Chronicles of Crispin 06

As our intrepid hero followed this strange group of misfits down the misted squares of midnight cobblestone streets, he bethought himself of where it was he was venturing to, and whom therewith. He knew, thus far, that he was going to see a boat. But a mysterious boat, apparently, because there was much ado about it over the multiple Mordant Thieves they had consumed at Club Zephyr. Some kind of special boat in which was performed missions. What kind of missions, unknown.

Once taken out of the sexually amplified, intellectually dimmed environment of the club, Crispin found his companions surreal, even slightly demonic in manifestation. They walked together silently, almost grimly, purposely striding towards their mysterious destination in a formation of four, with Crispin straggling behind like a small child. They all seemed locked into their individual worlds of thought. As the silence weighed down upon him, Crispin felt the need to say something, anything. But right as he was about to break the hold of that witching hour before dawn, Taft suddenly stopped and spewed chunks that were backlit by a florescent hair salon sign. He leaned over the curb, heaving and spluttering. The group stopped and waited impatiently.

“Goddamit, Taft” Looger muttered ominously, shuffling awkwardly on his feet.

“A waste of quality drink, that is,” Kruger opined, leaning up against a post and twiddling his fingers.

“So . . .spphrt! . . sorry, folks . . . spppt . . .hhheeww . . . just a minor malfunction of equilibrioception due to the shortness of my legs in relation to . . . .spsptth! . . . the over acuity of my vestibular system,” Taft explained as he cleared his esophagus.

“Or something,” Lydia said, her arms crossed, though not unkindly.

As they waited for Taft to recollect himself and finish blowing his nose, Crispin felt an increasing sense of unease. He was totally out of his element, and all he wanted to do was go back to the club and take body shots off Melana. As he was envisioning that pleasant scenario, a gun shot rang out and suddenly everything changed.

Chronicles of Crispin 05

Looger leaned forward. “We know that in the 3rd – 4th grades, you frequented the nurses’ office due to complaints of headaches. We know that an MRI scan performed on you at the age of 6 revealed a slightly unusual development in the R-complex area of your brain. Which subsequent research did nothing to elucidate.”

Crispin started. He’d almost forgotten about those episodes in his childhood. Nothing of substance had come of them, and his headaches had subsided, and as far as he knew, he was a normal, average human being. He took a large couple of swallows from his beverage.

“We know that you are capable of more. That you could be something much greater, in service to powers much more sweeping than Phineus & Mortcum Waste Management Co.”

“And what powers would those be?” Crispin inquired shrewdly.

“Ahha! Jumps right to the point, doesn’t he?” The merry band of misfits chuckled. “Suffice to say that these are powers that are responsible for the events that determine the course of human history, insofar as it can be guided.”

“But wait a sec. I’m not exactly a very capable worker. I’ve never excelled in anything except track, lacrosse, and drinking.”

“And dancing, neh?” Lydia winked, her thigh seeming to massage his, the parting of her upper and lower femoris displayed succulently with the crossing of her legs.

“Er, I guess,” Crispin said, trying to keep the blood from rushing to currently non-essential parts of his body. “Nothing useful, basically. And what is this R-complex thing you mentioned?”

Looger, obviously accustomed to pontification, sat back and gestured with his hairy hands over his paunch as he spoke, “The brain stem and cerebellum are the R-complex, the reptilian brain. This is the evolutionary basis from which our brains have evolved. You with me? It controls subconscious aspects of your body, like your breath and body temperature. There are certain people, generally of a mystical persuasion, who believe that we can consciously learn to regulate and manipulate this most basic aspect of our brain in order to increase longevity, physical health, and strength. Through meditation and other such disciplines.”

Crispin wasn’t quite sure that he understood how any of this related to him. Or mattered. He concentrated on Lydia’s presence next to his and sipped his drink. Sensing that he was losing his attention, Kruger spoke:

“I have a brain development similar to yours, Crispin. Which is not to say that the capabilities I have gained are comparable necessarily to those that you will develop,” Crispin duly noted the use of the future tense, “But essentially, I have been able to hone the physical structure of my body and increase my strength, endurance, and agility. This makes me a highly useful instrument in my work to those powers that be.”

Lydia suddenly stood up and stretched like a cat, her nose ring flashing in the iridescent strobe lighting, breaking the spell that Crispin had been under. He looked about him wildly, drunk.

“But enough talk,” she said, placing her hands on her hips. “Come on, and we’ll show you our boat.”

Chronicles of Crispin 04

Crispin shifted uncomfortably upon his haunches. This was a strange group, for sure. He glanced back over at his work comrades, noting that they were quickly proceeding into that stage of drunkenness wherein the stuff of legend occurs. Marissa was trying to obtain a shot from out of Thomas’ buttocks, her hands hooked around his thighs and her nose buried deep. Jesse was dry humping Lauren in the corner like a dog in heat, while Mike and Cain, water cooler buddies, looked on approvingly as they removed their shirts. Ah well, he was enjoying his strange cocktail, and he had to admit, there was something compelling about these outcasts who welcomed him so readily into their entourage.

They sat together in collective silence for a moment, sipping their drinks and soaking in the hedonistic ambiance of Club Zephyr. Crispin was, by this point, a bit tipsy, so he may perhaps be forgiven for failing to notice when Lydia slipped her hand into his pocket and withdrew his wallet. She handed it off to Kruger, who summarily withdrew the driver’s license and handed it back to her. Lydia pressed herself against Crispin a little harder, giving him some boob this time, and simultaneously slipped his wallet back into his pocket.The only thing that Crispin was aware of was thigh and boob. Kruger excused himself and tipped his hat to Crispin, who nodded back.

Looger leaned forward, his eyes a-gleam, his breath scented with shellfish. “Tell me, m’boy. Where did you learn them moves on the dance floor?”

Crispin flushed a bit. “Aw, you know. Just feel it in the hips. I used to dance to Michael Jackson in my underwear when I was a boy.” He wasn’t quite sure why he volunteered this information. But Looger nodded, seeming to approve of the dancing to Michael Jackson in skivvies as a perfectly viable method of learning.

“You’ve got the moves of a rattlesnake. You’ve got POTENTIAL, lad.” Kruger returned and handed a print-out to Looger, who consulted it, squinting, in the limited club lighting. Crispin took another couple of pulls from his Mordant Thief and drained the glass, giddy with Lydia’s silent and subtle attentions and Looger’s flattery. Crispin turned to Taft, who was happily drumming the beat of the music on his knees and watching the debauchery on the dance floor with interest, and offered to buy the next round. With a horse whistle, Taft called over the pony tailed waitress in black Converse and ordered them a new tray.

Looger examined Crispin piercingly over his glasses, his beard bedraggled in a somewhat majestic manner, now that Crispin looked more closely. “Don’t you think your talents are being wasted sitting behind a front desk all day?”

“Well, it’s a job,” Crispin began earnestly, “And the people I work with are fun. I mean, do I wish I was doing something more fulfilling? Of course I do. But isn’t that just the way adult life is?” Crispin looked around at the group, all of whom were gazing back at him intently.

“Wait a second. How did you know. . .?” By way of answer, Kruger flipped Crispin’s driver’s license onto the table like a card. As Crispin processed these events, the waitress distributed the drinks about the table and turned her sweet headlights on him. He automatically went for his wallet, then more urgently, realizing that his card may have gone wherever the ID had. But it was there, as was his cash, which he handed off to the waitress, who looked around at the table quizzically as she left.

“Sorry bub, just a routine background check. In this industry we’ve got to watch our backs,” Kruger said.

Lydia purred into his ear, “We just wanted to make sure that we could trust you. We LIKE you. If we are going to continue in this relationship, then we need to learn more about each other.”

Crispin’s head was spinning. He took a few pulls of his freshly delivered drink to ground himself. He took his ID and put it back into his wallet. He looked around at the group, all of whom were watching him. He smiled and raised his glass. “To new friends and new adventures!”

“Bravo, kid! Bravo!” Taft bubbled. Lydia squeezed his knee. Looger nodded approvingly. Kruger tipped his hat. They all raised their cups and drank.

“So what else do you know about me, then?” Crispin inquired.

Stay tuned, don’t touch that dial, folks. Crispin will return tomorrow!

Chronicles of Crispin 03

“Yes, men of the sea we are! And one woman! But before we get into the specifics of our enterprise, I would be happy to forward you a beverage in an attempt to account for the tragically spilt beer (though the fault was all Lydia’s), which did, at the very least, have the unforeseen but perhaps divinely intended outcome of introducing you to us!” Taft enumerated cheerily, his round face uplifted to shout over the techno music.

“I’m not quite sure what you said,” Crispin shouted back honestly, “But I sense your good intent, and I’ll drink whatever’s handed to me. And I will forgive whomever was responsible forthwith.”

With this objective determined, a round of drinks were arranged by Taft through a comely waitress in black Converse and black socks. As they awaited their libations, Crispin was invited to join the odd group  in being seated. He spotted Menala back at the bar, his pink boa draped winningly across her back, but he then noted that she was engaged in exchanging body shots with Morrison. Morrison was driving his oblong face in between Menala’s substantial breasts in the effort to obtain a buried shot. So as Lydia patted the seat next to her invitingly, he plopped himself down. The waitress appeared with a tray of ruddy, strangely aromatic cocktails that made Crispin envision the Spanish Mediterranean coast.

“To your health, Sir Crispin!” Looger called, and they drank.

“What in God’s name is this unholy yet strangely compelling concoction?” spluttered Crispin.

“It is known,” volunteered Kruger, “as the Mordant Thief. It consists of tequila, dry port, and a dash of olive juice brine. I was lucky enough to discover it one hot, humid, and airless night in a nameless hotel off the Gulf of Mexico. I had been attempting to drown my sorrows in drink after a particularly demanding mission that took the life of my favorite Mexican mistress and a substantial amount of money. Not to mention unsettling the nation almost to the point of civil war. ” Heads were shaken all around in quiet remembrance by the group.

“Ay, THAT was a fuckin’ mission, alright,” Looger stated.

By way of attempting to include Crispin, Lydia explained, “Not all of our missions end successfully. We have had some close calls.” She leaned over slightly so that her ample thigh lay against his. Crispin nodded thoughtfully and took another pull of his Mordant Thief.

“So.” Crispin tried to think of a way to steer this conversation into his understanding. “Um. So you guys have a boat?”

The group of misfits looked at each other and smirked. “Yes, it is a BOAT, that’s for sure. A boat such as you have never seen!”

Train your web browser to this here blog tomorrow for a fresh episode in

The Chronicles of Crispin!

Chronicles of Crispin 02

Once out ‘pon yon dance floor, Crispin executed a few deft hip waggling maneuvers that combined salsa sensuality with hip-hop swagger. Or so he liked to think, in any case. Menala clapped her hands in delight and pressed her ass against him in approval. It would most likely take another 2-3 shots of tequila before tongues could get involved.

But right about then, a wrench got thrown thence into the proceedings. From somewhere just out of peripheral vision, a drink was heaved onto our aforementioned dancers. Beer, to be exact. Menala yelped, and Crispin exclaimed, “What-the-fuck!” He swiveled about to locate the source of untimely beer upheaval, his arm hair already getting sticky. Menala dashed off to the ladies’ room, her shapely calves flashing in the gyrating club lights.

A blonde girl with pink highlights came up to Crispin and gripped his wrist. “I am SO sorry! I just totally spilled my beer ALL over you! Oh shit!” Crispin eyed her petulantly, beer dripping down his ribs. The girl appraised him. “Wow! I dig your mascara! My name is Lydia. I’ll make it up to you, I promise,” she said mysteriously, still holding him by his wrist. “C’mon and meet my friends.” Though Crispin was quite certain that Lydia was not referring to sexual favors when she said that she would make it up to him, the primitive part of his brain allowed him to be led by the hand by this strange, short but shapely blonde. He could tell that she was completely obnoxious, and he was still pissed about the beer and the lost mating ritual time with Menala, but there was something just off enough about her to make him interested. Maybe it was the nose ring.

Lydia brought him up to a lounging group of misfits, all of them guys. They looked at him dispassionately as Lydia introduced them, shouting over the 4/4 beat of the music. “This is Looger,” Lydia said, waving at the first gentleman, who was sprawled out on a cushion like he was going to get a lap dance. Looger was a large man with a prominent belly and a disheveled beard, but despite these slovenly indications, dressed immaculately. He nodded amiably enough at Crispin. “He’s the brains of the operation,” Lydia shouted affectionately. “And this is Kruger,” referring to a tall thin man standing against the pillar with a rakishly tilted cap. “He’s the hands.” Kruger obligingly shook hands forthwith, demonstrating his long, bony, but strong fingers. “This next gent is the one mainly responsible for you being half-covered in beer, though I plead guilty, in part, as well,” she said, pointing out a small man who was bubbling over in excitement and was the only one who came up to Crispin. “So pleased to meet you, SIR! And so sorry about the spillage, absolutely unncessary, if only Lydia here had just allowed me to . . . ” Lydia stomped on his foot, stopping him short. “I’m not sure why we keep this guy around, to be honest,” she said playfully, “This is Taft.”

