gum

i am a very talented statue. have you ever had someone trace the outline of you, with an invisible thickness between their bone knuckled pointer finger and the bridge of your upturned nose? it is a ridge down the center with two mounds of round on either side. and you are embarrassed about it. people with long bridges and flat bases are not as critical. you wear your criticality.

sitting there i am always trying to look out the window in the beginning, it is a basement with large windows inset in deep sockets right at the hairline of the wall and the ceiling. they are white wooden frames and six panes across, three panes down - though it looks like two sets of three by three panes were pushed together, that the full six was not actually constructed as such - the panes are probably eight inches wide and twelve tall. though i think i am not good at guessing measurements i actually often come pretty close, unlike with people's ages. but people show their ages differently. maybe i am unknowingly actually quite talented at guessing the age of a soul.

a bundle of branch and spiky gumballs, the very ones that got stepped on in the backyard with bare feet, jumping off the tire swing to land soft little pads right on top of them, the ones that probably induced matt's trypophobia because they have that quality of holes where the seeds sit. that is their function, to be one of natures experimental drawings for vessels to scatter seeds for the continuation of a type of life expression. these are orbs with holes, but the holes are made as if two sides of a triangle were cut into the surface of the sphere and pulled up so they could stick out all over it. and the sphere is made of thick walnut like shell. so the triangles become spikes. and they break off in your soft little foot if you step on them wrong. i should know what kind of tree they are, sugar maple? often (once a month? twice?) a thought passes through my mind that there should exist in me a game of memory matching trees to their names. the differences between trees are not lost on me but i do have trouble noting them in my daily life.  

sweetgum. there i went using the internet. this is why i cannot remember the names of trees. the taxonomical name of the american sweetgum is liquidambar straiflua. okay. other names "sweetgum" answers to: hazel pine, american storax, alligatorwood, blisted, redgum, star-leaved gum. what a dense file of aliases, sweetgum or should i call you "alligatorwood?" actually i am obsessed with how each seems it could be its own species, or not a tree at all. the word gum of course calls up rubber between molars, jaws squeaking and gnawing in the way they do only when entertaining the redundancy, the accepted and celebrated inevitable and assured dead-end that is chewing gum. 

these branches of that sweetgum held their gumballs and a few dead leaves. the bark, the seed pods, and the leaves all a dry flaky dark brown, my distance, the shadow of the sun high in the sky, and the logic of the season all had the shades indecipherable from one another. only their shapes and movement in relationship to the wind had me understanding the distinct parts of the whole -blisted. 

if you stare long enough into a frame, especially a white frame, once eyes soften and vision loosens at the edges everything starts to have a blueish, so light it is close to the white of light, glow. and once the phenomenon radiates from the frame you can start to see it in everything. it appears that the essence, some energetic force from within, separates from the matter of the object / being. it condenses itself around the object / being into a tube, a skirt, and takes shape as the outline of the thing. 

when she traces her finger over my nose or around the top of my head to explain to the drawers some particular facet of me in relationship to them in relationship to the background in relationship to the place where light is and is not in the room in relationship to how light is and is not on me in relationship to the way my body has been formed in time in life in relationship to the genetics i had encoded in my biology when i became of the merging of two other already living shaping beings, her finger does not touch my skin. it would be easy to say because it is inappropriate to touch me. but maybe it is because she cannot, or rather, she is, touching me. by touching my outer radiation internal made external glow. allowing and reminding them to see that, too. it is what will make the rendering real.