Disconnected is a column published bi-weekly by Rob George. Disconnected is a collection of semi stream-of-consciousness poems usually generated from one compelling thought. The rest of the poem is written around this thought, at an attempt to be both surprising but concrete.

White Flowers

By Rob George

A dark morning, a damp morning. Phantom pauses from my smartphone trick my half-baked mind that the alarm is going off soon. It doesn't, and this is because I did not set one the night before as it was a busy friday night at work and i had gotten work off in the morning. I sleep late. Outside it is wet. Daniel plays Apex Legends. I have only been back in Madison a few days, and for the first time it is less likely for me to have brought the virus to Madison than it is for me to get the virus in Madison. I head out to the front yard, where it is raining and I stand in the rain and get soaked. This is cool with me, and that is exactly why I did it. I watch the clouds move across the sky, mirroring the shadows of the shade on the street below them.

The skatepark is going to be wet, we know, but we are going anyway. The sun is hot. There are gaggles of teens in small groups, all giving me incredible waves of nostalgia for my own formative years.

Drinking on a terrace at night is reminiscent of almost every single book by twentieth century white male writers that I have ever read. The only difference in my white-male-written story is that this terrace is in Madison, Wisconsin, and not in Paris or San Juan.

I cannot read a book if it is not paperback. Because I fold every book I read, the spines on the books that I own and keep on my bookshelf are ruined and the books flop open unless they are weighted down by other books or by bottles of cologne or candles.

If I leave a paperback book out in a morning like this one, it will puff up and each page will either double in size or become stiff and compromised in a way that it will spread out and expand to double the size of a dry book anyway. When a book gets wet, it activates the magnets in each page to polarize them apart from eachother. This expands the book. Water and electricity are compatible in the way that electricity can cause repellence anyway.

The white flowers are watered by the rain. Currently, all the white flowers are in the sun, although I'm sure the shade is shifting.