Electra’s dictionary film noir….. more from the secret shorts vault/(edjmmusechron) 25 March 2020

I go down the stairs, I walk in the shadows and watch him at his piano as he plays and watch the muscles of his back and shoulders that flex

and find myself swept into images of dreams I have known and seen so many times…. but only at such times as they choose to let me recall them …. and find now, as such, I remember this now …. from dreams.

It draws me out, as if it calls to me, this elusive and seductive sense; so familiar, so warm to behold and…. now as if summoned by this sense, I find a place to sit....and give up to as I float into its manifestations.  The charcoal smears softly in the pale light and comes alive on the sheet of sketch paper....

I know every shadow and angle of him by heart.... every crease of his face ....as if I put it all there myself.... how long I searched those dreams to see his face; to see his face ....again ....but it was always obscured in dream, the wind caught in his hair and cloak, blowing across his features

I put down the sketch pad and walk over to him as he plays and stand behind him at the piano  ..... I run my hands down his shoulders and back and kiss his neck and feel his hair fall loose against my lips as I take the cord from his hair. He stops playing.

I take his hands and pull them behind him....

but he lets me

and slowly wrap the cord around his wrists and tie them....


“Do you trust me?” I ask him and watch his eyes

He doesn’t say anything. He just watches me. When I kiss his mouth he shuts his eyes and gives into me as I kiss him. I move in front of him onto the piano bench and wrap around his hips and it is awhile.... before I move down to touch him.... and with hands, lips and mouth I feel him ....give into me

the vampire as guide through hell; reflections in a scrying pool (refrain)

it was always during duress that he came to me in dreams

 
I would not remember right away upon waking, only feel such peace

it would come later to me in the day during a moment when my mind wandered



it happened last night to me this way

*****

I wake up and hear music ....it is the middle of the night and the strangeness of these days seems to melt night into day

and day into night

irrelevantly

as he plays I watch the ceiling, the strange shadows from the lights from downstairs which pulls me to reach for my sketch pad

I go out the bedroom door and sit by the gallery banister on the floor with my sketch book to sketch him as he plays

it is the part of his piece he calls ‘flygningen av duvan’

I watch, like from a balcony as he plays, shirtless, in dark blue flannels and watch mesmerized how the light bounces off the gold of his hair as he moves

I go to get my phone .... and turn on the video and record him

and watch like a voyeur as if in my own private concert hall with just him

Noir Pandemic descends (edjmmusechron) 18 March 2020

dictionary,

logging passing thoughts....

it has been a strange week awaiting the descent with the news of the world and a kind of creepy global quiet you can feel

even while there is a withdrawing of society in quarantine, it still tries reaching with its tentacles by other means, tolling the doomsday alarm clocks



*****

the house feels different this time without everyone

unless it is just my mood that I must temper from its tendency for cynicism over the state of social and human evolution  —no matter how tempting it is to dwell

like being hurled by the tail of the balrog with Gandalf facing doom as we reflect on the foibles of humanity

.... I think I would rather defer to the wizard than wish to take any of this on


I stare out from the window seat looking out into the wet and thawing view outside ....that slopes down a mountain in a muddle of pines and skeletal trees —now still thatched with clumps of thawing snow

I hear Jörn finishing a call with his father when he walks into the kitchen and finds me in the window seat with my feet up

“Vad gör du?” he asks just now returning from his run and ending the phone call with his father

“Ingenting.”

“ingenting,” he corrects me

“Didn’t I say that?”

He sits down where my feet are   and takes hold of my feet and puts them in his lap but leans over to emphasis with his hand how my mouth should be shaped and repeats the word

He says,
“ingenting.”

“Oh.... ok.... “ I shrug, “hur mår din far?”

“Hmm?” he shakes his head and shrugs, “what was that?”

“Well I just asked you —“ I get my phone to check myself and show him

“How did you say that?” he asks me

I start to get up because I see he’s making fun of me but he pulls me back as I say, “I’m so sorry I bastardize your language, Jörn—” and he sits me down in front of him

“You don’t, I’m sorry!“ but he’s laughing at me, “I’m just teasing you—”

“Shit!— skit!— fuckit, Jörn! why should I even try if—“ but stop and look at his eyes, “you look tired, are you ok?”

He gives me an odd look,
“I’m just stressed out,” only I see I have made him paranoid as he feels his own head but then he says, “I feel better knowing where everyone is.”

“So where is Hanna?”

“She’s still stuck in Nevada with Erik in the middle of a desert—well, practically. But I told her she’s better off there then if she were to come here.”

“Nevada? How did she end up there?”

“It was for a modeling gig in Las Vegas—“

“Were they gambling?”

Jörn gives me a look and shakes his head in this way that says he doesn’t want to talk about it but says,
“and I guess they ran into some musical producer there and —guess what? This is very Hanna —she has her whole band there so they’re recording an album in some studio in the middle of the desert.”

I laugh,
“that is awesome!” I think about that and then say,
“that is probably the best creative method to produce material—bored in the middle of nowhere,” I point out—then I ask, “and Andreas is with his girlfriend— where did you say?”