“I’m Crispin,” Crispin said to all, in his typically phlegmatic manner. He stood there awkwardly for a moment, uncertain whether he should still be angry about the beer or not. “Um, so, what do you guys DO, anyway?”

“We’re sailors!” Lydia enjoined. “Sailors of the high seas, if you please. We were just discussing our next route and mission, when Taft, as is his wont, got a tad carried away.”

Join us on the morrow for the further adventures of Crispin! . . .

Chronicles of Crispin 01

Crispin donned his feather boa, slid another silver ring on his finger, and appraised his mascara’d face from many different angles one more time before stepping out of his highrise apartment and into the elevator. He was destined this evening for a meetup at Jesse’s place and thence onward to Club Zephyr, which required a certain flamboyance in get-up just to get in. This was the first time he would be going out with some of the ladies from work, and he was eager to show them that he had a wild side that they would not have guessed from the unassuming, placid demeanor he maintained at the front desk. He knew that he had a winning smile, which was enough to pique the immediate interest of a stray lass, but he had always struggled in the conversation department. He required props and activities to cover this weakness when he went out. Thus, he was also a tad nervous, because meeting the girls over at Jesse’s first could be kind of weird, before the alcohol got into everyones system, sans deafening bass and beats. He was arriving at the tail end of fashionably late in an attempt to curtail that awkward face time.

He was pleased when he strutted into Jesse’s, his heart thumping and his wallet loop jangling, and everyone called out and whooped in delight at his appearance. It was simply because they were all bored and thirsty for spectacle, of course, but he thought that he also sensed some burgeoning sexuality in the flashing eyes and appreciative catcalls of a few of the girls. He high-fived Morrison and grabbed a beer nonchalantly from the fridge. All he had to do was sit back and wait for the encroaching darkness of the club, where the alcohol and jubilation of freedom from normalcy would kick in. He could tell that there would be some shots involved, some freaking, some sandwiching going on tonight.

After the beers were summarily polished off, it was time to head out. Marissa was already getting loud and stumbling a little on the 5 block walk. Crispin made sure to stay at the head of the group, knowing that his ass looked pretty good in his red jeans. He could sense a good vibe emanating from Menala, a quiet girl with funky earrings and great calves. So when they got in the club, he made sure to sidle up to her at the bar. But even with the coating of liquor on his tongue, Crispin found it difficult to establish anything substantive via verbal engagement. He needed to ply her with his body language. “C’mon, let’s dance,” he told her, wrapping the boa around her neck. She smiled reluctantly but followed him, her straightened hair tied back around her ears.

Stay tuned for the further adventures of Crispin on the morrow. . .

Et Tu, Brute?

Brutus caved in to the unspoken demand in his soul for idleness. His brain told him, take a look at your schedule. You must do this. You must do that. But his soul called out to him for mercy, and he could not find it within him to do much beyond the simple boiling of tea. Perhaps, he thought, this is some form of depression. A lack of motivation, a juvenile internal form of rebellion against the adult demands of the external world. Just let it all go. Let it all slide by. What did it matter?

Brutus required a consistent stream of friends to force him out the door. Otherwise, he would forget who he was, and he couldn’t fathom how he could face the world without any deep set conviction. If someone were to challenge him out there, on the street, how could he muster the passion to reply?

Obviously, he had somehow managed to pull himself together enough to craft the illusion of some kind of put together adult life. He was a fairly successful manager at a bank located so close to his apartment that he could walk there in 20 minutes, and he did, every single morning stopping at the cafe on the corner for his chai. He went out with a loose affiliation of friends from business school and his workplace every weekend. Sometimes they would go out to a club and dance; usually, they took a booth at their favorite bar, Muskee’s, and drank one too many martinis while trying–largely unsuccessfully–to hit on women. He would wake up on Saturday mornings hung over, beset with an inexplicable feeling of guilt and impending doom, which he could only shed after going to the gym and eating breakfast at a diner, where he would sit drinking coffee and reading The Economist until he felt ready for the oncoming week again.

But this weekend had been different. Brutus excused himself from the Friday night outing, on the somewhat legitimate claim that he had extra work he needed to finish over the weekend. But he hadn’t touched the work. He had sat listlessly in his apartment, so idle that he couldn’t even bring himself to put on a CD to break the silence. He sat there in his boxers, drinking his tea and staring at the floor.

So he elected to give in to it. He allowed it to overtake him. He sat there in the darkened gloom of the impending evening without turning on the light. The extra work could plausibly be extended into the week; it didn’t have to be finished this weekend. This felt like a throwback to his undergraduate days, when he would skip class and waste the day playing video games or drinking beer, doing absolutely nothing in some kind of child-like defiance to the demands of the inhumane strictures of the civilized world. It could also have been called laziness, but it was more than that. Something inarticulate and hidden. Something so unlikely to find its way into expression that it fizzled out instead into impotent idleness.

Was this his natural proclivity, perhaps? To drift purposelessly in some limbo of spirit? And the illusion of his daily life was only some type of caving in to the pressure of normalcy? Too many questions. It was better simply to sit, thinking nothing.

Googly Two Shoes

Googly Two Shoes was a shrimp in the deep blue sea of Nordstruttom, a dire strait betwixt the continental shelfs of Jabar and Joongedoon. GTS swam in the slow dancing curl and uncurl motioning of shrimp in the darkness of that cold water, his unblinking beady eyes glistening with a light that was like that of the moon. Two Shoes listened for the sounds of currents carrying the fathoming moan of whales, gauging the season and horoscope through the twinkling chitter of starfish. As a shrimpling, founded from the shore of Kooler, Googly made his way through the depths by the trail of green plankton until his belly grew ready for shellfish and mud shrimp, and he ate his way down deeper into the darkness, away from the reggaeton and tourist encroach of Koolton Bay, until his eyes glued wide open with which to catch a glimmer of a crab leg or fish scale, glimmering in some otherworldly light that reflects off of something not the sun. Down and down he sank, eating daintily in the way of shrimp, growing more vessely and plump with meat as he went. As we all know, in those deep dark waters of Nordstruttom where there is no clear delineation between complete absence of color and a deep shade of blue, life can be competitive and fleeting, but at the very least, quiet and ominous with the weight of meaning.

We will remember Googly Two Shoes for his juiciness of body and cleft of taste. That he was netted so unjustly in mass industrial manner, torn asunder from his netherworld deploy, speaks poorly of the human species’ rampant, primal need for meats that it does not deserve to rend. But we will nevertheless enjoy this sauteed cashew nut surprise in his name.

Cosmic Waves

The wind blows soundlessly through the seeming void between objects in its relentless, unguided reflection of movement, its invisible transaction in the perpetual and progressive altering of states. At some point in the continuum, the soft brush of its passing moves through and beyond our globe, gently upsetting delicate and almost unquantifiable electromagnetic balances. Cows stomp their feet and low in the subtle agitation of their species, uncertain momentarily which way to face as they chew, huddling together in all manner of disarray, heads butting bony hindquarters, against the disruptive forces of the unknown beyond. The cities hum along in their rote activities, transport and commerce tireless in its industry. The dense thicket of humans, condensed into vertical and three dimensional enclaves, branching upward and out into the canopy of the atmosphere, senses little, if any, overt disturbance. Alcoholics set on stools in their accustomed midday dives perhaps sit up straight for a minute, looking about them blinking in consternation, uncertain of where the clairvoyance of cosmic disturbance lay. They order another drink, slumping back down into their slow girding for oblivion.

Near the intersection of 124th and Lenox Avenue, a girl on the cusp of adolescence stands against the wall on the sidewalk sobbing disconsolately into the palm of her hands. She bends at the knees, crouching over like the pain inside of her is almost too much to bear. Locals glance at her as they pass, uncertain whether to intrude or leave her to her personal and private turmoil. The heat and humidity of the day spurs them onward, however, everyone eager to escape the reflecting heat of the sidewalks and streets.

Lina is unaware, exactly, of what prompted this despair, so overwhelming that she could not stop it even out in the street in front of everybody. She had been walking home after hanging out in the park reading a random book she had picked out in the library. She had been attracted by its bright but melancholy cover; Love in the Time of Cholera. It was a bit confusing, but its descriptions were lovely, and she enjoyed its tragic romanticism. Sitting in the shade on a bench in the swamp-like heat of summer, she had felt transported physically into that unnamed tropical Caribbean city.

As Lina walks, she enjoys noticing details that normally don’t warrant a split second of attention, details that are oft taken for granted; cracks in the sidewalk that form like fissures from earthquakes; from what stress, from what shifting, breaking commotion did this particular crack arise? What moment in time gave to this panel of concrete its wrinkled, broken face? She traces the patterns of fire escapes with her eye, noting the juxtaposition of their diagonal descending with the horizontal steadfastness of rectangular windows. The cryptic splashes of graffiti, competing signs of territorial display, unintelligible except but to the underworld author and his nemesis. The constant urban battles of voices straining to be articulated out of invisibility, to stand out in the midst of the crowd, to be discovered, contested, to call and wait for a response out of the unknown.

She had been walking just like was her norm, reveling in the quiet details of her world, when she was stricken with the sense that all of what she could see was a farce, a mask of something completely alien and foreign to her understanding. For a moment, the veil was rent, and she gasped in terror at the vision of a universe of mute indifference to her personal, formative grasps at knowledge.

She was overwhelmed by a sense of utter, hopeless loss and despair. The tears came like a flood before she had even known what hit her, and she reeled, stumbling, over to the wall, barely conscious of the outside surface world any longer. All of the world, she felt, was suffering, was wave of pain after endless inarticulate pain, never to be overcome. She could only shudder in horrified acceptance, weeping in open defeat. Disconnected images flashed through her mind’s eye, seemingly connected only by the thread of her disassociating consciousness. Her mother, a tree, the local weather anchorman, a cruise ship, the planet earth from outer space, a dog she had seen yesterday, the postman, a brick wall, the texture of grapes, sliding, wet orbs of matter, a fungal infection of the skin. . .

Lina knew that nothing would ever be the same again. A breach in the everyday world had occurred. After a while, her sobs lessened in intensity, and just as quickly as it had come, her sorrow dissipated, leaving her hollow and tired. She blew her nose into a napkin and wiped around her eyes, looking shakily upwards into the deafening quiet of the sky. Birds twittered noisily in the harbor of a tree in an art deco apartment courtyard. She stepped back into the converging helical motions of the city.

A Sunset

Every day the sun sets, and the people walk down to the wharf to watch it, snapping pictures with their cameras and cellphones, their arms encircled about their loved ones, their dogs sniffing each others anuses. Sea birds float above the water, seemingly conforming to the dips and crests of waves with their bodies like silk stretches against the curves of a leg. Joggers pant gently past the scattered sets of sun watchers along the beach as professional photos are arranged of a freshly married bride and her groom standing on a rock against the deepening red-purple-orange of the sky. The colors blend crisply into each other, glistening across wispy sheer clouds draped along the horizon. A mysterious and large ship sits as a blackened speck alongside the sun as it drops into the sea. Everyone is watching, conscious at some level of the seconds that slip so long so fast as the sun glides downward into dusk. Waves swoosh into the shore, swishing against the rocks, a seagull calls, a woman in spandex pants stretches against a pole, and the sun inches towards a singular point of deafening light, fading then suddenly into green absence with an almost audible splash. The people slowly disperse, couples huddled together against the cold back to their cars, as the sunset fades into the subdued hues of evening.

Fragment

Jasper climbed the ivy-strewn wall to his third story window. It was wholly unnecessary, but more fun—and exercise to boot. Unlatching the window was somewhat of a delicate task whilst clinging to the window frame with a few fingers and toeing in on the sill while attempting to slide the latch up from within with a folded piece of cardboard that Jasper kept tucked into his wallet for this very express purpose. It took balance, focus, and patience. The window thus opened, he swiveled into his room and threw on a compilation of Bjork that he had made over the weekend. It had been a good day—he had studied two chapters of Arabic grammar after work while nursing a local micro-brew at his favorite bar, and he had also read a 1/3 of his Gabriel Garcia Marquez autobiography during lunch. At work itself, he had had a very meaningful conversation on metaphysical philosophy with Liz, the new secretary under Brommerman, and obtained her cell-phone number. He had also taken three full, swiftly executed dumps throughout the day. It had been a wonderful day. A home-cooked meal of fish and curry at his friend’s apartment for dinner, followed by a half-hour session of shisha smoking and conversation, with small glasses of port. Then a quick, quiet dusk lit bike ride home, and a climb up to his room.

Jasper brushed his teeth and watched himself in the mirror. He never saw the same person twice.

