All 1200 Words + n+1 Correspondence + Reading All 1200 Words

A lot going on here

Bummer! But there are homes everywhere for those with the eyes to see.

All 1200 Words:

Begin by looking up. 

Describe them literally: large masses of white moving through the air; fluff-like balls in various shapes, giving and taking shade.

Describe them scientifically: Strings of gas. Crystals and vapour. Nimbus. Cirrus. Cumulonimbus. A thousand men above ground. 

Call them what they are: Clouds. 

Call them what they could be: dogs, cats, kids, rats, faces, lovers, dogs, eyes— seeing into you, searching through you. Trees, fields, grass, sticks, the old woman you watched limp into the night, the dogs who howled her name. Cars, roads, homes, walls, pet dogs, stray dogs, dogged men— moving, shifting, dancing in the wind. Figures you will outlast, faces you will leave, the first lips that said they loved you, disappearing into dust. Notice their constant changing. Remember that they move. Run with them. 

Find a single shape. Describe it. Notice the way the edges bend up and across and up, again and again. Decide that it’s a staircase. Climb. Pretend that the little cloud children with their little cloud shoes, with their untied cloud laces and their untouched cloud lunches, descend the cloud stairs coming back from cloud school each afternoon. Assign them personalities of their own. Suzie, her face the gap in a large mountainous puff, her body blocked by a tree, worries that the specks of vapor on her cheeks will be taken for zits. She fears the other kids with their chalked-in heads, so she drifts away. She reminds you of yourself. Decide that this is pointless, ungrounded. Look for something more. 

Find a rectangle of white with open space in between. Project your fantasies onto it. Make it a frame home to old family photos. Watch your grip on your father grow weaker through the years. Make it a dance floor with beautiful bodies moving as one. Have them merge and part and love and feel, let them know the sky is theirs. Watch the man who stands in the corner, swaying to the music, but refusing to indulge. Pity the children who thrash around, grating their bones with each fall to the ground. See a boxing ring. Fight. Imagine two brothers, say, Cain and Abel, sparring in the name of vice. They lunge at each other, moving from man to line and line to block, blocking the jabs of their own bloodline. Cain in the left corner. Abel in the right. Abel’s running at Cain now, but the latter dissipates into air. It’s silence, and anticipation, and the crowd’s cheering Cain’s name. And before Abel can find his footing, he’s sliced to spots in a fratricidal swoop, blown away the remnants of a man. Watch as Cain wades through guilt forever. Watch the ring get smaller, and smaller, until it’s a white picket fence with an open gate, an invitation into the dream. 

Spot the Hindenburg. A whale. A tombstone. There’s a man lying on his back to the left of it. His gut could be a hilltop. Be practical. Think him dead. Accept that if it was slumber not slaughter that kept him down, the responsibility would fall on you. You’d have to roll him over, help him find new form, get him up, and out, and kicking again. There would be no bright days as he floated above you. Decide you’re better alone. 

Bury the pain of this. Forget the lovers who see glory in the shapes that haunt you. Consider them short-sighted fools. How many looked at the sky and felt it was theirs? How many saw A+J and B+C and C+G all now and all in hearts and all forever, wiped away in the wind. Repeat that love is for suckers. See a man and woman holding hands in the clouds. Squint until the man departs. 

Return to the biblical. Find Cain amongst the clouds, between fields, wading through the cane. Observe the orchestration of his disintegration. How his falling fragments follow him through the sky, stuck, isolated, lonely generations, following a lost leader. Let the looking come to an end. They can not hold you, Cain and his clan. They are a clouded manifestation of the mind. 

Find anything else to think about. A flock of birds, the rustling of trees, a plane floating by. Posit. Perhaps the captain mistook the monoxide machine for a shooting star when she was young enough for mistakes to be cute. Perhaps halfway through a smile, her mother rubbed her back, saying, “Sweetie, that ain’t no dream maker.” Maybe her obsession began then, maybe it was written above, maybe the plane had made the wish. Remember the lessons your own mother passed down: look left then right, then left once more. Pray twice a day, and sometimes more. Want less; want less; need no more. Hope for the best; expect the worst, and often more. Hope that the pilot wants to fly the plane. Expect that she needs to. Compare her to the boy who sits in Economy Class playing Operation perfectly through the turbulence. Think about destiny, and pre-destiny, and pre-pre-destiny, and the determinism that determined that a lifetime of plane figurines and flight simulators would lead to days like these, suspended in the sky, watching auto-pilot pull her through.

The man. The dying man. The dead man you saw earlier looks like a circle now. Refuse to fill space in.

Throw your gaze towards the light. Paint with it. See a man on fire, two dogs in tandem, a reindeer floating along. Spot an outstretched hand; trace it back to a falling figure. Wonder what it would take to steal the sun. Ask if the gas hand could hold the heat. Beg for one cool minute, please, just a minute, to breathe:

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They’ve banded together now, a single wall of white. It moves slowly, but without hesitation, monitoring the sky. It is the kind of mass there must be something behind. Resent it. Label it an obstruction of truth. There is nothing to be taken here. There are no secrets overhead. 

Imagine yourself the falling figure, tumbling towards the unknowable. You’re descending now, gliding through the sky thinking about all things under it. Forget the irony, dispose of it. Clutch the real. The clouds won’t catch you; that bed’s not yours. You’re falling, flying, flaming towards things you can feel. Hands that touched you, fists that fought you, water you drank, swam in, could hold in your palms. You’re tumbling townwards. You’re tumbling now. You’re a golden god, and they can’t ignore you. They’re watching. From trees, and fields, and homes, and roofs. The papers are calling you a miracle man. The pastors are calling you “god”. The cultured deem you Icarus, but they don’t know what it’s like to burn. Yell it, scream it, bark it goddam it! You’re falling you’re falling you’ve fallen you’ve fallen— you’ve fallen, so you look up. You look up at the large masses of white moving through the air; fluff-like balls in various shapes, giving and taking shade. You thank them for their gifts. You praise their objectivity and resign yourself to it. You look up, forgetting the point. 

The meaning 

is in the 

      words. 

Here’s me reading the piece. Have a day + look up while you still can.