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    The Void Sutras
    The Void Sutras
    The Void Sutras
    Ebook84 pages53 minutes

    The Void Sutras

    By Alexx Bollen

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    About this ebook

    the void sutras is a book of poems and short prose by Alexx Bollen, author of "Periphery." It focuses on the spaces left between major moments in life, and the moments between poems. It's a meditation on the vacuum that is left when one's life has been changed by loss, or marked by absence.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAlexx Bollen
    Release dateJan 30, 2014
    ISBN9781311934574
    The Void Sutras
    Author

    Alexx Bollen

    Alexx is a writer out of Portland, OR. His works include "Periphery" a novel in the magical realism tradition; and "the void sutras" a collection of short fiction and poetry.Since 2011 he has hosted The Alexxcast podcast wherein he ruins all credibility gained from his writing accomplishments.

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      Book preview

      The Void Sutras - Alexx Bollen

      Of tangled sheets.

      Of course it ends with a she

      Tiny poem

      Vernal equinox

      Om Mani Padme Hum

      Love poem 47

      Nighthawks at the diner.

      Prose-like objects:

      The physics of her walk.

      The intelligence of crows.

      The Sufi of Portland.

      The story.

      Reptilians in a Venn Diagram

      Even more on the subject on small moments in nice weather

      Saturday Blues

      Monologues with the void

      Gravitation

      The various paces of things influencing the moments between what is and what came before

      The ones that got away

      A small thing about rain

      A little more about light

      Ozone

      Objects of debatable existence

      All the pretty girls

      Uncomfortably darting

      Spring albums

      I overheard once

      Sarah sitting quietly

      About Alexx Bollen

      The void sutra:

      There exists

      a space between poems the void sutra

      inhaling all matter and spitting back

      something far less tangible

      Offerings:

      We wrote those words on slivers of silver, leaving them as offering to the rain.

      Watching stacks of ourselves dispersed by magnetic storms which leave no trace,

      no hint of ash.

      We wrote those words with the patience of saints, in scribe-like care,

      and due attention paid to the void.

      Waiting at a distance for the ionized smell of rain, which will grant us leave

      to walk from that place

      into the permanence of unknowing.

      The physics of her walk:

      She walked like she was pushing a bicycle. I remember the first time I saw her, with a rigid neck made more for pose than functionality. It was the end of summer, still too fucking hot. I was slouched, drinking a coffee and staring like a creep at the girls walking by, with or without bicycles. She was both.

      It had been three weeks since I'd last spoken to anyone aside from a few words of greeting to servers or the denizens of my job. My Saturday caffeine twitch had not yet developed, nor the crushing anxiety of nothing to do later that night. I remember scribbling something obscure in a notebook, and sitting slightly more upright and crossing a leg. Coffee was imbibed, hours passed, and I walked around trying to find something to hold onto, some obscure comfort.

      I met her on a completely different Saturday, one with less heat, more rain, and smallish feeling of impending something. Watching the outside via a mirror in front of me, she pushed her phantom bicycle through the door. Her dress was still summery, her swagger less pronounced. The seat next to mine, the only one unoccupied became hers. She smiled and nodded a faint hello, my response was weighted and measured to be the exact amount of hello she had given. A success of subtle interplay, or at least a success at avoiding the inevitable guilt of overreacting to a promising social situation.

      When we finally spoke it was because of a case of misunderstood ownership of a dwindling packet of cigarettes. When it was finally resolved through compact or treaty that it was more than okay for her to smoke mine, and I hers, we became fast talkers... conversationalists of the highest speed and alacrity. The conversation red shifted as we lost awareness of observation in the wake of something new.

      We met again outside a bar, her ghost bike shining in the approaching fall. I had brought along an apparition of a small motor scooter, moving uncomfortably like fumbling for keys while holding groceries and a full bladder. We spent the next month together in twelve hours. The morning was red-eyed and I rushed to the bathroom so I could not be embarrassed by my earliest form of humanity.

      The thirty minutes we were awake ended up being about two days; the day itself was six months. She left my apartment after three real days, moving at approximate light speed to the outside observing universe, though I'm reasonably confident no one was observing.

      And when we walked we pushed our bicycles. When we sat we stored them in our posture. I read her that trifling nothing from the first time I saw her. She said she knew my face for months before that. She could outrace any concept of the past with a speed that defied convention.

      By the time we rode our phantom car, the world was nothing but a place holder, a variable in the equations we shared, now moving at near infinite speed. All speed encounters entropy. The physics of ghost particle bicycles was unbound at the end

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