From a crouch

From a crouch of a fire stair John enters the hospital cafeteria like a paste extruded into a denim ensemble with paste still for hair, taking a lidded plastic glass of thin orange juice from a chilled cabinet, alights at a too large round table the color and texture of souse, where two ample black women in scrubs beam. From the distance, where every body can be seen from head to toe, the measure of proximity in a hospital, he could be seen as immediately shaping the moments as they came, with his arms speaking like a conductor or puppeteer to draw out voluminous shrieks, moans, exclamations, through the undulations and ripples of the womens’ squinting bodies. And also he spoke, with a singularly human distraction, in words that, from where the gallery sat around the perimeter of the hall, arrived in concussions on the antimicrobial air that blunted the nuances of the tale or fragment which had the women rolling out glee from the cavities of their legs and sucking his full excrescence of words from the air in their tremendous gasps. He held court. Daily immemorial and onward daily they danced. (more…)