Online Romance Not Fit To Print
Not fit to print but not fit to burn, Deb's words
spilled out like a torrent. It was a once-romantic
text, at least in her esteem, but not in theirs. True,
she has no data to back that up no editor has named it
abhorrent but she senses there is a tedious flow to
her paragraphs (which speak on their own behalf,
'There'll be no need for autographs'). Proud fiction
which fell from her fingertips, that prose is inert now
and dormant. Her characters move without motives and
they lack in sympathy. She took her fingers then off
the keys and went to sit by the floor vent. She rested
her head on the hardwood, right on the dirty floor, and
watched as the clock struck four. The chimes, they did
not ignore her. She crawled to the window to look
outside and stopped to wonder what the war meant for
the people who passed on the street below, were their
voices fleshed out. She moved all the dead fruit into a
row on the sill at her home in the Sunset and picked up
her palette as the thought came: 'I lead a lonely
life.' She paints, with a putty knife, a Californian
still life. At home, far away, she would have found a
way to transcend the bittersweetness of and the dead-
beatness of this feeling. Magnetic poetry was astray on
the floor. She knew she wrote enough today. Her
typewriting hands are sore cause her words ignore their
meanings. At night with her paints and her pens at
rest, she still doubted but tried to ignore it. From
her bed she reached and turned the last lamp off in her
tranquil room. When dawn came she'd rise and she'd
write some more, but for now she would rest the
discordant voices in her head while she listened to the
breeze hit the drapes. That wind travelled three blocks
from the frigid beach to her there in her third floor
apartment. As she drifted she reminded herself not to
doubt all the love she'd poured out down by the western
shore. At least the ocean did not ignore her.
