FARRAGO

Is beauty the same as love? You used to know this answer, but now you’re not sure. You used to know ugliness meant fragmentation, splintering, isolation; you thought beauty was their absence. You’re finding it harder and harder to find that difference. When you knew beauty, poetry came easily to you. When you’ve forgotten it, when you think poetry has an obligation to be more beautiful than silence, you can’t write at all.

Everything appears serene until IRON MAN flies through the sky with a loud whoosh! He is distributing fluttering bits of paper from above. The camera pans down to street level, and one of the papers flutters into view. It reads: Wedding of the Century: Bucky Barnes and Captain America in classy italic font.

“Okay, it’s fine. It’s Macca’s, they won’t question my order…uh, hi. Can I get three-hundred and sixty nuggets?”

You haven’t slept in two days because you can’t be bothered going to bed. Walking home at 8am you see things you haven’t seen in a long time: people out for breakfast, old Greek women shuffling to church, parents walking their kids to school, a man in a kebab shop slowly readying a fresh tube of meat. It’s all happening.

“Br-brain of hers. She lu-lusts after me, lu-lusts after the unknown, the unreal, the deviant older woman. She’s stuck here in her job, in this town, but now she’s stuck here with—”

Her eldest daughter picks up the cake tin and takes it inside. She puts her son down and he toddles after them. She passes her mother in the doorway. “Typical of him to leave it on the verandah like that.”

It was almost summer and it was lighter for longer these days. The dying heat of the day wafted off the asphalt, bringing the evening down to a temperature where one could comfortably go without shoes. Nicholas didn’t have the luxury of a balcony, so instead he sat on his windowsill with his suit pants loosely rolled above his hairy ankles, dangling his sockless feet over the last of the evening traffic below.

On my scribbled to-do list is the task: “reacquaint myself with magic.” Then an arrow coils past “catch up on W9 lecture” and “finish Part C stats” and connects to “in the world, myself, etc.”

The hand behind is slightly cocked, palm face up, the fingers outstretched, the entire arm straight down, the profile of the body thereby having a more dramatic lilt, as six eyes regard him as he passes through the lobby. Viewed from the side, he looks unnatural—viewed from behind, he is the scenery. The hand in front holds another—a second. He walks forward slightly slower than what is realistic. He does not squeeze the second hand, as he is led, through the lobby, past the lobby, down a corridor lined with windows on either side.

Bright yellow in the sky as frail, trembling rays of light filtered down to where it met the ocean. The churning waves crashed against each other in sloppy undulations. An eternity of movement swirling on the surface of a calm ocean. Thick and cold, the depths seemed still, motionless in comparison to the surge of movement on the surface.