Charles-Gimic

CHARLES GIMIC
by
TED HASH-BERRYMAN
A Revised Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
An Eco-friendly E-book

Your offspring were not frayed strands of genetic code.
They deified you, loosed in a sunken neighborhood.
Their birth wasn’t from the acrid smoke of your ancient work.
They ignored several impostors who weren’t so different from you.
You were flailing while tucking in your undershirt, limbs scraping the air.
Your low Hell was empty in vast aware ways below the rocks.

Ted spins pregnant light from an invisible cactus. Ted Hash-
Berryman, the infamous geologist, recedes inward toward the scent of his
unfettered ape. Hash-Berryman speaks slowly, unperturbed by feeling,
despite existing alongside the living. His progeny, allthewhile, is savoring
the skunk. She stops fuming the flame, and discovers the human face that
is nowhere. Her path isn’t straight. Her rooster crows in a
Presocratic tongue, yet gradually everyone visits from the mainland
seeking her trajectory.

You were not revived in a concentration camp. Your grandparents
gave you increasingly away. Even earlier, some scavengers traded you to
them. That stopped happening at one point. Some weeks, you were around
the trailer shitting a silver hole in your old memories, others you stood in
a slim closet doorway spitting your milk on the dark carpet.
There was no last light of autumn. All of your children were squealing
inside of the oven; all the while, another generation was effacing the dead.

There exists one library of fabricated plastic. He leaves from there
without limbs for his sockets. Holy shit! He has achieved an apex whenever
he leaves without a coffee mug. One exhale protrudes over a salt lick.
Several enlarged particles of flaked skin haven’t yet detached from his
pillow-thick lips. He sends two ‘fuck’s out from his pressed teeth. In his
hands, he weaves sand into thinly held strips, under which mites cuddle.

He is collapsing you strangely with no callous detachment, and he
stretches the elastic socks so that you are now the shoehorn of his
deterioration. A cord he unravels acts as a deluge of sorrow, but the
chopstick’s blunt end is not his to wield.
“We won’t protect her ears, Ted, from this wild cacophony,” his other
head scorns. But he’s wrong! Forever, after ending, this house has returned
no echoed sound. Summer evenings have not since known the infinite,
and they expire within minutes.

You were not yet affluent when you meant to provide a space for the
mercenary’s trap. Big crowd above the attic floor, but you couldn’t smell
their vomit from downstairs, spinning from the toilets. “These are long
intrepid nights,” your sleep told you while the crowd noises gnawed your
symptoms. Months crawled. Your father bore the faux-fur leash, which he
latched as its void enveloped the attic.

\\
You are an early Alexandrian grunt. Now is far from two dozen
months earlier, but you are still advancing toward New York. The path is
coated with brown thorns and the water drains down toward your ankles.
A unibrowed man tries to sell you his oxen, but you have no money left.

A god is coming through your walls; you are not fixed inside yourself.
An immoveable American forms a misleading hello. You haven’t informed
the press, although you should have. The praise that heats your soul means
nothing; it is not quite right for your aura.
“Some will follow a cult with or without you, Mr. Hash-Berryman,”
warned your mother.
“I was without hate, with an empty mind of empty images. Inside my
imagination branched a new understanding. That force, fortunately, will
never die. Here, see the light: AWAKE FOR THE PROPHET; TRUTH
FOR BREAKFAST.”
Twice you dropped Mr. Hash-Berryman’s name, unabashedly seeking
his approval. He ignored the whole attempt until you saw him sincerely,
never to see forever more.

She threw a feast during the silence that she failed to maintain, as an
irrelevant professional should. Her skin was water—her birth was
forgotten now. Her openness was balanced; the visible recorder wasn’t so
visible to her wife. She was so glad I bled. No moment persists forever—
why should yours? Unless forced, most animals wouldn’t believe that you
understand what they say.

This wasn’t the era without ignorance. Most mornings, I watched
multiple women drowning in a bright sun beam. Should I remain
unawake and breathing, I will have destroyed all certainty of my direction.
The breeze that once pulled me wasn’t prepared for speech, or knowing.
Only an afternoon of silence. Earlier, you’d said a large wood plank was
loosened from your grasp by a lady, so that once her young boy
remembered his mother, she would be impressive.
On another evening we watched the odd particles of our firmament
collide. You noticed the one hummingbird dirty itself across the oblong
sky; its altitude dropped like waking segments of a lucid dream.

Fables distributed like algorithmic statements. Large Ted lifting a note
isn’t even afraid. These rooms darken as the living leave them. My student
needs me, so digging around her is the hole of truth. Not a single child
consumes my depth. A black stalk blows black ice to corrupt the signals.

After another fresh month without a snowstorm, Ted went down. I
am very sure you know why. My doctor’s throat appeared as in laughter;
rodents roamed through every single hallway. A closed-door meeting we’d
been planning slowly arose. She didn’t deliver an honorable speech that
ignited a fire in her colleagues, so she felt flawed. Would she protest her
only chance to die a warrior? However it seemed, she had not approved
our approval. “Ted the god!” she prayed before her mind went out where it
once could not reach.

Our nation is failing. You disappeared around that same time for a
reason you will not admit. The visual moon escapes with the only past you
remember in its halo. “You forget,” Ted restated, “that all future
generations must face the god within each being—that they are past
versions of the same truth.”

YOU WORKED OUT IN AN INFINITE PLACE
Crags from angelic mountains
Beyond the bordering door
Erasing the aggregation of
Green mould spores.

A pebble is a pond that ripples especially. Everything beyond its
surface plus luster. My luster or your luster, it must know. From a distance
my soul bleats like the abandoned white sheep.

We shouldered in an ancient—who pretended himself beyond
death—toward the spired towers above the dungeon. His name was always
Ted, and he questioned the both of us. He left his mouth slightly agape. He
was not pulled by the dark doctor.
The brunt of this was never reported by the old tectonic woman who
revealed only that there has existed a drought for ages, particularly in the
wild. “Praising high false sorcery,” she thought.

Disparager of temporary accolades with no recollection of new
poets, you’re dying! You’re dying! I will make known the air strip with no
lit batons moving past the hour. I can see out of the pilot’s cockpit in spite
of self-clarity. I know that there is no plane transitioning off of the runway,
even moreso that the man of light isn’t crawling over the terminal floor.
There is one similar animal in range, so there can be no quietus. It would
never arrive without bringing a substitute truth.

The centerpiece on your dining table demonstrates your morning
ritual. In this way, your legs are concealed. You hide them from preacher
and healer, and your breakfast, flattened, leaves space to sit.
When day breaks the southern brambles, we examine the mice
within…. Our winter here becomes too white; we complete daylight by
subtracting our fingers.
Naive as pieces of paper covering a puddle, we bellow our thoughts.
We all hold the onus of ceding the power, of emptying thrones
illumined by the rule of extravagance.

FUTURE ACCESS
A human resembles past
Sophisticated primitives
Not having been taught.