heart beats quickly
Photo taken by Bryce Flaskas - Melbourne, Victoria. 2021.
αρχίζουν
our hearts speak in cycles - sanctuaries easily sensed, swarms of creatures, and their magnetic ebb.
even invisible currents, unforgiving that wreck our bodies, and the bodies of others.
countless passage ways in counterfeit dance with muscles and mane.
or strapping a fist, or a doorway enfolded by pink mist sometimes explained in a spherical coherence.
or distressed cloth that takes shape with the surface it cleans,
knowing only how to love by speaking in extremes.
πράξη ένα
the crossed vision of a youth, whose petrified wooden feet leave early in the morning towards a tapered tide, drip from a sea bench.
he senses a breeze slowly making its way from port end to port end,
rustling the thin film of sperm and swabs of algae and microscopic coral at its surface.
from a distance a lady, or a beautiful idea,
pinched in turquoise, fishing for shells shaped like eggs to bring with her, making small spirals with her hand.
devoted to the full vision of an earth and daughter of everything above and with silver lacing her crimson temples it seemed as if the earth decorated her temper for this.
the youth selfishly outnumbered - becomes inspired by her lyrical movements and dives to start paddling,
aware now of how the waves are in long union with his hands to meet her, and how his feet once wooden and petrified turn to fins, and how his stomach swells with mouthfuls of water, and how water makes the sum of his chest, carved into opalescent scales -
a fish and so many vessels framed by the descent of the earth.
πράξη διό
he hears the play in her now pigtailed hum.
haunting him in whatever depths and awakes him spinning to her blurred sway, now dulled dress.
still savouring, each section like falling grapes wash his mouth.
thinking with fierceness about the currents in between,
and his mind the artillery of currents bending tides a long way off, countless numbers at once -
unwrapped and then awarded to a fishing string, his whole body and hers hopelessly
shine a monster in his mind.
πράξη τρία
on the oceans floor here a crater,
a child’s bed its phosphorous metacarpals cradle his infinity.
Infinity rested on the tangerine coloured sand,
making shifts wildly to a zircon then
cerulean, before unwinding in inexorable spiral increments, caterpillars
each with a desert void.
The youth pauses to notice,
his mind now stole, the creatures crowns
slightly inching eachother to a whole.
Bryce Flaskas.
All rights reserved © 2026 Bryce Flaskas - written permission needed for re-use.