When Word can write narrative, intentions in Word reduce in scope to one sentence.
December meditation with shirt off in public
Concrete picnic table. Sun off the river. A place to be seen meditating. A He sure can pick em spot. Sun off the river, scarce in December. Off the river a two sun light-heat pincher. So shirt is coming off. One because bare skin this time of year tricks in plain sight—all the jacketed walking white Jesuses. My woman likes the taste of brown skin. I chase the sun across the rainy season eager to have a contact.
Lose the shirt. Eyes closed. Hear hikers looking at me. I take their voices as an object of mediation. I take the thought that they are looking at me as an object of meditation. I take the likelihood that my imagination is correct that they are looking as a object of meditation. I take the likelihood that they don’t give two shits—object of meditation. I take the likelihood that they want to look but don’t because each expects the other to first as an object of meditation. I take the winter breeze on skin, direct solar. I take ground squirrels rustling brush, fear up chest, the likelihood not a rabid raccoon, a bushes-sheltered danger to self and other.
The voices of hikers moving at the speed and angle of looking. The embarrassment at being there and being fit enough to be nipples-out. Concrete under ass. Ass as good as face. Back cold front warm. No back front. Cold warm. No cold warm. Fear up chest at what are probably ground squirrels. The inability not to “see” ground squirrel, to not see what the people with the voices passing may—brown bald man shirt off, back to them, against the Carquinez Strait, looking like someone trying to be seen meditating.
Mama in classical definition
Infant does not perceive itself as needing care. It may not perceive itself. It may perceive stiff inside. Stiffness from the inside pushes out as what infant does not know to be sound, much like pus if pus on contact with air became powder. When infant pushes inside stiffness out, it takes some time, and the longer it takes the more the pushing out fills, rattles, nearly tears, but before it tears the pushing-out place is plugged with that which lets in, and that which lets in unstiffens stiff inside, changes it to its opposite. The force of the pushing out owes to the stiff inside feel but also to the want for stiff inside to change to its opposite. Similarly with outside stiffness—cold—only the plug is not to the pushing-out place, it is plug all-over and nothing need let in. In surrounds. If infant does perceive itself it is a self the same as that which fills the pushing-out place and that which creates an in. Stress and relief are some kind of sand in the sun and water wiping over it and receding, wiping over it, receding. That beach is baby.
At some point baby gets the over-wipe is Mama. Not self but a kind of proof I feel. Of Yes I suffer and should not long. Mama the not-me brings bad feel’s opposite. Monogamy, in out, back forth, marooned with Mama.
The young infantryman on the beach yells Mama after being shot from the bluff. The middle-aged suspect yells Mama during early stage organ failure, handcuffed, knee on neck. Trauma in classical definition. Mama in same.
A few months back when I discovered you (for myself), I thought your work to be intriguing. Since then I've done more research into minimalism–a direction I absolutely want to head in–and see how your work fits wonderfully into this genre. Are you familiar with it? It's uncanny how well you write "burnt tongue" passages and "on the body" metaphors. It would be stupefying to think you weren't at least aware of this style of writing. If not, I need to send you two links, one to an article by the author of Fight Club on the master(ette) of this art, and the other to a masterpiece by this masterette. Let me know. Great work, either way!
Phew. Intense narrative. So well done. Which are you here - or are you both - and more?