Ray Succre (D2D - Issue IX)

A GRAND GESTURE

When things began to fill my house, I married them.

Clutching an iPod and everything that shook my head,

I tended to apply my strengths in fumbling excitement,

and I knew the Sun walked along my expansion.

I wondered, when I hadn't felt hunger in years,

who had stolen my nothing.

There was a time I owned it, but thieves persist,

and one of them unkind had popped me,

taken my nothing, left me standing on a domestic floor.

Things were wonderful, an ever-worldly Spring,

in my hands, atop my eyes, films to watch and beeping shoes,

singing clocks and a sea of charms microwaveable.

But I am human, nothing has a force to me,

and so it was with simplicity I sought out the thief.

I found him in a small town, locked in a room.

He had nothing; he'd locked it away like a radical testament.

"Give it back," I told him, "I have everything now."

He had dreams each night, he explained,

of having everything.

We agreed to a barter. I would give him everything

in exchange for nothing.

"You mean nothing to me." I said.

"It won't matter, you know," the thief mentioned,

taking it all,

"we're nobodies. We're nobodies

with nothing and everything. We bloom in secret,

we wilt in quiet. Nobodies."

"Then our course seems clear enough." I replied.

"You mean everything to me." he said.

"We need to find the somebodies that stole our lives."

Our cell-phone rang then, and one of us answered.

"Hello? Yes. Oh, I see. Thank you."

"Who is it?" the other asked.

"No one; it was just more of us."

Ray Succre currently lives on the southern Oregon coast with his wife and baby son. He has been published in Aesthetica, BlazeVOX, and Pank, as well as in numerous others across as many countries. His novel Tatterdemalion (Cauliay Publishing) is forthcoming in early 2008. He tries hard.

Dance to Death, Issue IX