A Secant Query

Between Friction and Rage

Wherein violence sustains a beating heart...

Between Friction and Rage

Nice Running Into You

On train ride up to lover's house party, people within eyesight walk through structures; contact my eyes have with the sun interupted by what moves between us: a person's feet. I match this rhythm to my own feet at this pace from my life.

Keeping how much of their body's length the ceiling is from their head in mind, I move into a space alongside them. Astrophysicists looking at exoplanets might fill in missing pieces in the way I fill in wristwatch, loafers (sure), butt plug tail (confirmation needed), good deed (in a sense), busy (to a fault - that's chasm), vinyl tile flooring (speckle pattern).

Whoa! I'm making a ton of assumptions from some shadow I glimps for two eye blinks. Hours pass (that person but a moment on the whole train ride) keeping up with all falling between the sun and my eyes. Tending that connection, I flit; a federal building disrupts it, and I am in there, flip tables, get my loved ones the care they need.

A leafblower - I crawl inside its single stroke engine, have it explode, scatter the remains, leave the person standing next to the one wearing it knocked over, reassessing their life. I jump into this above-ground and waist-deep pool, and this one, each an armspan across - each their own safety ladder leading out of it, all drained for winter.

Safety, Displacement

At horn sounding, I retreat to my body. Horn loud. Single-family homes in earshot, poor kids. Horn a safety thing (structures, too, train ride is, railway itself, house party; And probably the leafblower, too). Safety, violence: these terms are arbitrary. Safety doesn't look like safety.

Were the conductor a machine, I might ask a local paper to interview the people in such units - how the horn blares effects their cookouts, time outside, shut windows, animal wellness. What brings one conductor to blare the horn more than others might be their idea of safety.

Safety generates friction: two universes meet (say the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system) like a venn diagram, and the space in the middle - their meeting - is an imprint of the first displacement.

Violence, Vibration

Eviction terminates my time living next to the train. Days of train horn blaring my open windows blasted shut, over.

How much of my life I lose to cortisol train horns release might be an hour per month, two. Including my neighbor's lost hours in this count, this forms days. By month fifteen living here: 3 years of collective life successfully extracted from us, to safe the life of someone living life a horn can save. Safety is tickle-down violence.

Sundered flesh spectacle spared (distributed stress tears everpatient bodies curiously lacking evolutionary ear protection apart), safe as epidermis.

Wanton Asks