a minute in his eyes
The soft autumn light gives birth
To the prismatic colors reflected from
The ginkgo's courageous leaves
As they fall like snow.
The skirt of the crouched maiden
Casts such a powerful yellow over the scene
That you fail to notice
An awkward shadow,
Standing quietly with his back to you.
You feebly try to hail him,
But he stirs not.
Step by step,
You approach this figure,
Clad in a black so dark
That it causes Night to yawn,
Close his beady eyes,
And drift off to sleep.
As you near him,
The body starts to vibrate.
A force of one thousand thoughts
Courses through the mind-links,
Forcing the psyche to doubt,
Loathe,
Love,
Fear,
Embrace,
And shun
All at once.
You reach out a trembling hand,
But before you can test the fibers of his garb,
His back melts into his chest,
And his hood melts into his face.
Before you know it,
His huge eyes stare into you,
And you are afraid.
He opens his mouth,
As if to speak,
But all that emerges is the white noise hiss
Of an poorly tuned radio,
Jerking your eyes open to his,
And bleeding all other senses away.
As the blood lingers on the lobes of your ears,
Pools in the palms of your hand in stigmatic ecstacy,
Trickles off the tongue taking taste away,
And nips the nose of it's sweet sense,
The lids of your eyes are forced back into hurting,
Until they are nothing more than the curve of sight.
The owl-like orbs of the stranger
Pierce through your indifference,
Until only he lingers there.
His eyes began to cast shadows on the shadow,
And you see the conical branches of time.
You know these strange fields of thought!
You see steps of a younger you
To the arms of an eager father,
And steps of a wiser you
From the arms of the same.
The love and compassion you once felt
Manifests itself upon these conics,
Then diverges and splits
Into a million shards of what if
Scattered among grains of why
And shattered dreams.
You race along these younger yous
Of and older time,
And shudder at each fork in the path,
For you get a glimmer of what could have been
But never was.
Where does God go when Man closes his eyes?
Suddenly, you see a vibrant ginkgo
Plastered upon a canvas of present.
You step back and see the faceless merchant
Who you are selling time to.
He draws you back, quickly,
And you bleed for forgiveness again.
And again, you see the conics,
Golden cones growing as you do,
Every point on the cone, a choice you could have made,
Every edge, a choice you did.
You push on, through this scene of disturbance,
Until you see people you knew but no longer know,
Choices you made, but never make,
And places you've been, but never are.
You break the trance just long enough
To see how thin your hands have grown
In these few, short choices you have made,
Standing in the fading light,
With a stranger.
You bleed again as he pulls you back into his trance,
Forcing you to cue the present
Until, like him, it melts into the opposite.
You reach the edge of another cone,
Pick a point (arbitrarily by now,
For you are no longer in control),
And continue. You reach the edge of
This cone, and it glows with an inhuman frequency.
The hiss from those dry, parted lips
Screeches deep into the recesses of the brain,
Filling them with formaldehyde.
The life you lived in his eyes
Slowly drips down his face,
Gathers on his vague chin,
And splashes onto the yellow ginkgo leaves.
The color drains from his undefined brow,
And pours out the floodgate in his sole.
The color fades from the scene,
Changing earthly hues to white,
Like a gentle dusting of late autumn snow.
You reach out his hands and find them to be bleeding,
His face bloodied, white, and pale.
Until the color drains from your yellowed eyes,
And the world slowly fades away.
You look down at your hands
Vibrantly changed under the overexposure
Of the blinding white,
And feel the age of a minute's predictions.
The white seeps into all of your pores
And you open your mouth to hear a sound.
You emit a noise,
Silently white as the world around you.
You are afraid, and scream this hiss into the world.
Then, you close your eyes, and the white is black.