A Dialogue: the Wick and the Carpenter

(1996)

It feels as though it is going to rain. As follows from that fact, it is also cold and darkly silent. A man in a grey overcoat steps out of an unremarkable grey house in the suburbs and walks briskly down the driveway, led by a little black dog that is trembling with excitement. The man stops suddenly and looks up at the overcast sky as if sensing for the first time the imminence of rain (although he obviously knew beforehand, as shown by the overcoat). The dog pulls impatiently on the leash and whines. The pair walk down the street together hurriedly, most likely trying to avoid the rain before it hits.
“Red! How goes it? Looks like we got some rain coming our way. Did you hear about the collapsing of the bridge? The collapsing of the bridge? All the children have gone insane. The flowers are melting into pools of wax too hot to touch. The rain is just what we need, just what we need; hopefully it won’t get too rough for the repairman out there.”
A bird falls lazily out of the sky onto the sidewalk. Red jerks his dog away from the bird and waves to his neighbor and continues walking. The sky grows darker and the silence grows pregnant with expectancy. Red threads his way carefully around pools of hot wax.
A child runs out of some hole in the sky and approaches Red with a smirk on his face while stomping gaily upon wax puddles as if they were mud. “Hey, mister,” the child shouts before turning abruptly into a piece of string sticking upright in the wax. Red’s little black dog whines and begins to lick at the string. The strings shakes and quivers and then finally pops back into the child, who promptly begins giggling, “that tickles, cut it out!” The dog’s stumpy tail waggles furiously in delight. “Animals always break through appearances,” the child tells Red in a matter-of-fact tone, the kind of voice children use when they are trying to be grown-up. The little boy scampers up onto Red’s back and seats himself comfortably with his arms around Red’s forehead.
“Now it all makes sense!” the little boy says cheerily, looking about at the world from his new perspective, “Everything is clear and simple. If you people would just let us see it from here more often, we would be able to understand everything even better than you could.”
“You don’t seem so insane to me,” Red replies, continuing on his walk as before, down the sidewalk.
“Who said anything about insane? If anyone’s crazy here, it would be you. Like how about that blue vase?”
“What?! How did you . . . “
”And the smoke rising out its translucent belly? With the cubist yellow background? C’mon! Who else would think of such a thing!”
“I . . .”
“You . . . always distorting things! Always hiding behind abstractions and intangible walls! What are you trying to get at? All you do is confuse me!”
Red stops as the little black dog does his duty on a little square patch of withered grass. Red mumbles something incoherent to the winds and then his face lightens up suddenly. “It’s like when you look at an ocean at sunset or . . . or when you want to say something but you can’t, like when you wake up in the morning and remember your dream and you know that there was something there, something that you knew while you were there . . . do you know what I mean?”
“I guess so,” the child says grudingly.
“And your throat gets all thick and you clench your fist and you know, you just know that something is there, is behind everything . . . and your soul, you soul gives this little leap . . . ”
“Wait just a second! Your soul? Your soul!”
“I mean, your heart . . .”
“No, no no! Don’t try to slip out of this one! I heard you say quite clearly, ‘your soul.’ You said, ‘your soul!’ the child says triumphantly, “So, getting a bit spiritual now, are we?”
“Well, and so what! Alright then, your soul, damn it!” Red yells as he begins walking again, “Your soul feels as if it were trapped within that infinite nutshell and it feels as if it were happy and sad all at the same moment!”
“And there you go again! What kind of contradiction is this? Always distorting things!”
“What do you want, the devil take you?!” Red splutters, fuming, before he catches himself and shakes his head about–much to the chagrin of the child, who hangs onto Red’s ears. Red helps the little boy off of his shoulders and they walk hand-in-hand. Thus calmed, Red walks in silence a little further before speaking again. “Well, I know what you want. You want happily-forever-after’s and Disneyesque epilogues. You want the redemption, the infinitely merciful judgment, the darkness and the light. You tell me that we separate things with abstractions–well, you separate things with simplicity. And so what if I do think of a translucent blue vase with smoke rising from its belly, with a cubist yellow background? Stevens had his blue guitar; Bishop had her volcanoes; Dostoevsky had his Karamazovs. We are all struggling in our universes within glass walls, forming our own realities based upon distorted perceptions.”
The child stomps his foot and whines, “But it’s because of you that we are simple! If you would let us see instead of covering everything up, we would know everything! It is you, you who have made us this way!”
Red stops and turns to the child. “But you and I cannot see the truth. Sure, you can see the hazy glorifications of innocence and the puerile basement upon which we are all built. And I can see the moody debasement of experience and the jilted heights to which we aspire. But none of this adds up into one, meaningful, absolute equation. There are always the spaces between our selves and each other for which we can never quite account. We all see through our own lenses, and everything is the struggle to bend it all into as broad a reflection as possible.” He lifts the child and kisses him upon his forehead, and the child turns into a string again, then falls down into Red’s mouth.
The rain begins to fall. It is a cold rain, a sheet of polished metal slamming into the ground like nails. The man in the grey overcoat scurries quickly back the way he came, tugging the reluctant little black dog along. At the foot of his driveway, the man pauses and scans the distant, gloomy horizon. “Ah, the bridge–it’s been fixed,” he murmurs, lost in thought.
A bird flutters like a flame through the rain and slips across the smoky blue sky like a dribble of hot wax. A yellow glint of sunlight arranges itself somewhere beyond the clouds, preparing for the post-storm flash of unburdened calm. The warm scent of flowers begins to wend through the air.

Rich’s Run part I

Somewhere, at some specific point in time, continued in a certain movement of rhythm and counterpoint, the story must be begun. Really, it could be begun anywhere, and ended anywhere. When viewed from the outside, life seems quite full of wonder and magic. But when we’re down in it, suffering, struggling to get by day-to-day, we are largely unaware of how we could appear to any observing distant eye that might chronicle our alien lives, moving in our strange, tragic and beautiful bubbled existences.
Rich had been artfully picking his nose, immersed in his book of fantastical tales of flying dragons and arrant knights. Absentmindedly, he flicked the collected and rolled booger out into the room somewhere, to fall unseen into the dense foliage of carpet, and ground eventually into a kind of composted veneer of dust and grime. Perhaps there were invisible creatures living in that forest of synthetically spun filaments, creatures that were hunting through the basin of grid-like matting, and that spotted the meteoritic falling from the sky, heralding its coming with cheers and a wild dashing to plunder this fateful bestowal of organic matter for their Queen. They might lift chunks of golden, green-red snot to the heavens in gestures of gratitude before carrying them, one by one single-file, back to their warrens at the outskirts where the carpet meets the wall, only to offer them in supplication to their Queen. The Queen would sample a choice, juicy morsel with her microscopic tendrils, and would gleefully grab immediately for some more. Then, mouth filled with chewy tenderness, she would magnanimously bade her underlings to feast and dine at will . . .
Rich heard a noise out in the front hall that made him sit alert, mouth in mid-chew of a chocolate chip cookie stolen from the (supposedly) hidden stash in the top cabinet. He sat waiting to hear if another noise would occur again. One strange noise was not enough to warrant freaking-out status, but two noises definitely were. He waited for minutes. He was beginning to relax and chew again. But then there was another one, unmistakable, a creak in the wooden flooring in the entryway that always creaked when you stepped on it. Rich’s parents were gone: his father was at work, his mother out “running errands.” So Rich was on the alert, as he always was when left home alone, for any intruders, such as murderers, thieves, and little boy snatchers.
Holding his breath, he slipped out of his chair in one movement, knowing that to attempt to move too slow would only make the floor creak. In sock encased feet, he traversed out of open view from the entrance into the dining room, creeping down through the side hallway and into his bedroom. He was an expert at closing and locking his door silently, having perfected the skill when he stayed up late one summer and decided that he would lock his door every night after his parents had gone to sleep, as a protective measure against nighttime forces. Then he would unlock it again as soon as he awoke in the morning, using the same swift, silent movement. As in moving over creaky floors, it entailed a single continuous stream of motion to make it silent. Any hesitation or uncertainty made noise, Rich had learned through constant training.
He moved to his sliding-glass door and opened it slowly. It made noise, but with his door closed and the intruder still feasibly creeping up to the dining room, it would not be heard. He stepped out and slid it shut. Now he was in his domain, the backyard. There were all kinds of pathways and hidden places here that only Rich knew about. He utilized one of his “secret” passageways now, crawling through the shrubbery to where he could see into the dining room, where he had been seated only moments before, obliviously chewing a soft and moist cookie and reading about dragons. Through the sun reflected windows, Rich could barely make out a dark form moving slowly, seemingly directly towards the path which Rich had just taken. It passed by his cookie plate and book, and momentarily turned it’s head; suddenly, Rich could see clearly it’s face for the space of a moment. All he retained was the impression of pale white skin and large oval black eyes, monkey-like, otherworldly. The form then moved back into the darkness of the hallway and out of sight towards Rich’s bedroom. It frightened him incredibly. It was one thing to know for certain that there was somebody in the house; it was quite another thing to know that that somebody looked like an alien monkey, and seemed to be searching expressly for him.
Rich knew that there was little time. He got onto his feet and made a dash, continuing to bend low to keep beneath the line of shrubbery, until he got to the fence, where he already knew of a method of swinging onto an overhanging branch into the neighboring density of trees, such that he went over the fence and plopped over onto the other side in the dirt without being seen or making much noise. He had perfected this maneuver when he played at being a ninja with his pal Jimmy during his early elementary school years. It certainly came in handy to have such a streamlined escape route, Rich now realized. There was no way that the alien monkey would know of to follow him this way . . . unless the alien monkey could smell or see his tracks with some otherworldly sense. Rich felt a chill and increasing sense of panic. Now it was time to run.

The Eye in the Middle of the Storm

In seconds of self-awareness, Janet felt bliss in the middle of all of the noise. It was as if all this anxiety, madness, fear was designed just so as to enhance and demarcate clarity in the moments when it came, crystalline, dew-dropped, silent before the storm. There was no denying that even in her weakest, most insecure of times, Janet still knew that she was beyond all of it, beyond the stifling imposition of other’s jealousy or indifference, beyond her own vanity and ever-shifting self-image; she was somewhere already still, sitting neatly next to the stream, taking it all in, letting it all wash away of its own accord. Like a sieve, like a net of the heart, a purity that dirt could run through untouched. All that would be left of herself in the end were these treasured moments of beauty, when the light focused through her and everything she was and everything that she touched was perfect, in tune with everything that is. Then the light faded and she became human again, petty, insignificant. But the diamonds were there, hidden, nestled into the back of her heart, and she waited inside of herself quietly for the moment when the treasures would become illuminated into the outer world again.

Janet knew that these moments could be sustained, lengthened, and increased in frequency. But she also knew that she could not produce them herself out of thin air. She had to learn patience, and learn how to open herself to the light when it came showering down into her face. It seemed that the more that she relaxed and allowed herself to be herself, the more frequently that she felt ecstasy.

All of the noise, the fear, the anger, the gossip, the taking for granted, the holding onto things, the materialism, the fake spiritualism, the pseudo-intellectualism, the superficial, the one-dimensional, the apathy . . . all of it added up to barriers between herself and her own heart. She was already free, if only she listened correctly. The knowledge was there, flagrant, demure, unappealing direct and simple and baby-soft and harder than steel.

Janet slipped out of her seat on the bus and stood swaying calmly in the stuffy heat of a Phoenix afternoon. The double doors pulled apart, hissing, and she dropped down the steps with gravity like water, centered, moving with music and light. A man stared wonderingly after her, his hand looped in a supportive strap, craning to look through the graffiti strewn window. She had something that he could not see.

City Story III

Jara looked at herself in the mirror, contemplating her curves, acknowledging her beauty. She touched up her eyebrows and slipped into her heels and walked the 8 blocks to her job, brushing by distant strangers rushing to their destinations. The sounds of the city street, a world immutable in its reality, untouchable in its concreteness. Men who hadn’t bathed in months curled into darkened entryways, pigeons stepping blithely out of footsteps with their heads penduluming and mindless. The smell of grease and tar and eggs and somewhere too the ocean in the breeze, and the trees in their square enclosures, all mixed into something indefinable and filled with some kind of ache and loneliness and excitement. Anything could happen, but you kind of knew that it wouldn’t; and even if it did, somehow it would be just like something that had already happened before.

Jara opened the door, catching the sun streaking across its mirrored glaze, and stepped into the air-conditioned lobby, into another sense of manufactured space and scent, a world created to address the chaos outside, an answer to its immutability. Here in this corporate structure the world was exactly as it had created itself according to a law that subsumed and consumed humanity. Nothing mattered, nothing was of value except as it pertained to money, to money that grew endlessly. The people within reflected this demand and were judged accordingly. How expensive the shoe, how much the gym, how big the ego, how connected the family.

