The Centipede + the Laptop
While the laptop is bone-white or creamy white or luminous white or blue-white, it is hard to tell what color the centipede is; it is both transparent and really there.
The centipede is long, almost impossibly long, both flat and round, obviously capable of going in any direction at once. The laptop is quite sedate by comparison, slightly oblong, occupying space neatly and tactfully, withholding its giant secret of connectivity, somewhat gleefully I suspect.
The centipede is dead. Or could be dead. Until it moves.
The laptop comes to life, like a woman, on a finger-stroke.
There is a space between them but they occupy the same plane. The laptop has the character of a platform, the centipede more that of the feather.
3 comments:
The centipede in my mind’s eye
The centipede in my mind’s eye is a centipede no question but just that. It is a centipede delivered in one punch so to speak, without detail. If I zoom in on the centipede in my mind’s eye, the image disintegrates. There are not enough pixels.
The centipede in real life provokes instant motion of the whirling windmill alarm blaring type (were motion sound), whereas the image of a centipede, whether print or digital, is conducive to sustained looking, by virtue of the removal from the scene of flailing limbs, whether human or centipedal.
From the tiled surface of the page, phrases such as, “exclusively predatory taxon,” “poison claw,” “egg tooth,” “organs of Tömösvary,” “matriphagic,” “many species lack eyes,” “always have an odd number of legs,” “in extreme cases the last pair of legs may be twice the length of the first pair” and "face backwards,” and intimations such as “5,000 undescribed species” and “cryptic lifestyle” can be gathered and assessed with an attention impossible in live encounters between domesticated homo sapiens and Scutigera coleoptrata, for example, whatever about cats.
Just as the great lump of the human body is irradiated by the corner-of-the-eye conduit of the feathery centipede, the exquisite speed of one is translated instantly into the bumbling panic of the other, the former torpor of the one morphed into the arrest mid-scuttle of the other, so too does the mind’s eye require only a vivid crumb to jump into brute life images to make flesh crawl. Consider the simple names “Feather tail centipede,” “Blue ring centipede,” “Stone centipede,” “Earth centipede,” “Galápagos centipede,” “Peruvian giant orange leg centipede,” “Giant Red-headed centipede,” “Red-headed centipede,” “Giant Sonoran centipede,” “Vietnamese centipede,” and our chum “House centipede.”*
In that theatre, of course, images will never be precise and may concomitantly incur commotion involving both emotional and physical states. They are nevertheless efficient, with the economy of poetry, despite their minimalism and blur.
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*And are those quotation marks or legs?
i love the humor in your writing
i hope it's supposed to be funny
waiting on the plain
dependent on the moment
a billion empty tunnels
wait silently
0101010101010101
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