“Binghamton, her family is from there,” Jörn says and absently starts massaging my feet through my socks which —hurt and tickle at intervals

“Your hair is getting long,” I notice freeing my feet from his hands as I move into his lap to tug his hair free of the tie as he shakes it out

“The person in the city who does it has been sick,” he tells me

“You should let me trim it,” I say as I put my fingers through it and play with it noticing split ends

“Why would I do that?”

“Because I’m good at it and I know what looks good on you—unless you don’t trust me ....”

“Is that a test?” he asks me and stands up, lifting me with him and starts towards the staircase and then walking up the stairs with me

“So what if it is—do you trust me or should I tie you up?” I ask him

He puts me down when we reach the bathroom but gives me an imponderable look when I say the last part and starts the shower, stripping out of his running clothes

Electra’s dictionary; definition of the guide through hell:

he is my reflection; I see my flaws in him but in him they become beautiful —the ones that do not seem to be what it is I fight within myself

he is everything I am not

both good and bad

all that I aspire to ....

he is brutal truth without apologies yet with surprising gentleness that it slips beneath my guard without my knowing, he slips the key into a lock to a door no one knows is there

Away from the madding crowds

I think it is the silence up here that lends some invisible net for the backdrop of façades to drop —or is it just the world has gone mad? .... only I feel there is a sense now that there has come a silent pact between us .... naturally unspoken .... as true honesty can best be heard by the heart; the seat of the soul; receipt

Whatever his missions are.... because as I have known it all along, from the first moment —when he turns to me now, the bolts he sends through me by just his look is enough to go by


“.....why have you been with me all this time if you never have trusted me, duva,?” he asks me


“It was not so much that I don’t trust you, Jörn —it was something else ....that I do trust ....and....  because I knew Jörn....you are the one .... the one who .... could figure it out....”

[a segway short]/Electra’s dictionary; Pandemic & other reasons for panic

It is about five hours to drive from the City back up to the Adirondacks 

All the way up we are quiet and ....it somehow feels like some exodus from a zombie movie; the strange feeling in the City that reminds me of another time there 

we don’t stop because of the paranoia about germs so we drive straight through, leaving suddenly after that conversation

He only tells me once on the expressway,

“there was more than one reason we had to go.”

This is all he says 

“....in the illustrious city of Florence in the fairest of cities of Italy, there made its appearance that deadly pestilence, which.... had its origin .... in the East, whence after destroying an innumerable multitude of living being, it had propagated itself without respite from place to place, and so calamitously, had spread into the West

“....despite all that human wisdom and forethought could devise to avert it by officials .... towards the beginnings of the spring the doleful effects of the pestilence began to be horribly apparent....” —from “The Decameron” by Giovanni Boccaccio, 1348

Kryptonite; the pirate with the vampire eyes; Electra’s Dictionary & film noir, (jm muse chronicles)

“Well, I took a walk around the world to ease my troubled mind

I left my body lyin’ somewhere in the sands of time ....

“You called me strong, you called me weak

But still your secrets I will keep.....

“I watched the world float to the dark side of the moon

After all, I knew it had something to do with you

“I’ll keep you by my side with my super human might....”
                                          —Kryptonite

lyrics from the song by 3 Doors Down


https://youtu.be/Tpl6ncyxLGw

*************

“It was a bad idea to come back to the City,” Jörn says sitting beside me on the bed, now facing the window as the first light of day touches the sky his fingers touch me absently; I watch him watch the sky alight as it slowly breaks “....especially now with this new virus— don’t go out today, I want you to stay here,” he says now

I watch him blink as the shards within his irises change like a kaleidoscope reacting to the sun, they glimmer

“I think we should go back up north,” he says to me and turns himself to look at me.... and it is something in his eyes that I see .... that I don’t think was there before.... what is that? he looks at me.... I put my hand up to his face as I sit up .... what is it? Only .... no, I have seen this before.

inside the pirate eyes —

but he just looks at me ....in that way ....

he puts his hand around mine that still touches his face but he just looks at me. Looks into me —his pale blond brows drawn now as he stares into my eyes

“I had the dream again, duva,” he says and suddenly takes hold of my face and skull inside both his hands as he moves to me and looks even more intently into my eyes

“Yes,” I say, “I heard you....” I tell him because it woke me as it mixed with my dreams. “And you got up to play that piece again ....”

He shuts his eyes and shakes his head,
“god, it was so real.... do you .... think about why, duva?” he asks me this against my ear

“Yes,” I reply —into his

It is as the sun floods light into the room that we both say together,

“back before the midnight sun ....” and we both shudder

He never usually talks about these things as I think he half chooses not to believe but then.... I guess he must get the images too....

the memories that clutch so within —the heart

sometimes I feel half mad for what I feel only.... the pirate has been with me for so long
now

....but our connection ....is hard to shrug off


“Is this the first time you’ve had the dream since last year?” I ask him

“No.... they seem to happen frequently but I don’t mention it because ....” he pulls his head from me to look into my eyes as he thinks and seems to search for words. For awhile he just studies my face with a kind of wonder and outlines my lips with his thumbs

So I say,
“it was a promise.”

His eyes become sharp as blades as he stares into me with an icy heat,
“yes....”

I realize I’ve been holding my breath

but I can’t hold it now and let it out and search his eyes to see if he knows what it means

Suddenly he says,
“I have to get you out of here.”