TORRES

Green Stretch

Added 2020-09-17 16:34:37 +0000 UTC

A (sort of) short story I wrote January 4, 2016, from which the song “Greener Stretch” (on Three Futures) was derived...

The sands hover more like a prediction than a problem. The two strips over my head move in cream and lavender and do not converge but inch in place. The cream backwards and the lavender forwards and then the cream forwards and the lavender backwards. Tectonic plates whose unknowable frictions you have no real faith in to ruin your life but sadly secretly your grandkids’ lives.

II.

This course womb wants me dry. Not porous and singular the way I entered but silent and egoless the way I’ll go. A slit symmetrically cutting charcoal and baby gray separates my feet.

The throated vacuum opens not from above where it had teased but from the coded foundation across which I the resisting party am balanced in a green stretch. A talcum heave leaves me.

III.

It doesn’t want me yet but shakes my clothes from my frame. I’m nauseated roaring HEY that suit is from the 70’s!

But YOU’RE from the 90’s the gaping gullet guffaws and I’m aware these omniscient sands do not spare even prophets like me.

Twenty four years and nineteen days tender but here’s the swallow and that purple velvet holds my seers like didn’t we just begin?

IV.

An earthy belch puffs loose purple hotly from the sated sands.

Salted and starting to sag I wonder can I be ready?

I the skin pulled taut will recede from rich deathless muscle.

Teal wall right and indigo wall left contract with featureless recognition.

How long do we have before I don’t have a name?

What does anyone care that I didn’t get the chance to stretch a little longer in my new velvet?

M.S.