Adjectives.
They’re lead track shoes on Usain Bolt. A ball gag in Joni Mitchell’s mouth. Adjectives are a shortcut through a briar patch when the out-of-the-way trail runs along the Grand Canyon.
Too, adjectives are just f*cking words.
Totality.
Read accounts. Hear talk. Adjective orgy! Same words regurgitated to describe a shortstop making a diving stop up the middle, or first bite of a Big Wag Burger, or that freaky parlor trick ol’ double-jointed Uncle Bruce whips-out…“Yo pipsqueaks, look at this.”
Adjectives are an affront to being there. Even ones with loads of syllables. Even ones Shakespeare used.
There. When it happened.
Crowd on field. Running. Roving. Planted. Cars parked like Jenga blocks, after the collapse. Lake Erie just, like, right. over. there. Yellow marble in cardboard glasses, eaten by circular void, nibble by nibble by nibble. Bi-plane performs loop-the-loops over coastline. Hue, lifted from A Moon Shaped Pool album cover, appropriately, smothers his scene. (Broken hearts make it rain). Shadows quiver. They must know. C-5 cargo plane fly-over. Street lights flicker on. Parents yank children off swings and sliding boards. “It’s almost time, kiddo. Put the glasses on.” Yellow marble…a wobbling table scrap now…still…almost…digested! The world—the one before the glasses—is yesterday. Is last millennium. Retreats into the pencil-tip universe awaiting Big Bang.
Blackness. Nothingness. Absence, baby.
“Okay, take them off.”
Atheist reborn, face-to-face with a god whose name he doesn’t catch.
Trembling. Wilting. Choking on breath. Others too, maybe. Were they still there?
He’ll ever meet that god again. It’s okay. No more absence, baby. In fact, totality.
Seven seconds come. Seven seconds gone.
He returns, he thinks. Yep, still here. Himself, again. Adjectives overwhelm him. Yes, ones you already read, already heard. He won’t insult you by repeating them.
Gunmeddle 