WE DISCUSS OUR DIFFERENCES IN A BAR AT THE EDGE OF THE WOODS

for Jill Moon 

"Well yes", I said to her," I do dwell on the absurd in life, but mostly I like the problems our use of language gives us to solve . Things we say that are meant to clarify the metaphysics latent in awkward pauses in small talk, or worse, where there is no trivia left and a sense of embarrassment starts to come over us, as if we're naked, are concepts invented on the fly, with the perspiration still burning our nostrils, word structures that have terms enjambed to the degree that the brain , the outer periphery of the human capacity to feel ashamed and to blush, stops digging itself deeper into a metaphorical hole and instead convinces itself the world is more a cartoon, something rendered by an unseen hand and the will that guides it, than cartoons themselves." 

She tilted her head, her shoulders arcing in the same direction, her posture a hard question mark of unconvinced arms and ready hand gestures of another version of this same moment, saying finally, but not finally "I cannot consider myself as a badly drawn and poorly scripted caricature of stammering awkwardness.I am a painter and I paint things that are not there , even in spirit. " She picked up a pencil and drew an apple, making it appear fresh and shining under an undisclosed ray of sunshine or tolerant light bulb.

"This," she continued, placing pencil down, "represents an idea of a fruit that does not exist. It is a lie , posing as a portrait of a fresh apple. But there is a lie in this thing that is already a fabrication, which is that this apple is extraordinary for being an apple and that it is a thing for all time and will always be as such. But this apple is already rotten , shriveled with skin like snake hide, or it is eaten , conceptually,and made into another idea of energy, an expression on another note pad, configured, perhaps, as a box of cherries or a glass of wine , or perhaps a dung heap, a representation that fails as representation...." She paused and lit a cigarette while I check for messages on a phone I paid too much for. She pointed t the phone. "There's no one out there" she whispered, "there are no messages from your friends. They are ghosts of conversations you only dreamt...of..."

There's too much cogitating in here said Romulus, who'd been in the corner doing a Sunday crosswords before realizing he didn't knew enough angry words to fill all the boxes. 

"What's a ten letter word for Migraine?"