But sexuality was acknowledged, albeit grudgingly, to have a force and power which of course was linked also, somehow, to money. A women’s genetic traits as symbols of the fruits of money. All of this available only to the highest bidder. Jara knew how to use what she was God given to play to these moneyed mentalities. They thought that they could have anything they wanted. Let them think that. And then give them nothing.

She flirted, she made loud jokes, she went out drinking. She would let them buy her dinner. But this was where she stopped. She knew that her limited power could only be wielded through the subtlety of suggestion. To allow anyone to fulfill their fantasy of ownership would be to lose all of that power. She would become just another thing, another product, another backroom story. For now, she was unattainable, and thus desirable, and thus powerful.

But people always attempted, of course, to bring her down in other ways. Insinuations about her ethnic heritage, snide comments about her upbringing. But she knew that with these things, too, the greatest weapon was her indifference and mystery. She had made the mistake at first of telling stories about her childhood, before she learned the hard way that anything that she said that was true would be used against her. Now she kept her true self and history hidden from these people. She would talk about current events, the weather, fashion, arts, food. Anything but about herself.

Distant, cold, mysterious, well-attired and full-figured. They all wanted her. They all wanted to tear her down into a powerless, sexed, insecure mess. They wanted her to act like something that they could buy. Something they could use and throw away and forget about in their quest for something else they could never have.

Depressions in the Landscape

On the cusp of a vast depression in the earth, the water flows from slowly melting snow, gravity pulling it downward inevitably into a standing pool that will reflect the sky. Here birds and deer gather to drink, disturbing quietly the still pond. Here at one point in time sit some hikers, refreshing themselves from Nalgenes as they take a respite from 10 miles of rocks, mosquitoes, and uncertain unmaintained trails. The sun bakes the trees, rooted down below rock, suckling sustenance from reservoirs beyond the grasp of human immediacy. The clouds shift in thin rails across the blue, distant and cold in another atmosphere. A chickadee forlornly repeats its ancient refrain of hope, honed into a dirge of spring. The hikers speak of past lives in cities, jobs that stripped them bare of idealism. Office cubicles, running down alleyways and biking through intersections. Of women laid and never caught. Of families strewn on the rocks of Victorianism. Of drug exploration and growing up without expectation.

There is nothing that can compare to the silence of the sun beating off of a landscape as unhumanly manipulated as possible in this day and age. Other than the vast network of trails formed, and the overly rapacious chipmunks developed, and the condensement of trees from lack of fire. But to sit next to this collection of mountain water, and to drink, and discuss. There is nothing that can really be done except to eventually fall silent, and to observe. The hikers do just this, and a jet blows across the sky thousands of miles above, and a lizard scurries from rock to rock to find the declining naked sun, and ants are busy on the treelimbs above, transporting tidbits of food.

It really takes this distance from everything, sometimes, to fully almost realize just how intimately connected you are to everything. Like you have to step away, step far up on a mountain, step far down into some deep abyss, in order to detach yourself from what you normally conceive as yourself, to gather fully the larger context. To look beyond the chains that bind you to your circumstances to realize that the circumstances are only bound by what you can perceive. And that perception can only expand with distance. And retaining this afterimage as you descend back into civilization, the hikers take off their backpacks and throw them into the bed of the truck, and they start it up and disappear down the windy bumpy road into the messy, noisy interstitial madness of humanity. They meet up at a bar later that week and find that they are silent, unable to word their sudden difference, silent mourners nursing single beers in the half light of dusk on the patio, watching the sun setting behind a distant mountain range unseen.

The water falls without purpose, without creed. The mountains are raised by turbulent unseen depths. The stars shine out of death. Humanity is guided by what cannot be fathomed. By what cannot be mapped. By hearts as distant and beautiful as ice capped mountains melting into wildflowered meadows in the spring.

Zanorth II

This month’s flash writing for the astronaut collective, theme of “bug”:

Zanorth the cockroach scuttled across the soundboard, chewing on remnants of asiago habanero pizza that had befallen there at some point during the many hours long sessions of takes, retakes, and re-re-takes. Finally, the engineer, Burt, packed up his things, stubbed out his 3rd blunt of the evening, and went off into the night to some industry party in a trendy bar the size of an armpit to drink too many adios motherfuckers and shake his thing on the dancefloor until he got kicked out for grinding up on the clubowner’s wife and knocking over a pitcher full of mojito. Whereupon Burt then made his way to an apartment party at his buddy Fletcher’s, wherein he snorted a coupla lines of coke and then—the final highlight of the night—made out extensively with an aspiring bit part actresses’ chin because they were both too sauced to know the difference. The saliva and knobbiness of the area combined still made it seem like the night had been alright, when he awoke the next mid-day curled around a sofa with a shirt smelling from vomit that did not come from him, unless he somehow drank a quart of tequila without knowing it.

Zanorth felt the habanero was a bit overstated, but otherwise interesting. He sat and waggled his antennae at his reflection in the window lit by pulsating lights from hibernating I-Macs. The night belonged to him and his breed, spawned in the eternal darkness of insulation between walls scattered with conduit and droppings from mice long since exterminated with shock traps. His was a species that was somehow beyond time, straddled across the boundaries of pre-history and a nuclear future. Zanorth felt no need to evolve. He was quite content with his penthouse suite on the 3rd floor of a reconverted motel in the heart of Greenwich Village. Crumbs were aplentiful and gourmet. He often felt that the key to life (which in his case, he was well aware, was most likely limited to one year) was simply being content with what was immediate and given. Zanorth knew that he had it better than most. He had word from a fruitfly that once flew in through the open window from the garbage heap that there were cockroaches in the world who were reduced to scavenging for Vegemite in the armchairs of an abandoned apartment of some ex-pat Kiwis. Zanorth couldn’t imagine what that would be like. At the most, here in this paradise of frequent daily snacks and delivery pizza, Thai, Indian, and Chinese, Zanorth once had to go a whole weekend without a crumb. He called that the drought of week 37.

Burt knew, in some subconscious primitive part of his brain, that he dropped crumbs from his hastily snacked upon sustenance throughout the day. He also perhaps had observed, without putting two and two together, that the crumbs no longer were there the next day. Burt also knew that there was no cleaning lady hired to mop and wax the floors and disinfect the tables. But if he had ever thought about it at all, maybe he just thought that crumbs went to crumb purgatory, where all fallen crumbs belonged. Or they disappeared via magic, via some transmutation or karmic reincarnation into something new. Perhaps they became integrated into the wooden flooring.

No, the crumbs—as we canny observers know—went directly to Zanorth’s belly. But perhaps that is as it is meant to be. The hardshelled creatures of the night suckling upon what we are unaware of, feeding from the waste of our ignorance.

Flash Writing for the Astronaut Collective

The Astronaut Collective is a monthly occasion when a theme is presented and anyone who wants to contribute has an hour in which to come up with a piece of work reflecting their spontaneous output of said theme. This is the piece I wrote for the latest A.C. expedition, with the theme of impulse (also found here):

On a whim, Loopy turned off onto a sidestreet he had never ventured down before called Juniper on his walk home from work. It led him to a little Mexican food joint, where they served burritos from a sliding glass window in a faded blue building the size of a trailer home. It was called Super Burrito. It was meant to be. Loopy could smell the refried beans before he could hear the steady fuzzy polka beat of ranchero blaring over the Super Burrito radio.

He ordered the standard Super Burrito, sour cream, cheese, rice, beans, carne asada, lettuce, tomato, salsa. He dabbled hot sauce into the gaping mouth of his gargantuan burrito between every bite, and had the thing demolished within 20 chomps. It was pretty good. The last 1/3 of the burrito consisted largely of grease, but he just couldn’t stop wolfing it down even though he was stuffed. He belched softly into his mouth and then looked around as if newly awakened, noticing a pretty Mexican girl sitting at one of the tables across the fake green turf talking on her cell-phone. He caught her eyes, and knew prospects were good when she looked away and fiddled with her hair and then looked straight back at him while chatting swiftly away in Spanish. Loopy pulled a paper napkin from its tabletop container and carefully wiped the remainder of beef and Cholula from the corners of his mouth. He sauntered up to her and waited for her to put down her cell-phone. She talked for a minute or two longer, watching him, never taking her eyes off of him until she said “Adios” to her friend and flipped it shut.

“Hi,” he said, suddenly laughing at the silliness of the whole thing, unable to find anywhere to begin. Luckily, this loss of poise and purpose broke the ice, and she laughed too. Everything was understood, without speaking. They were young, full of life, and both had eaten phatty burritos within minutes of one another. Suddenly conversation was easy. Loopy sat down at the table and they talked for what seemed like minutes but turned into a half an hour, and the Super Burrito was closing. The Cholulas were collected from tabletops, napkin containers rounded up, the window slid shut. And then Loopy was suddenly unsure, as always, of when and how it should end. Should she be invited out now, or was that too soon? Should he simply settle for an e-mail, or a number, and stroll on back down the way he had come by such happenstance? He sat in silence uncomfortably for a minute, and she relished this, allowing him to wallow just a little bit longer, seeing how true he was, how unguarded his inner workings. He would be more than just a night of drinks. She took his hand and wrote down her number on it and kissed him on the cheek.

He walked back down Juniper stepping sideways every now and then to ease out a Super Burrito fart, excited about his place in the universe, amazed at how some kind of force of god had led him so impulsively to love, to his destiny contained so mundanely in a Mexican burrito stand. And now he must wait, deliciously, until the right moment will come again to proceed to the next unknown pathway to the heart.

The Night Horn

A horn blows from atop a mountain through the valley, sonorously rebounding across the snowy ridges, and a boy awakens in the night to find himself not at all sleepy, although he had been utterly exhausted when he went to bed. He climbs out of the sheets and fits himself into warm clothes and sits for a while in the darkness, listening to the horn blowing intermittently, a sustained deep note, perhaps only of some hippie stoned at a ski resort, working the night snowmaking shift. Whatever the intent of the blower, it is beautiful and mystical all the same, this long horn blown across the slumbering mountain town like a pagan call to arms, or an islam call to prayer. As the echoes trail off into ridges beyond, finally into silence, the space is blended back into the stream sounds of cars passing on the highway. The boy stretches out on the living room carpet like a cat and feels how he is only a temporary inhabitant of his own body. How he is in some sense akin to the breaths that dilate and distend his lungs, to the sounds of the lonely horn across the mountains and the silence that it leaves–an emptying and filling that are both equally hollow, equally meaningful, equally dependent on each other for continuance.

He had walked past his grandfather 2 weeks ago in an open casket, and saw how empty his body was, how withered and frail and blue. But just the day before he collapsed in the living room, grandpa had been telling sea stories and waving his pipe through the air like a wand, filled with life and insight, laughter and kinetic silence. There is now that space of energy missing in the house, the space that he didn’t even know was there until it was gone. The boy misses his grandfather incredibly, and feels strongly the emptiness in his heart. An emptiness that parallels his own aliveness, that runs concurrent with how aware and awake he feels at this very moment in the middle of the night. His grandfather has left behind his body like a breath leaves through a mouth. The boy breathes in and feels how his life is somehow inseparable with death, with his own death, with his grandfather’s death. How every movement, breath, and thought is tied equally to its opposite in some unknown world without forms. How every object has a shadow in the sun. How every event has a cause, and an effect. How everything in the universe, it seems, is one giant organism, intertwined, tangled, and slouching towards its omega point.

The boy listens to the passing of the cars for a while longer, thinking nothing. Then he says goodnight to his grandfather and crawls back into bed and sleeps deeply, until the smell of maple syrup will awaken him to the day.

