[Original scrawl]
//Gaslit//
A storm comes
and the power goes out.
The rain stops.
the town goes on a long smoke break.
In the middle of the night
the light comes on.
The cancer comes back.
--------------------------------------------------------
[Milled]
//Fooled by The Flicker of The Light//
A storm comes
and the power goes out.
The rain stops.
the town goes on a long smoke break.
By candlelight and glowing embers
-- a minute is an enormous expanse of time.
In the middle of the night
the electron light comes on.
Gaslit again,
the cancer comes back.
There was a storm a few weeks back. I scribbled this down as I ate Chinese food by candlelight and finished it in the hard light glow of a computer screen later. Tell me which you prefer/don't (if either) and why.
2 comments:
I like the longer one better: better rhythm. Summer of 2004, that massive blackout, those minutes felt like an eternity, but you could see the stars from normally-light-polluted NYC....
I'm not sure myself. I strongly believe in saying as much as possible in as few words as possible.
Here however I'm caught between wanting to convey the immediacy of the event and wanting to convey more clearly just what it is that bothers me in a social context about really I guess for fear of it just being written off as the product of an over-idealistic and maybe even hypocritical (I did after all convert this to just another electrical impulse and put it on a blog) luddite.
It really is quite amazing though (especially in large cities) at how the absence of something so apart from nature can take on the significance of something almost elemental to survival even though it's entirely artificial; and how in its absence people turn to some very extreme barbarism in the name of survival.
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