a grain of sand meets another rolling in a swell: plom plom plom tink plom plom plom whoosh. beaches are where dirt meets water, said bill hicks, in that way little bits of spittle came out of his mouth onto his black tshirt, loosening the utterance from the lips, desperate to let it go, knowing the laughs were imminent. i love this: x is just x; a throne is just a chair covered in velvet. and a joke is just a sort of crashing? but the sea is actually too loud, if you’re always next to it: it erases, scrubs too hard.
back from holiday i bought a book about indonesia from amazon, i wanted to know why it put me in such a state (too real, too fake, too blue, too green, too rotten, too fresh). looking at its fold-out map, it seems that a sentence is a bit like indonesia, right? a bunch of stuff spread out in a line. then made to form a whole; all the elements contained in the string at odds with one another. sometimes pretty, sometimes violent, people move around by boat: bali lombok krakatoa sulawesi sumatra flores java komodo.
Originally published untitled in Failed States issue no.1: island, September 2017.
Oscar Gaynor is a writer and co-editor of Tinted Window.
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