Germaine Installment III

Rawlins, his hair pomaded and glistening in the sun, stepped out of his car. The three yardsale ladies, apparently already familiar with him, hooted and called out simultaneously, like birds. He waved and pulled out a tray of cookies from his passenger seat. Germaine scrambled up fairly quickly, given his age, and hobbled over to Rawlins and sniffed eagerly at his pant cuffs, then began licking at his doc martins.
“Ho, old boy,” Rawlins said to Germaine, “Lookin’ good. Have a cookie.” Germaine gobbled it up in mid air.
“Goddamit, Rawlins,” Johnson shouted, “He can’t have that kind of thing, it’s going to kill him!”
“Hell no, Johnson! This is some good shit right here. He’ll live ten years longer!” Rawlins came up and slapped Johnson on the back. Johnson helped himself to two cookies and handed Rawlins the thermos.
“Weeeoooh! Holy shit! That’s some good lemonade.”
“I made it this very morning!” the lady with the red mustache said proudly.
“Vodka with love from Russia,” Johnson stated, taking back his thermos and washing down the two gooey cookies with lemonade-vodka.
“How’s it hangin’, Doris?” Rawlins asked the mustachioed lady.
“Oh, you know. Getting rid of some nice stuff we just didn’t have the room for anymore,” she answered, playing with her curls, “Do you like these bowls? Perfect for mixing.”
Rawlins and the broad chatted about baking as the cookies were distributed throughout the populace at the yardsale. The lady with the paisley kerchief ate 5 in a row. Germaine waddled into a shady spot underneath a table and laid out on his side, panting contentedly.
Johnson puttered through the various items displayed, always interested in the rare treasure that might lurk in the shadowy recesses of a scattered box of junk. At the very least, a white elephant gift was always one thing that you could assuredly come away from a yardsale with.
A half-hour later, his hands covered in dust, he found what he thought to be the doozy. It was an object completely devoid of any apparent function–a miniature boar, replete with tusks that might have been real ivory. It had tufts of mangy hair that may or may not have come from an actual boar. It stood haphazardly on legs uneven from years of storage in some packed away box. It was ugly, and Johnson couldn’t imagine why anybody would possess, or care to possess, such a thing. Which made it all the more desirable for him to possess.
“Where has this boar come from?” he asked the third yardsale lady, who sat poised on an antique stool like a hawk, silent and observant.
“That would be from India,” she responded, “It’s very nice, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Yes, quite nice.” He held the boar up to the light appraisingly. He was starting to feel a little funny. The lady in the paisley kerchief began, inexplicably, to make owl noises. The three ladies laughed together, again for no apparent reason–they seemed to be interconnected by some conspiratorial craziness. Rawlins was conversing animatedly with the red mustachioed lady about how to properly baste a game hen.
“How much for this here small boar?” Johnson asked the hawk lady on the stool.
“That’s 10 dollars.”
Johnson looked hard at lady. 10 bones? She gazed beadily back at him without emotion. She couldn’t possibly be serious. She must have an amazing sense of humor, Johnson thought. Amazingly dry, restrained sense of humor that none of the outer world, save perhaps her other 2 psychotic cronies, could possibly visualize nor understand. 10 dollars for a functionless, hideous replica of a wild boar! Johnson appraised the boar some more, looking for problems he could point out to knock the price down. The legs were uneven, yes, but not broken. The craftsmanship indeed was uncanny. The boar seemed quite vividly lifelike the more one stared at it, almost such that it seemed to be ready to gallop off into the suburban brush. Perhaps to mate with some unsuspecting housepet, creating a street herd of wild boar-cats, roaming the nightworld expanses of backyards and tar to forage for fallen fruits, nuts, and stray rats. He was definitely feeling a bit funny.
“I’ll give you five dollars for this boar,” he said suddenly to the lady, who had been watching him silently from her stool. She shook her head calmly.
“It’s a nice boar, I admit, but what the hell kind of use does it have?” he asked her peevishly, pissed off now.
“That’s an avatar of Lord Vishnu,” she said, as if that explained anything.
Mystified, he stood holding the boar, for some reason unable to let it go. Germaine heaved himself up and sniffed interestedly at the boar, his neck hairs rising. He barked.
If you’ve ever seen a real german shepherd get really worked up, it can be a rather frightening experience, especially if you have normally viewed said german shepherd as a quiet, friendly, boring dog. The german shepherd suddenly, instantaneously converts to a wild bear-like creature, all fangs and firey eyes, hackles risen like a wolf looking for the kill. Germaine had shed all of his age and was now barking frenziedly at the small stuffed boar.
“Aw, crap, Germaine! GERMAINE!” Johnson swatted at Germaine to no avail. Some inner ancient wild dog had been activated in Germaine, and there was no talking domestic sense to him at the moment. Not knowing how else to stop him, Johnson waved the boar in front of Germaine’s face, and then tossed it across the street. Germaine ran after it, ears swiveled forward and taut, and picked it up and swung it about in his jaws rapidly, like it was a bunny. A testament, again, to its workmanship, the boar had not yet ripped apart. Johnson wordlessly handed the lady on the stool a ten dollar bill. It had been worth it, almost, simply to see Germaine acting gloriously like a 100 percent purebred german shepherd.
Rawlins came up next to Johnson and slapped him on the back. “How you liking those cookies, eh, motherfucker? Give me some of that lemonade shit.” Johnson then had a moment of realization, as Rawlins took a herculean swig from the thermos, draining it of all liquid and dribbling a third of it down his chin and onto his t-shirt. The cookies!
“What was in those cookies, again, Rawlins?”
Rawlins wiped his mouth and belched. “Pumpkin, peanut butter. A dollop of special butter.”
“Special butter? Holy shit.” As it dawned on him what this meant, he could hear the three ladies tittering like schoolgirls behind him.

Germaine Installment II

Like all suburbs, Clayola had streets so wide you could fit three humvees side by side. Cookie cutter houses developed from some nobody’s drawing board vision of what comfort would look like if it could be marketed, a commissioned vision obtained and computerized in some high rise building in a city on the other side of the nation. Here they were, green lawns symbolic of the American Dream, stucco pink brown houses with 2 inch wide blind slats and bedrooms bigger than a trailer home. Johnson pedaled slowly down the gently serpentine blocks, alternating between the sidewalk and the radiant expanse of tar. He stopped to take a pull from his thermos, sweating faintly from his roughly 3 1/2 block journey. All part of the Woodsdale gated community. He wheeled his bike up to the yardsale at 1132 Dandelion Drive. A trio of women who may have been in their late 30s but looked like they were in their 50s manned the scattered goods. There were boxes of knicknacks, swaths of dusty fabric, well-broken in shoes from boys long dispersed from the fold, icecube trays that formed icecubes into clovers, lamps that seemingly existed in a universe apart from any given purpose of lighting, hardback books that had never been reprinted, and all sorts of other things that were pleasurable to browse amongst, simply for that moment of juxtaposition between the worn, dusty object and its possible function in your own life, the moment of wonder, when it almost seems that you might actually find a place for this thing on your bookshelf or in your closet or your kitchen–until you snap quickly back to the simple reality that this thing you are holding is sadly mere junk, in fact the purest definition of the word. Junk. But you continue browsing, relentlessly, even through the bins that are quite apparently only fragments of things no longer existing, in the hope that out of the jungle of junk there will be that one item that will give you greater comfort, greater mobility, greater prowess in the kitchen, but that you just could never suck it up to buy new.
But junk, too–it must be said–has its place in our lives; those purposeless objects that we put into storage or that sit unused in the farthest reaches of our rooms. They are symbols of memories and aspects of ourselves that we just cannot let go, even if no longer relevant–like totem items, imbuing our everyday outer world with secret meaning. Someday, perhaps, you think, these objects might serve a function, even though they never have. Or at the very least, you can pass these magic objects onto other people, such as your children or grandchildren, or–if in need of a few bucks to feel that your years of ownership were worth anything–to some stranger lured in by the prospect of cheap usable wares at a yardsale.
Johnson lived down the street from these ladies, but had never seen them before. One of them, head topped with a paisley silk kerchief, offered free lemonade, made from lemons which grew in their own backyard. The lemons were lumpy and sometimes grew in jointed doubles–or once, even triples–as if they had been subjected to nuclear radiation. The lemonade, as Rawlins had stated, was certainly of the mouth puckering variety, and Johnson found that it mixed quite well with the vodka in his thermos.
Germaine came waddling down the street, looking haggard from the journey, his tongue hanging desperately out the side of his snoot like a piece of gum trailing off a shoe.
“GERMAINE!,” Johnson piped, his face feeling doubly warm from the dual forces of the sun and the vodka-lemonade, “What in the hell has gotten into you?” The dog sniffed amiably at a box of old dress shoes and then curled himself into a spot of shade behind a broken grandfather clock.
“Excuse me, but is this your dog?” one of the yard-sale ladies, with a distinct red mustache, asked, pointing down at the german shepherd.
“That’s a tricky question, madam,” Johnson responded, sipping gently at his thermos,”because when one lives with such a dog, as I do, then the issue of ownership becomes somewhat complicated. As in, when I am a slave to his need every afternoon for walks, or to his constant hunger for milkbones, for example, the question is then raised: does he own me, or do I own him?”
“Well, he can’t be sitting here, he’ll drive away customers.”
“Madam, I assure you that young children will be lured into your yardsale in ever increasing numbers by his large furry ears. He poses no immediate threat to your commerce.”
A child then came running from across the street and began to pet the dog avidly.
“He smells like mildew,” the lady with the red mustache said, unrelenting.
“He has no fleas and has been rendered infertile by surgical procedure and he has been given all shots required by law. I have his papers here if you care to see them. Observe the nobility of his snout. 100% pure bred.”
Germaine rolled onto his back to be pet, and his pink penis could be seen flashing wetly in the sun. The child ran away cursing. Johnson quickly diverted attention by asking the price for a handsome set of polished nutcrackers. The rouse turned out to be unnecessary, for just then Rawlins pulled up in his Jetta.

Germaine Installment I

Germaine was a German shepherd, your garden variety of germane purebred–bad hips, arthritis, ears overlarge and rear end rat-like. His master was a Lipton tea drinker who would lay out for hours in the sun, but would wear such a large floppy hat and slather on the 45 SPF sunscreen so much that he was in fact as pale as an albino. He liked the feeling of being adventurous, without any of the deleterious effects. “Germaine,” he said, knee deep in a mai tai and Hindu scripture, “GERMAINE!” The german shepherd whined and looked at his pale master, his ears swiveled and tentative in the summer air, then groaned and raised his mangy body painfully and waddled over. Johnson liked to exercise his authority over the dog, simply to maintain order and give the semblance of purpose to his hours in (out) the sun. Germaine licked at Johnson’s hand, inspected the mai tai, farted breezily, then plopped himself down again, having determined that the call was only an exercise.
The phone rang in the kitchen. “Goddammit,” Johnson muttered. “GERMAINE!” The dog lay on his side, his left ear merely moving a little in faint reflex. “Useless mutt. Can’t even pick up a phone.” Johnson heaved himself up and suddenly felt the mai tai drop heatedly into his stomach. He stumbled his way indoors and picked up the phone.

“Johnson here.”
“Motherfucker.”
“Rawlins, I thought I asked you, politely, never to call here again.”
“MotherFUCKER.”
“I’m sitting here in the sun, I’m reading the Mahabharata, I get up from my concentrated study to answer the phone from someone who should not be calling me.”
“Mo-ther-fuck-er. There’s a yardsale going on down on Dandelion Lane. Lemonade and everything, the kind that makes you pucker.”
“Any chicks?”
“You’d better be there motherfucker. I’m baking cookies.”
“No shit?”
“Peanut butter and pumpkin, motherfucker!”

Johnson got his Schwinn out from the shed and tried to take some of the cobwebs off with a stick. Germaine lay watching happily, his pink tongue lolling. Johnson poured a little vodka into a thermos, just in case, then got onto the rusty red bike and pedaled around the side of the house and down the driveway and into the street.

Zanorth

Here am I, Lord of Cockroaches, Zanorth, surveying my territory, the kitchen lands of Apartment Q-258. My antennaes waggle in the summer breeze that wafts out from the hour long hot showers that the female humanoid takes in the bathroom. This is indeed a land of plenty, a fertile tiled square of frequently dropped crumbs, forgotten leftovers, abundance overflowing from ceramics at every step.
My people live in the spaces between the walls. We do not carry strange diseases. We are nearly impossible to kill except by strong and deftly placed poisons, or individually by very sharp or very heavy blunt instruments. The humans seem to fear us excessively for the reason that our existence is based both entirely on their excess–while simultaneously, we could still exist without them. This terrifies them–the idea that we could outlive them–and that meanwhile we are simply using their wasteful habits to chill out and party.
It has been a good season here in the kitchen lands. Why, just last night, we came across 4 different types of cheeses, along with drops of various red wines to accompany them! Just think, what a waste it would be if all of this extra foodstuff simply sat forever on the kitchen floor, never to be enjoyed by another lifeform. We the cockroaches love to try out new things. I myself just tried out candied yams for the first time last week, and discovered them to perhaps be the most luxurious dining experience I’ve ever partaken in. I will dream of said yams, the orange and white creamy blend, until the next chance encounter I have with them again. In the meantime, I will enjoy this piece of mushroom pizza crust with a dab of ranch.

Afternoon with Zansky

The light filtered down eventually to the floor in catchments, a stream of filtration of clouds, tree leaves, and sun roof angle, finally falling onto the open page of Zansky’s latest sci-fi/fantasy novel, laid across his lap as he sat, head tilted back and snoring softly on his sofa. This latest sci-fi/fantasy thriller was just in the midst of describing the interrelations of Zanorgs with their dragons, when Zansky’s mind wandered to a lunchtime conversation with receptionist Janice about whether life on earth began from organic matter carried on a meteor, or if some intelligent designer, aka God, crafted man already complete.
“If there was a designer, than we’d better call the motherfucker to account. Trial of the century,” Zansky had said.
“Wasn’t there a Dostoevsky story about that one already?,” Janice said.
Zansky was about to correct her, but then realized that it was a good corraboration, even if it didn’t fit exactly.

