umm... I tried prose.
Its cover was worn through, stuffing poked out of the holes in the arms, back, and cushion, and it smelled of dust, age, and dry leaves. It was a somewhat uncomfortable chair, but the old man did not notice.
His course and bony hands rested motionless on its arms. His eyes were fixed in a distant stare; his head was inclined slightly down. He listened to the old hard-wood floors creak under the shifting weight of the settling walls, and watched his thoughts superimpose themselves over the dancing flame –
it was a fitting backdrop.
He was an intelligent man, a sensitive man, and a kind man, but he had always been strong on the outside, seemingly unaffected by malicious intentions, and responding to kind actions with only a silent, subtle gratitude that one could only detect if they knew him very well.
No one knew him very well.
No one hardly knew him at all.
It was the hundreds of fearful, dismal, and wretched memories forever ingrained – mercilessly burned – into old man's tired mind that he chose to sift through as he passed the time. They were not painful – they no longer moved him.
As he kept quite still as he sat in his faded blue armchair facing the fire, he would gradually lose track of the locations of his extremities, and before too long he would simply feel like a small cloud of vision hovering at head-height.
As he became entranced by the flames, he would lose sight of everything else, and his disembodiment and loss of perspective allowed him to passively watch those fearful, dismal, wretched memories replay themselves against what seemed to be a raging inferno.
Sometimes – maybe once in any one of the slowly passing silent hours – a subtle change would come across his face as he sat in the armchair in front of the fireplace. His eyebrows furrowed ever so slightly, his entranced gaze fell momentarily to the dust-lined meeting of the floor and fireplace, and the corners of his mouth turned downward involuntarily just for an instant.
It was nearly undetectable, but that didn't matter.
There wasn't anyone to detect it.
These were the moments that he stumbled across the kind of memory that moved him more than anything else could.
The old man had "good" memories – memories of childhood's innocent wonders, of simply growing up, of young, sweet love and fields of flowers, of summer naps in green meadows. He had his memories of old friends, familiar faces, and the different places he'd grown fond of during the years they had been his home.
These were not the memories that moved him so – he would only draw from them a mellow, bittersweet sorrow that those days were no longer.
The memories that moved him were not memories of events or specific sensations, or even identifiable combinations of either. They were vivid, rich and deep sensations – impressions, emotions, and an array of inexpressible sentimental abstractions, all smeared together as fluid time flowed over them. They were not visual, at least not in the sense as the other memories – they were complex emotional mixtures from which vague colors, – or at least vague shades of light, dark, warmth, cold, or mystery – vague texture, vague traces of smells, faraway sounds, and faint flavors that the old man could have almost extracted if he had ever had desire to. They swept over him without warning, moving him to those ever-so-slight external displays of the deep, dreadful melancholy that he felt.
For anyone else, they would have been tears.
Poetry by Morgan Cellohead
Read 684 times
Written on 2009-07-12 at 05:52
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The Old Man
The old man's features were illuminated by the flitting, flickering firelight that he faced as he sat motionless in the faded blue armchair, the chair in which he had spent many an evening hour since farther back than he cared to remember.Its cover was worn through, stuffing poked out of the holes in the arms, back, and cushion, and it smelled of dust, age, and dry leaves. It was a somewhat uncomfortable chair, but the old man did not notice.
His course and bony hands rested motionless on its arms. His eyes were fixed in a distant stare; his head was inclined slightly down. He listened to the old hard-wood floors creak under the shifting weight of the settling walls, and watched his thoughts superimpose themselves over the dancing flame –
it was a fitting backdrop.
He was an intelligent man, a sensitive man, and a kind man, but he had always been strong on the outside, seemingly unaffected by malicious intentions, and responding to kind actions with only a silent, subtle gratitude that one could only detect if they knew him very well.
No one knew him very well.
No one hardly knew him at all.
It was the hundreds of fearful, dismal, and wretched memories forever ingrained – mercilessly burned – into old man's tired mind that he chose to sift through as he passed the time. They were not painful – they no longer moved him.
As he kept quite still as he sat in his faded blue armchair facing the fire, he would gradually lose track of the locations of his extremities, and before too long he would simply feel like a small cloud of vision hovering at head-height.
As he became entranced by the flames, he would lose sight of everything else, and his disembodiment and loss of perspective allowed him to passively watch those fearful, dismal, wretched memories replay themselves against what seemed to be a raging inferno.
Sometimes – maybe once in any one of the slowly passing silent hours – a subtle change would come across his face as he sat in the armchair in front of the fireplace. His eyebrows furrowed ever so slightly, his entranced gaze fell momentarily to the dust-lined meeting of the floor and fireplace, and the corners of his mouth turned downward involuntarily just for an instant.
It was nearly undetectable, but that didn't matter.
There wasn't anyone to detect it.
These were the moments that he stumbled across the kind of memory that moved him more than anything else could.
The old man had "good" memories – memories of childhood's innocent wonders, of simply growing up, of young, sweet love and fields of flowers, of summer naps in green meadows. He had his memories of old friends, familiar faces, and the different places he'd grown fond of during the years they had been his home.
These were not the memories that moved him so – he would only draw from them a mellow, bittersweet sorrow that those days were no longer.
The memories that moved him were not memories of events or specific sensations, or even identifiable combinations of either. They were vivid, rich and deep sensations – impressions, emotions, and an array of inexpressible sentimental abstractions, all smeared together as fluid time flowed over them. They were not visual, at least not in the sense as the other memories – they were complex emotional mixtures from which vague colors, – or at least vague shades of light, dark, warmth, cold, or mystery – vague texture, vague traces of smells, faraway sounds, and faint flavors that the old man could have almost extracted if he had ever had desire to. They swept over him without warning, moving him to those ever-so-slight external displays of the deep, dreadful melancholy that he felt.
For anyone else, they would have been tears.
Poetry by Morgan Cellohead
Read 684 times
Written on 2009-07-12 at 05:52
Save as a bookmark (requires login) Write a comment (requires login) Send as email (requires login) Print text
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