yearning for a personal connection to something lost that causes his fingers to softly caress the rotting skin on her cheek.  I feel a vague sense of satisfaction at the most subtle of noises as his finger slips through her cheek and into what used to case her tongue.  I feel relief as he idly tears the lips off of her face, first the top, then the bottom, like punching a wall, like popping a zit.  He stares at her, pulling back her eyelids, exposing the rotting contents just beneath her skull.  She grins at him, anymore incapable of anything else.

“The gray matter goes first.”

In situations like this, what you do is think of the small mercies.  You think to yourself:

Pretty soon he’ll be doing that to me.

He asks, to no one in particular:

“They never last very long, do they?”

There’s always a purpose to dialogue like this, but as he leans into her, burying his face in the dead remnants of her hair, I start to lose my mind just enough to forget that I’m supposed to be looking.  He breathes deep and embraces her, wrapping his left arm tenderly around her impossibly slim waist.  His right hand finds the back of her neck and he holds her like that for a long time, his pelvis pressing into hers.  Finally, reverently, he lets her go.  Some unseen support gives way and her shoulders slump forward, sickeningly pushing her wrists deeper into her pockets.  Her head falls and for a moment he holds it up with a single finger, turning to me.

“Perfect fleets.”

He lets her head drop and gravity’s tender malice causes her spine to give way at the base of the neck.  The stitches keeping her head on her shoulders stretch and tear just enough to spin her eyeless, lipless grin on me.

Hanging there, half attached to her body, I see her brain is nothing more than maggots, moving relentlessly but no longer in the way it used to.  One by one, they drop to the floor.

I think:

Penny for your thoughts?

He says:

“Something funny?”

So, I know I must be smiling.

He takes a step closer to me and his hand dips into his pocket.

It’s the simplest thing, a seam ripper.  It’s barely anything and it’s the smallest gesture as he removes it from his jacket.

I hear the street noise and I know we’re not together in the AM.

I think:

They’ll hear me scream.  They have to.

And he knows:

“They’ll hear.  They’ve heard all the rest.”

In situations like this, what you do is think of the small mercies.  You think to yourself:

At least I’m not alone.

It’s funny, how that definition has changed:  Alone.

The Tailor kneels in front of me.  He says:

“I’ve been thinking about this for a long time.”

As he brings the seam ripper to the base of my foot, I think:

Nothing really cuts.  It just presses specifically.

The seam ripper pierces the soft skin at the base of my ankle; the penetration is nothing, barely a pinprick.

He looks up and me, his lips cracking into the smallest of smiles.  His weight shifts lower and I feel the point of the ripper angle up.  It finds bone.

He says:

“It’s ok.  You can scream.”

The ripper begins its long journey up my shin and I do.

In situations like this, what you do is think of the small mercies.  You think to yourself:

Maybe I’ll make a nice pair of leggings.

A Forgotten Word

 

 

A Forgotten Word

 

You hit me

like a spider web,

like a

strand

of

something,

silken,

untrustworthy

like you were

never here

at all.

 

You cling

as if, Imagination

a

chord struck

Dissonant

with

Dissipating

resonance,

so low

your colors

bounce off

your colors

and

whisper

only

a forgotten word:

“Love.”

On The Ocean

I’ve been working on this for a couple of nights.  I’ve had Paul Simon’s “The Obvious Child” on repeat all night.  It’s a hell of a song, check it out if you haven’t already.

It’s been months since I’ve written a poem.

This one’s about the lives we choose and the ghosts of lives we almost do.

Here it is, as always, thanks for the read.

On The Ocean

 

I feel as though

there is a sunrise

somewhere

playing across

a

room

kissing lovers, unaware

with an intimacy

rivaling

the

cause

of their

exhaustion,

and

I think back

to

myself

with

Elisabeth,

on a beach

years ago,

Three AM

breathing down our

necks

the city behind us

cozy,

the purveyor of

our bottles of wine.

I remember

the certainty

of which I felt

that I would be

in love with her.

___

I feel my life

in terms

of

Dawn,

in the dust

hanging

magic

in

the

air

I

see for my life

a

series of memories.

And I feel you.

Like a breath of fresh air.

Like crisp laundry.

___

You are

my life

aired out,

windows open,

soft colors all around

with no need

to get out of bed

save

to make Great Art.

___

But I see you

only in glimpses,

your hair,

a ghost against

your tender neck,

the sounds of Ocean all around

always a room ahead,

begging I follow you,

and I do

only to be begged

again.

___

I see in you

a life removed.

A dream I

dream not of.

___

I see myself

truthfully in gloaming

and you

in dawn.

___

I look at my life

and see a white picket fence.

I just see myself

writing it for someone else.