In his dream, Zansky saw a place that was like the park near his apartment except that it also was like the playground at his elementary school. They were being attacked by UFOs that were dropping rotund bombs which would explode after 1 minute of hitting the ground. So he was running around with an unknown friend and they either had to grab the bombs that fell near them and try to lob them back up into the sky at the UFOs, or run away from the ones about to explode. They also had an arsenal of thick rubberbands which they were using to attack the hovering spacecraft, but they were hard to use without hurting their own thumbs when the band was released. Zansky awoke laughing yet feeling strangely nostalgic already about the dream world. It had been heroic and action packed and it kind of made sense still when he woke up, as opposed to most of his dreams, which were relegated immediately to the wastebin of memory upon waking up, because they were just too weird to make any conscious sense.

Carrot Talk

Lasie dabs her carrot into ranch dressing and crunches it speculatively.
“It’s not that I don’t believe in a god, exactly,” she states, an eventual response to Zansky’s earlier half-joking comment about her apparent inconcern with the moral implications of her actions after she had cussed out a small child on the street. She double dips her carrot and crunches again. “It’s that I believe in humanity. I believe in our ability to heal, to recuperate, to learn from our mistakes. Everyone walks around so scared of each other, scared of themselves, tiptoeing around whether you can say this or that to a black person, whether you can wear this color eyeliner to a concert, whether you can spank your annoying brat of a kid or not, I don’t know. It’s stupid.”

Zansky squints and watches her, the way she holds the carrot like a wand and waggles it in between her declarations like a rubber pencil. His function in the relationship is to provide critical counterpoint, to question Lasie’s free and apparently nonchalant ways and discover the philosophic underpinnings that move her, to lay bare the foundations of her behavioral patterns. Her function is to shake up Zanksy’s convictions, rattle his cage and force him to take flight from comfort, to ravage his Angelican upbringing. They complement each other like chicken and waffles, like molasses and tobacco, like a burger with peanut butter. Just fine once you get used to it.

“Does believing in humanity necessitate a lack of faith in a god?” Zansky asks, always bringing things back to the Big Questions. God. Death. Government.

Lasie always wants to laugh at Zansky’s seriousness, yet finds it so endearing that she can only answer him semi-profoundly. She finds herself stating bits of Zen she never knew she contained, flashbacks of Keroauc and shrooms from camping trips in college. She sometimes wishes she could take notes on herself.

“It’s really one and the same, isn’t it?”

“What, human beings and God? Bit of a stretch.”

“I dunno. No, I mean the faith thing. If you lack faith in humanity, then you’ll lack faith in god. But you’ve got to choose, at some point, what you’ll model your god upon. Is it like a human being, or is it like something completely unknowable and unreachable, something pristine and perfect and pure?”

“Nice alliteration.”
“I try.”
“So what you’re saying is that one’s relationship with humanity reflects, at some level, a relationship with God?”
“I don’t know what the fuck that means.” Zansky loves Lacie’s exuberant use of expletives. His toes wiggle in his Birkenstocks. Although he did think that cussing out a child, even a snotty spoiled child, for spilling ice cream on one’s shoes was a bit over the top. “Basically, all I’m saying is that, to me, a conception of a god is really kind of irrelevant. Yeah, I said it. I guess it sounds blasphemous or whatever, but there it is.”

“She finally admits to heresy.”
“Burn me at the stake.”
Lacie uses a particularly long carrot to smear ranch on Zansky’s nose.

Zansky

The sunlight bothered Zansky. It bothered him because it made him squint, no matter how dark or wrap-around the sunglasses. The woman sitting across from him at that blindingly white table is pretty, her name is Lasie, pronounced Lacey, her parents either couldn’t spell or were trying to be different, and Zansky met her one day at work when he went into the accounting department, which he rarely did, and she was new, she could care less about the wider world, and all of the men in the surrounding offices stopped by to say hi and make jabs at getting her out for a drink. Zansky ended up having a rather wonderful 15 minute conversation with her at that time, in which they explored zodiac signs, salsa dancing, and fig newtons. They now met regularly for lunch, usually went to the same place–the only food joint within walking distance that didn’t clog your colon if you ate there more than two times a week. They were the talk of the 10th floor of Bingham & Merle. Insinuating remarks at the water cooler. Snide gossip snippets walked into. You know how offices are. People get bored. We talk down each other out of earshot until everyone we know is reduced to cheesecake.

Zanksy liked talking to Lasie. That’s really all that mattered to him. He knew better than to believe in other people’s envy. He had given up on rustling women into bed. It’s good for maybe a half a night of something that makes you feel bad about it later. The only sex worth having is when there’s some love behind it. Enough at least for more than 2 nights. Enough for everything, for forever, for nothing at all but knowledge of self. Interchange of past lives. Molding bowls of futurity.

When Lasie was out of high school, she had traveled the world with a knapsack of 3 days worth of clothes. One set of clothes was for dancing. One drunken night she was in Morocco, smoking opium with five men who were cousins, none of whom could speak English, and yet she claims that she learned from them that their forefathers were Assassins, and they taught her the recipe for making a mean falafel. She doesn’t know how this information was transmitted. She laughs as she talks about her past, everything behind her. No regrets, no shame, everything leading up to her point of now. She knows what it is to be alone.

Zansky tells her a story of when he was a child and he tortured a potato bug by pulling out its limbs one by one. He still feels that he hasn’t fully payed out his karmic dues for that. He wakes up in cold sweats sometimes. Lasie is laughing, and Zansky tries to keep her laughing for the rest of the half hour. Her laughter is a stream of cascading water catching the light through the trees. She smokes cigarrettes after eating. She rides bikes that don’t move anywhere in a glass room with sweating people in spandex.

The Well

In the lamplight, there, by the well, can be seen the old man of gnappy beard who sits all day and night in the same place, fed scraps like a venerable dog by nearby shopkeepers. He asks for nothing and accepts everything. He watches the world and the only judgment that he passes might be simply through his very existence, his everpresence at the well, flies unacknowledged at his forehead and ankles, unrelatable to the commerce and bustle of the day. At night, drunken young men might harangue him from time to time, but find nothing much of sport in his fragile compliance. He is like the well, an object of what is taken to be always there and thusly ignored largely except as backdrop. A few who have been around as long as him know of his history, and know him as a man, and know wherefore he sits like so much dust. Even a few of the next generation treats him with the respect of an uncle, albeit a slightly crazy but harmless uncle, and they will give him treats on holidays, or pull out a cigarette if they happen to think of it as they pass on their business. Ola comes and talks to him everyday at lunchtime and gives him a glass of milk. She tells him of the gossip of her workplace, and to be sure he knows nothing of those people or of how they may relate to him, but he nods intermittently and Ola is content to use him as a whiteboard upon which to trace different theories of the daily dramas and conflicts that form her world, and which she will later present to other, more opinionated and vocal judges. That he is even listening is uncertain, but his gentle gaze contains little of insanity, and he seems to be in full possession of his senses even though he chooses not to utilize them, or at least, to relate any of these sensations to the outer world.

Jale is a young boy of somewhat noble heritage–the somewhat being that his ancestors have served nobility honorably and well for untold generations, and thus they have become intertwined almost indistinguishably with the history of kings and of princesses and the other various trappings of power, such that now in these shifting times his father could proclaim his bloodline link to an ancient king of mythic yore and not many would dispute it, or even really care one way or the other, to be perfectly honest. Jale didn’t see much evidence of any difference between his family’s life and any others, but it was nice to think that there was something special contained within him, traced through his very marrow, a grandeur sleeping, a blessing of those who came before. He likes to imagine that the quiet pretty girl 2 streets away is also secretly a princess, and that they are destined to become lovers. She averts her eyes from him whenever they pass, but he feels that there is something between them that need not be spoken, that links their very spirit long before they were ever born. Jale passes the old man at the well every evening when he goes to fetch water for supper. He is slightly afraid of him, and tries not catch his eyes. But more important is that the pretty girl sometimes is there also, and he watches her slender arms drawing the water, and there is the possibility that she may look up at him and notice him. This evening she is not there, and he gathers the water absentmindedly, wondering how he can get through another dry night without a fresh glimpse of her red shirt, of her bare feet in the mud next to the well. He steps upon a sharp rock and twists his ankle slightly and falls, spilling a portion of water upon the old man. The old man slowly wipes the dripping from his face and beard and looks gently upon the boy, who fearfully looks into the old man’s eyes, not sure of what to say, not having spoken to such a person before and not sure of what is said to such a person. Everyone ignores him and Jale thinks perhaps he should gather himself and run and pretend nothing has happened. But he has lost a significant amount of water and does not wish to be slapped by his mother and laughed at by his younger sister. But he cannot move back to the well to gather more water and pretend that he does not see the old man, does not feel his mysterious silent eyes upon him. He stands irresolutely. The old man smiles, seemingly perfectly knowing and not crazy or strange at all, understanding of the boy’s plight and of his reasons for fear. The boy finds confidence in the smile and offers the old sitter a drink of the remaining water. The old man sips like a bird from the mouth of the clay and nods. He does not mind that his shirt is wet. Jale rejoices inwardly and quickly gathers more water, almost oblivious until the last moment that he stands face to face with the pretty girl, always in the same red shirt, her raven black hair falling like living vines down her face to curl around her shoulders, and that they are gathering water together. He stands with his full bowl, looking at the top of her head. She looks up at him and smiles, and they both move away at the same time, and he feels that he wants to run but that it is too late to do such a thing without looking like a fool, and the old man smiles after them, nodding with water hanging in beads amongst the gnarls of his beard. Jale begins to talk to her, and she listens quietly, moving with her burden of water like an unseen princess, and only Jale can see it within her, the way she carries herself, the strength of her spine. He tells her of the old man and he wonders of why and wherefore such a man comes to rest forever by the well, and he speculates that perhaps the old man is really in fact an old king but has been forgotten and all of his subjects have been put under a spell and the king waits for them to awaken patiently, so that he can again come unto his throne. The girl says nothing but does not seem to reject this theory, and Jale continues talking until they come to a parting of streets and then he tells her farewell and she smiles again while looking at him and he feels so strong, so stupid, so like a little boy, like a prince, like everything and nothing all at the same time and he runs to his home, spilling nothing all along the way.

Insomnia

waiting for the definition of sunrise, tossing and turning, as it is said, Timothy stared into the patterns of the ceiling swathed by the moonlight mixed with clocklight, illuminating bits and pieces of reflectant objects in the night. It was a world beyond endurance, a world where one woke during a sleep needed to replenish exhaustion, and could see things that perhaps were not meant to be seen. Yes, it is true, not much sleep is needed to survive. But in order to not be in a constant state of aggravated anxiety, it can be beneficial to be well-rested. Not happening tonight, as it has not happened in many a night. From whence comes this stress? There are a million little reasons to give to manifestations of tension in one’s daily life. The uncivility of an overweight woman taking your money at the toll booth. The way a stranger brushed up against you in the subway, unheeding. The touch of cheap paper napkins. The unending demands of those who have more comfort and money, and those who have less. The little girl staring at you out the back of a passing Oldsmobile. When Timothy was in third grade, he had headaches everyday after school. It occurred for three months and finally he was taken to the doctor, who ran tests, such as placing Timothy on a stretcher and sliding him into a mechanical device that made loud noises that accelerated to indicate that it was forming pictures of his brain, and after an hour and a half of this, there were colored diagrams with no signs of anything abnormal–no tumors, no schizophrenia. Just stress, is what the doctor told his mom. He must just be having some extra stress. Stress from what? what exactly does a child in third grade get stressed about? The teacher who calls him names in order to feel better about her dry and bitter life? The insecure bully who physically and verbally abuses him at recess and after school? The standardized tests to determine whom is “gifted” or not? The arts and crafts sections of Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas, when finally creativity is encouraged, even if only to crayon in the white sections of print-outs from cheap cheesy books the teacher found in her closet from the year before?
The ceiling consists of a textured white wall that gleams blue with yellowish tints in the late night/early morning light. His own mind rebels against what he knows he needs. Sleep, sleep, sleep. He is scared, perhaps, of dreams, of when pieces of the suppressed world within himself will arise and play ruthlessly like childish tyrants with the pieces of his everyday world–trivial, amplified, monsterous, and meaningless. Everytime that he looks at the clock, an hour has passed in which he could have been asleep. And then the alarm is ringing and it is time. Time for a tomorrow that he is not prepared for, and will never be prepared for, because it has passed, is passing, is gone even before he got out of bed, because everything that would give him joy has been slaughtered in the night by his fear.

Sagarmatha

Time to tear myself back down to a hollow reed, strip myself of all the fluff. There is nothing to be held except the breath when it sounds upon a note. Everything else can go to hell. One gets tied to all sorts of rules and legislation in relations with other people. But these walls we build around ourselves are meant to be broken. Can’t even take ourselves too seriously. What is in a name? What is in a face? What is in a heart?

