This Particular Girl I Knew
She walked alone bathed in borrowed sunlight and the fires of distant
suns.
She walked along the edge of civilization
With high rises
and cable TV to the left and the primal sea on her right.
She walked on the dust of billion year old stones and on skeletons.
She was watched by alien eyes that saw her only as an interplay of
shadow and movement.
She walked by a fire that was consuming sunlight
Hoarded away
in a chemical nest before her grandmother was born.
She did not see the orgy of killing that was taking place just ten
feet away
Under the lapping
waves of the dark ocean.
She heard voices crying out to each other in languages evolved from
the clicks and grunts of
Naked animals
hunting in the dawn of time.
She walked where the dead bodies of shipwrecked sailors had washed
up on the shore,
Beyond caring
that they were the first of their countrymen to reach this new land.
She heard in the distance music created by manipulations of pure mathematics
Playing rhythms
that were oldies by three thousand years.
She had skin darkened by tubes of gas which gave off radiation like
the sun
When electricity
was passed through them.
She wore brief clothes spun from the decay of prehistoric life
And carried a
sweater that protected her inside varying artificial climates.
She hummed a bit of tune composed by a man that no living person had
ever known
That was being
used to sell automobiles.
And as she walked, she thought,
“Gee, I wonder
if Gary will be at the party? Is this bikini too tight? Am I too fat?
I
wonder if anyone can smell the beer on my breath? What day is this? Yuck,
I smell
fish.”
Christopher
M. Palmer
April 24, 1996
12:17 AM