Ray Osborn

On the Exhaustion of Time


ISSUE 37 | FASHION | FEB 2014

A dreamier and more delicate sensation was provided by another cave game, when upon awakening in the early morning I made a tent of my bedclothes and let my imagination play in a thousand dim ways with shadowy snowslides of linen and with the faint light that seemed to penetrate my penumbral covert from some immense distance, where I fancied that strange, pale animals roamed in a landscape of lakes. The recollection of my crib, with its lateral nets of fluffy cotton cords, bring back, too, the pleasure of handling a certain beautiful, delightfully solid, garnet-dark crystal egg left over from some unremembered Easter; I used to chew a corner of the bedsheet until it was thoroughly soaked and then wrap the egg in it tightly, so as to admire and re-lick the warm, ruddy glitter of the snugly enveloped facets that came seeping through with a miraculous completeness of glow and color. But that was not yet the closest I got to feeding upon beauty.
-Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory Ch. 1.2

nothing is ever as smooth as something that is without time, or something without time, like a rhyme without space but i close smooth, as Forever, or what i meant to say, clandestine, to me myself and hold on to various tones, so as to remember that tried moment of 'yes' or affirmation between the moments that i've moaned as if they're paradigms of my uniform time that i save as a crutch for the line pulled, sweetly, and singingly, through my fingers and stupefied; how many millions of years ago? but i know

know, by me, arranged, slowly, painstakingly, avowedly, unfathomably, into an order of texture could i have spoken, about myself with you, present, no, but probably, if you think so, then, ok, but what's sweeter than imagining why you remind me of the mountain range painted in blue behind folds of sered sheets left out to gather pain and rainwater from the thawed stones that lay between here and there because a rumination's width is coarse but he could also garner and gather sand

sand through sandstone or sulfur and loam headed upstream with the fish and everything else that follows this flow of a yellow not-flower intimating a map of the world as it is, as if it could be, and punctured by man's jejune flight away from the self if only to fall back to what was more beautiful before and after and weighted and weighted with gemstone's duration-less wit in the scoria space of indolent and violent yearning of this: sting in the chord of a string or a cordon let loose by, who knows, and phatic emphatic worth but if emotionality then there will be some kind of catalyzing chrysalis with a pouncing project repeated ad infinitum before the syllables of a sand dune's divisive open tones and lack of accidentals,

if accidental, be it sharp or flat the rule is always to stay near the coursing diction of philosophical hum-drums though it would never be a joke to me unless the timbre of sarcasm didn't sneak in and make smaller sarcasms so that they can loll and roll with the fissures and things caught in the mouths of seagulls. would it be unbeautiful and halting. let me show you the difference in flow between the thing typed with capitals and that thing left undisturbed in its wanton rush where i make sweeter and smoother sounds in a mode 'knowing' that it is not-knowing all of the indices of propriety and class but only those of sound gathering in wretched handfuls of sand. why would i be forced to move a beach? but you are, and it is hard. so i'll quash my own correctnesses without fluidity and show you how it can be what you have. the work is like painstakingly staving off flies during the honey-eyed season. wielding that which bears eat: the possibility of words to mean, i mean, don't you want to know everything that could be as well as everything that couldn't be and everything that has been? i do.

do i? said, it is not; then they give you a cap and gown to match the coloration you have so tried to keep in mind as the possibility of words to mean and mindful of what has been sutured to me, i imagine him agreeing to my every wish though keeping him would not be my lingo. i watch as he washes me and undoes the braid of my past-tense and, wait as he plans and moves into order all of the things he has planned for me to wear on the shell, of my, skin, as they would be like the mantle of a ce-phalopod or a house, crum-bled with intricacies and belabor-ed with little peculiar spectacles meant to deluge an exodus demure and lacerating but if only to distract the troubled, spavined, skin skin is peacock fauna if a stubborn tract of land, a garden to their inlaid and near-to-the-shore type of home referred to as "The Scavenge Of God" which in all finality seems to be a series of catacombs but it has been inlaid with obdurate dreams, of which we cannot speak for their ribald nature, the pew of sex,

sex with allocations grows weary of tread complaints and so they take and leave in various conundrums, a surplus of lack, without starvation, by which we solve time's due process without spacial tenders for i have never wished to be him, though, God's, a name, name racked with contortions and dimensions that may have fitted pants but don't dull the cataclysm or catechism of his call or its call, with fervor, that could have stepped from any wind sweped plateau, Badlands, for one day and one day only, hence a system of 24 hours but let's macro-manage that daily duty into a poem, for love, for it does not come easy, nor does it stay, or, stray, for long; with rings in his eyes, and therefore the regular practice of love

love stayed is a rutile stain, not of masturbation or menstruation but packed between layers, like, saying just friends is enough to capture a standard of living between two people, as though emotional money were blue. i'd offer to live in falsetto then to see, you go, towards the door, false, me, me for you, your love is like a terrarium, the word so fresh and clean like how you keep me in the world of singularity but away from dirt, in this fake earth, on a faker earth, you say, how you do, it keeps me wanting in voluminous praises, not praise because that would be sacrilege. sacrilege to nothing.


1. Series On the Exhaustion of Time

 


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