On the peak of the highest mountain in the world, face to face with his aspirations, Ivan felt nothing but weariness. Now there was a long trek back down ahead of him. And what was there left in the world down there? Here in this place where no man rightfully belonged, with barely enough oxygen to formulate a complete thought, Ivan could see himself. Here, away from all the world, literally above it, the secret things hidden in his heart that drove him to drag himself here became evident. And they were all stupid. Stupid stupid stupid. Blind persistence and dedication to a purposeless task. Climbing a mountain just to prove something to himself. Well, he did it. He was there, standing on the peak. And what exactly had he proved? The whole thing seemed ridiculous. All the money, all the gear, all the training, all the sayings of goodbyes to friends who looked at him with the gentle pity of that bestowed on the harmlessly insane, all of the holding himself away from the women who would have loved him. He had left all of his life behind in order to do this, in order to get to this place where he now stood, and none of it seemed worth it. Was this why he had to come here? So that he could finally understand what he had been throwing away? Such waste.

Ivan turned and began the slow descent back into the atmosphere, back into the land of the living. He had wanted to just sit down and stay there forever on top, but he had not come there to die. He came there to see what it is to live.

City Story II

Hunter keyed his way into his building and climbed the six sets of stairs to his sanctuary and prison. His refuge and battleground. The answering machine light bleeped in repeated four minute intervals and he was excited to know that someone had wanted to talk to him. He pressed the play button and listened to the voice of a friend he hadn’t heard from in a while re-crafting the connections that made her immediately present in his life again. It was good to know that love continued, that it was not simply a bubbled world lost like Atlantis to the submergence of time and fading memory. Hunter executed a quick dance-step, a little kung-fu jig that expressed his joy to himself that he was alive and recognized.

Hunter sat on his floor and stretched. It was something he did daily when he got home from work, something he did with religious conviction–exhaling slowly as he inched forward, stretching different leg muscles in a few various poses. It was yoga except that he didn’t know that it was yoga. He thought of Yoga as a sweaty room with an Indian pretzel guru guiding huffing middle class white people through feats of balance and groin pulling. This was mere stretching. He was working out the kinks in his system.

The light of the Corolla sign across the street blinked, a stuttering blink that was annoying to the point of driving him insane at first when he moved in, but now it was reassuring, a crippled reminder that he was home, largely unnoticed except when he stared at it. A stammering blinking that whispered at the edges of his subconscious apartment visual space, the way the repetitive ticking of an old grandfather clock goes unnoticed until suddenly you hear it again for no reason at all and then you can’t stop listening to it. But it was reassuring, this monotonous stuttering. It was reassuring in the way that the muttering homeless man with his white sneakers and plastic cape on the corner was reassuring. It assured you that the world was unknowable and mundane and that it was consistent as long as you didn’t pay attention to it.

Hunter put some bread in the microwave to thaw it out from the freezer. He chose some Dixieland jazz from his CD collection and put it on. He changed into what he liked to call his flappy pants and he puttered about the apartment with his shirt off, feeling the cool hardwood floor against his feet. He liked to do this, putter about without purpose. It felt good to putter about and feel the cool floor on his feet and have nothing to do. He fluttered about in his flappy pants and took bites from a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The trick to making a good peanut butter and jelly sandwich is to put a ridiculous amount of both peanut butter and jelly on it. Even more peanut butter. The jelly is really just there to counter the dryness of the peanut butter, to provide a basic counterpoint. Damn a good peanut butter and jelly sandwich is just about one of the best things to chew on as you putter about your apartment, and it never lasts long enough. One sandwich is never enough. But you don’t want to make another one. Another one would be overkill, it would ruin what was good about the first one. Plus it just takes extra effort that really isn’t worth it, not when you’ve got bananas sitting just perfectly ripe on top of the fridge.

Hunter peeled the banana the way apes do, from their natural tops, the half without the taper, because he had read that apes peel their bananas in this way. He consciously made the decision each time he picked up a banana to peel it down from the non-tapered end, because this is the way apes did it. He figured that if apes did it, then there must be a good reason for it, beyond our immediate understanding. It imbued his banana peeling with deeper significance. He felt slightly righteous as he peeled the banana, like he was in tune perhaps with some primal forces that others who might peel their bananas heedlessly could not understand.

A banana which follows a well made peanut butter and jelly sandwich is a form of heaven, a slice of paradise. It is the little things that count, the cool floor on the feet, the puttering about and the meditational imbibing of the banana. The flapping of the pants as the Corolla sign flickers lonely but always going. The old time jazz, back when jazz was dance music, back when people did not sit down to listen and reflect on the solos, they did not see the colors flying in the spaces between the notes–they got onto the dance floor and shook their rumps to it, their asses were down in it, they were shaking inside of the music. Before the world came together and apart and grew self-conscious of itself.

Now in this post-modern time, Hunter thinks. Post-post-modern. Pre-something. In the middle of something going to something from something. To modernize was to become aware of oneself and to proclaim this, to make a song of oneself, to destroy oneself. To post-modernize was to deconstruct the self, to fragment the self, to see the pieces of self in the all self. Or something like that. To become lost in the primordial soup like a matrix mystic. Now where were we?

Hunter turned on his desktop computer and waited for the hard drive to stop clicking and opened up his word processing software.

Breakfast and Work

Hunter splatted out the habanero Tabasco across the surface of his eggs and hash browns as Jordus returned to the table with a newspaper folded in his paw. It was one of Jordus’ annoying habits to peruse the paper while eating with others. Hortencia sipped her coffee black and watched Hunter shovel a fork-load of food into his gullet. He was aware of her watching and felt the vague discomfort and insecurity that accompanies the outside observation of normally unaware tasks. He liked eating better alone, without the need for social projection. He liked sitting alone with a book in front of him and putting food into his mouth without thought, immersed in the story, the process of eating an excuse to concentrate for a period of time solely on the book, without any other distractions beyond the unconscious simple joy of bringing food into the mouth and chewing and washing it down in pink lemonade.

“City Recoils In Aftermath of Black-out,” Jordus read.

“So you like the job, then,” Hortencia said to Hunter.

“It’s surprisingly fulfilling to fill out forms and move them from the In to the Out box. I gain satisfaction from filling in the boxes with information that only I am designated to give, and then to place these papers in the Out box. I take the pile at the end of the day and I walk them over to someone else’s desk and I place them in their In box.”

“The job has a future.”

“It is remarkable, this feeling I get when I drop the completed forms in someone else’s In box.”

“‘25 percent of adult Americans are afraid of the dark.’ And those are just the ones who admit it.”

“I wish I could enjoy meaningless mundane tasks that I am not paid enough for. My boss gave me a raise on Monday, I think the company senses that I am restless. They apparently felt the need to show their appreciation for my mundane tasks. Employee recognition, the demonstration of the company’s awareness of ‘the little guy.’ I didn’t even ask for it,” Hortencia said, pulling off a piece of a blueberry muffin top, the kind with giant crystalline sugars on it, and stuffing it delicately in her mouth.

“There is even a gym and showers at my new job. I can come into work after a night of partying, sleep in until the last minute, then shower when I get there. They provide Mountain Action scented body wash.”

“They gave me a button in my mailbox. It says, ‘I Am Appreciated’ on it with a little golden star. In some ways I am offended.”

“It says here that children are fast becoming the top consumers of electronic devices.”

The hot sauce sprayed on Hunter’s food was beginning to cause a light sheen of sweat to break out on his forehead. He washed down his food with O.J. and breathed through his mouth.

“I am offended because it shows how disconnected the company is from my needs. They think giving me a button is going to increase the quality of my work? There’s probably statistics. I am offended because they blatantly treat me like a number rather than like a human being. They could have had my boss make me cookies or something. That I might appreciate. A fucking button. Like I’m in third grade. Even third graders don’t want buttons anymore. They want an early pass to recess or a coupon for McDonalds, something with value. Not that I’m complaining about the raise. The raise itself was a nice gesture. I could have done without the button. I would have been happy without the button. The button just served to piss me off.”

Hunter kept looking out the corner of his eye at an Asian girl sitting at the next table. She sensed she was being looked at and animatedly talked to her friend and brushed her hair back with her hand. Hunter made sure not to be caught looking, but to look enough so that she knew. He breathed through his mouth and gulped down O.J.

“That was some shindig last night, huh. I’d never seen Harris dance before. He looked like an ostrich on acid.”

Jordus folded up the newspaper and sat back and laughed. A piece of toast flew out and stuck to the table. Hunter had started laughing at the remembrance of Harris dancing and then laughed harder at the flying bit of toast. Hortencia smiled and pulled off a chunk of muffin and adjusted her glasses.

A Final Scene

Hunter moved through the door to see her standing in the mirror looking at herself with something like despair. She reached for the soap and washed her hands. He watched her, thin browned arms and slender fingers moving slowly, drying against the towel, her hair falling down the side of her face. He moved from the room before she looked up at him. He sat on the edge of the bed and watched cars moving down the boulevard from the window, listening to the apartment building filtered sounds of the city. She came in and stood at the door, leaning against the doorjamb, her fingers gripping the wood. She sat down next to him and watched the side of his face, the sadness there. Everything they had to say they already knew, but there was the danger of explosivity when it came into the air. She felt something like love for him still, but in the war within her heart, he had already been categorized as enemy, and there was no turning back from her duty now. She looked out the window too and listened to the words she had prepared in her mind. Hunter, she said.

Stop it, he said. Stop it. Just go.

She started to say something and then he looked at her and shouted. Leave now. Get your shit and get the fuck out of my life. She got up and gathered her things from the drawers as he continued to sit and look out the window, his hands clasping his knees. Bitch, bitch, bitch, he thought. He knew even as anger flooded his mind that he would miss her the minute she walked out the door. He didn’t want to be left like this, with angerness and bitterness filling up the space. He stood up, clenching and unclenching his jaw. Marcela, he said. She continued to gather up her things, folding her clothes with a quiet, controlled calm. Marcela, I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I couldn’t change for you. I’m sorry that I couldn’t be who you needed me to be. I’m sorry that it has to be this way. She stopped and regarded him levelly, saying nothing, her hands at her sides. He stepped forward.

You know that you have been nothing but distant to me, she said. This is not what I had been prepared to tell you. I was going to tell you that I had found another and that he was good to me and that I was leaving. But what is really true is that you have shut me out of your life. You have shut me out of your life and you have been waiting for me to leave. So now I am leaving. This is what you want me to do. I tried. I have tried with my heart for you, and you have left me standing here with my love in the air, falling to pieces. I will not destroy myself for you.

He listened to this, and stood reeling in the silence, letting all of the hurt penetrate everywhere, the true nature of their battle coming into consciousness. I would never ask you to do that for me, he whispered. He grasped at the table by his side for support. He could not believe in this version of himself so monstrous.
Marcela, he said, lurching as if stricken. Forgive me if I have been far from you. I know that it is over, but I don’t want you to go thinking that I have not loved you. I loved you, but I did not understand it, and I did not know how to show it. Every morning waking up to your dark waiting eyes, your eyes with the questions in them, waiting. I did not know how to answer. I am sorry. For what it is worth I loved you and I love you still. I don’t want you to hate me when you think of me. Please forgive me.
I have already forgiven you, she said. I tried hating you. But what use is it in ruining my heart?
They stood looking at each other, with nothing left to say. They touched each other like frightened children, and hugged each other to themselves in a silence that was deafening. A dog barked in the dusk. Hunter clutched his fingers around her shoulder blades. She had one hand on his neck and the other on his lower back, a heat interlocking. And it was now that the tears came. They pulled back and looked into each other’s flooding eyes. They kissed one last time and hugged again but now it was over. He left the room and walked into the kitchen and looked blindly into the refrigerator. She packed up the rest of her things and went into the bathroom and blew her nose and washed her hands again and came into the kitchen and said goodbye. They said that they would keep in touch. Hunter knew that he would not speak to her again.

City Story

The lights in the city went red green red in the puddles of oil glistening in the cooling Autumn sun, Los Angeles, walking along the suppertime sidewalk, Hunter prowled head down, needing air, strangers, the ever busy and indifferent outside world, the simple flowing motion forward of stepping after struggling for hours alone on his computer in his clean, organized, solitary apartment. The basic problems of language tonight could not be resolved. There was no expressing what he needed most directly to say. There were side avenues, right angles to that direction, but it was like poking a needle at a vein in the dark. Added to the basic fact that he wasn’t even sure what he wanted to say exactly, just knowing that he needed to. And then the heavy stillness of his loneliness pressing in around every spark, making it difficult to catch even the draft of one opening sentence, nothing insubstantial tindered–all thoughts were vital, boundless, and opaque to immediacy. He stopped and fingered out a Kamel Red Light and lit it and blew out smoke steadily, standing before a pink staccato hanging plant infested apartment complex lined with projecting rectangular balconies from which smells of various take-out and stove-cooked foods emanated. He watched a pretty woman across the street talking on her cellphone and looking up and down the street, waiting to be taken somewhere. He breathed in smoke and held it deep in his lungs and blew it out at the sky. He wasn’t a nicotine addict, but there were times in the streets that he needed the cigarette excuse to stand and meditate in the midst of so much apparent purpose. The many cars sleeping along the curb were glistening with lights in the descending dusk. Smells of foreign worlds, flowers mingling with the dinner street Fall smells.

Hunter continued down the blocks, listening to the fragments of peoples lives spilling into an atonal polyrhythmic flow of city life. Always everywhere something there to let you know that you are a piece of something less and something greater. There is you and there is me and the in-between is but a matter of beginnings and endings which have no distinction. Here is the rich and here is the poor and here is the hunger and here is the denial and here is the ever looming threat of the crowd boxed in, separated and policed mainly by the mind–the danger is felt when the eye is opened and the reality stirred. The blinders of everyday indifference are the city’s lifeblood, it’s basis of existence. Alien human beings are traffic, they are passerbys, they are herds and individuals, they are box office ticket buyers and supermarket cart wheeling hobos, jazz club afficianados Hollywood industry junkies. They are a force contained and exploding in windows all across the night

Well, it made him stronger, Hunter felt. It destroyed him as he loved it. It recontructed him as he hated it. And even when the voice within him couldn’t find its way into this overlying structure, simply walking through the solitary streets and breathing the electric air soothed him to an unrequited silence. Where the inner ground of integrity was known, with no verification, with no credits and no communication.

Particular Matter

harold returns to the window to stand silhouetted in the moonlight on the
carpet. to see the shadow of the smoke wisping into the sacred stillness,
sacred, except for the occasional sputtering cough. harold likens himself
to christ in times such as these, enjoying the utter ridiculousness of
blasphemy. blasphemy that is pointless once you designate yourself
consciously and purposely as heathen. blasphemy, another method of control,
another scare tactic. that is bad. ok? this is good. now, let’s sing
songs and we’re going to go home feeling content to know that we are good
people because someday our prince will come and sweep us away into that
perfect place that we’ve been waiting for desperately while blinding
ourselves to the squalor that is our daily news. signs of the apocalypse.
harold’s eyes glimmer, he imagines, in the darkness. pulling rather
eloquently on his pipe. it’s only a matter, watson, he says, of time.
because we all KNOW what is coming. but when? BAH. he spits a loogie that
sparkles as it flies on its way to the side of the trash can. TING. damn,
almost. it was a jolly good shot, in any case. harold eyes his lazyboy
with precocious eyes. precocious eyes, that’s what some teacher said to his
mum at an open house when he was in the third grade. He’s got such
Precocious Eyes. he didn’t know what it meant, but his ego inflated like an
aroused penis all the same. gobble, gobble. he’s always reminded himself
of his precocious eyes every time he’s around a particularly pleasing
specimen of female flesh. imagining that they are all whispering to each
other in delicate trills. My, what Precocious Eyes! knowing, of course,
all along, the utter ridiculousness.
once you have stepped outside, my boy, there is no going back. harold
thought about this one. he clasped his hands behind his back and paced like
a caged lion might pace if it was a suburban male that smoked too much weed.
he stepped outside of it all a long, long time ago. it might have been
third grade. it might have been the moment his eyes were wiped clean of
blood and opened and took in the sharp hospital fluorescence of reality. he
had stepped outside of his station and looked around. but the home he
returned to was not the same. his parents looked down at him in doubt, his
wife awoke and turned her back to him and subsequently farted in her sleep,
his children ran into lives of normalcy cut out and conditioned by
commercials. where was the warmth, the stillness, the nurturing care?
where were the smiling pictures of nostalgia, the shotgunned beers of the
past? harold sat down cross-legged on the floor, feeling suddenly heavy.
because of the weight of what he had managed to forget.
and who could blame anyone? how could he blame anyone for their blithe
songs of hopeful faith? how could he be blamed for his self-worshipping
degeneracy? for they know not what they do. everything solid casts a
shadow. and reflects the light.

Set Up

jacob scaled his fire escape to the 3rd floor and pushed up his window and
slipped into his room dukes of hazards styles, knocking over a glass of last
night’s scotch. he did a jig of pure joy, slapping his ankles and twisting
into a pile of clothes on the floor. it was hard to believe that it was
real, and yet it was, god fucking-a, it was, this feeling of belly
shuttering ecstasy, this love, this world of raw pleasure that he had
forgotten could ever exist. he pulled out his pipe from his desk drawer and
packed it chock-full of hash, giggling insanely. one hit a two hit a three
hit, all in a row, getting fucked up now, not enough, four a five a seis, a
sex, a two multiplied by a three, resultant in an exponential increase in
explosive sensory information. what was this his heart was saying? this
was unbelievable, that his own bodily mechanisms could speak to him in firey
chemical rhythmic tongues. alive, alive alive! conscious movement, jacob
practiced tai chi to aphex twin in his boxers. water! food! this was
amazing. yet it could be regulated, channeled, communicated. he picked up
the phone and dialed the now instinctual number.
“yeah?”
he jumped up and down. “honey goddess baby queen.” his mind’s noise
suddenly quelled.
“hey sweetie. what’s goin on?”
“i am scaling heights i couldn’t ever have imagined a whole day ago, a whole
universe away, like so fast that i feel g-forces. shit. i feel so fucking
good!”
she laughed shyly. “yeah, i think i know what you mean. you’re fucking
crazy, you know? i love you.” she paused, looking out the window. “i need
to finish my work. i’ll talk to you soon” she hung up. he hung up.
the silence reverberated with cosmic force. jacob wanted to cry, his heart
was an open wound, his mind was upside down, his body ached for immediate
enwrapped alien warmth. he laughed. life was so fucking amazing. it was a
rollercoaster, it was a movie, it was a cup washing over the rim into
aether, it was ink sloshing into indecipherable patterns, it was beautiful,
it was horrendous, it was shocking and powerful and new.
“for good. for good for good for good,” jacob whispered to himself as he
rocked, clutching his knees. “always use this energy for good. it is not
yours. it is not for you. this is for everyone. this is for the world.
this is for what all of us thought was missing. it is here, it is
everywhere, it is in her eyes and her hair and the sucking sea sound of
sweat between our bodies. wonder! wonder! wonder! i am in love. i am in
love and i am frightened. i am in love and i am insanely happy. i can feel
the blood pushing through my veins to the pulse of my heart. i can feel the
heat of astral connection spreading throughout my limbs. i can hear the
sound of my dreams resonate in the hollows of my brain. i have been here
before. i am here. in this, the deadly still center of the eye of the
storm. i am incredibly lonely. i am incredibly hungry. i can never get
enough, enough of her.” he smiled sadly. “for good, for good for good for
good. she is not mine. and i am in love.”

Milk

in the luxuriant grass of the orient lay a life form contemplating the
configurations of the clouds. for the sake of this conversation we will
call him Calf. Calf is one of those Dostoevskian minds that burns up all
the world in the blackhole of his intellect, despite being of an honorable
nature. as i said, he lay in the luxuriant grass, the lush waist-high grass
of an ancient eastern land, studying the movements of the passing clouds,
those billowing congealed masses of dew–at least, he appeared to be
studying them. of course, he was only pretending to study them, as befits
one of a Dostoevskian turn of mind, for in reality his thoughts was focused
quite wholly upon the matter of the road below him, where passed the
villagers on their way to their various duties for the day. he perhaps
truly wanted to be mindlessly examining the clouds, for he was supremely
conscious, after all, that he was seated in a verdant meadow of beauty
beyond words, and that the sky was a theater of the utmost majesty–if it
could just be taken in with a clean, pure, and empty mind. yet it was
impossible, quite impossible, for Calf to concentrate his attention on lofty
and divine matters as long as there were people passing along that road.
for each person that came along, Calf found himself looking out of the
corners of his eyes and figuring out who it was that was coming, and why
they were coming and whence they were going, and of what nature they were,
of whether he liked them or not (he probably didn’t), and of how they were
looking at him, if they noticed him at all, engrossed as they were in
matters of daily bread. “ah, Sunyan,” he would mutter, for instance, “that
silly drunkard. he wouldn’t know the sun if it fell on him. he’s got one
doozy of a wife though, the thighs on that woman are unbelievable. how is
it that such a fool gets a woman like that? the thighs on that bitch, my
god, what those thighs could do. . .” or “ah, there’s the sheriff. i’d
best lie low and not move, or else he might manhandle me for loitering, the
swine. all he does is loiter all day. him, and his goiter. there he goes,
butt cheeks a-rolling, on his way to the whore-house, where he can make
himself feel powerful with his money.”
so Calf lay in the grass, the long and verdant grass, casting judgment upon
his fellow villagers, unable to find peace in the clouds which passed
unacknowledged through the sky. as he thus lay, a giant grasshopper
appeared unto him. it was a giant, green, gossamer grasshopper, and Calf
knew not whether it dropped out of the heavens or if it simply appeared from
out of thin air. Calf, not being of the religious personality, did not
prostrate himself before it, as another might have done in such a situation,
but rather stared at it, unable to comprehend such an anomaly. “what in
god’s name . . . ?” was all he could think to say.
“in god’s name is correct,” the grasshopper informed him, settling into the
grass on its hind legs. “do you know god’s name?”
Calf, after coming somewhat to terms with the fact that there was a giant
grasshopper speaking to him, answered, “god is that which has no name.”
“you are approaching the right answer. it would have been more correct to
say simply that you do not know, because you know nothing, least of all the
name of god,” the grasshopper reprimanded, twiddling its antennae in little
spirals.
Calf wasn’t sure how to take this, coming from a grasshopper. he decided
that it would be better not to challenge it, for it was surely from the
spirit world. Calf had certainly heard of such things, for in those days it
was not uncommon for the spirits to appear in physical form to the people,
for they were close to the earth. but Calf, of course, had never seen a
spirit, nor conversed with one, and he had never believed that he would.
all of his intellectual webs that spanned his days and nights with their
seeming impenetrability seemed suddenly full of gaps, and he felt extremely
humble to be in the presence of a giant gossamer grasshopper, which was
sitting opposite him, a little lower down the hill yet rising to double
Calf’s size, the high green grass folded around it, its bulbous eyes focused
querulously on Calf, waiting, apparently, for him to reply.
“what is it that you have come to teach me?” Calf asked the grasshopper, for
he was a sharp lad, and he realized that if a spirit had come to visit him,
then it must have something to give him. he knew that if not treated with
respect, a spirit could quickly become demonic and ruin the rest of one’s
life with a curse.
the grasshopper appeared satisfied with the question, for it crossed its
legs and lit a pipe and sucked on it for a while in silence, blowing out
long thick trails of smoke which slithered and rolled into the sky in long
wispy tendrils like the dragon beard of a sage. in the smoke Calf could
smell fresh things, it made him think of the open sky which he had failed to
notice before, it smelled of dew and clay, of sun and rain. after blowing
its smoke into Calf’s face for a few minutes–though it seemed like
forever–the grasshopper finally spoke.
“i have come to you in the form of a grasshopper so that you might be more
receptive to my information, for if i came to you as a man, you might never
listen to me, for you seem to think you know more than everyone else. i
come to you because you have the ability to learn, and you have the capacity
to do many great things in this world if you so choose. but you have been
idling in foolish thoughts of jealousy and insecurity and fear and anger.
you have been attached to your thoughts as if they were the fruit of life,
when in fact all they are are rotten dead things that do nothing but waste
your time, and drag you around, up and down, keeping you forever lost.
“what of all these people that are passing by? what are they to you? they
are trying to do their duty as they see fit, and what are you doing? they
do not need nor deserve your judgment. they stand alone in the sight of
god. let them do what they need to do, and help them to do it. what are
you to them? why are you so great, that you are better than them? you
should be serving them, you should be sacrificing yourself for them to
further them on their path.
“i will let you in on a secret. you will best serve yourself by serving
others. let us say that you are hungry. but you know that this passerby is
hungry, too. imagine if you had cooked your meal, and you had gobbled
everything up immediately by yourself. and this stranger who is hungry
would smell the scent of your food, and he would feel the hunger in his
stomach aching, and he would have anger in the form of envy in his heart.
and so though you may have momentarily fulfilled your hunger, you would
have sown a seed of anger in the world that would be revisited upon you.
now imagine if you cooked the meal, and then you served him first, and then
you waited until he was satisfied. then you ate what was left. he goes
away, and he is full, and he is content. you see, it is better to serve
others first, and then eat what is left. thus, you will be served by the
world. for how can anyone leave you starving when you have given everything
you have?
“but let me direct your vision beyond them. look at the sky, look at the
beauty that you are a part of with every breath. why are you wasting your
time worrying about other people’s lives, about how other people might think
of you, about what you think of them? there is much more to think of then
that. none of that matters. it is like these clouds, passing by. they
build and they build and then everything falls down as rain and pours down
the mountainsides into the valleys, into the rivers, into the streams, into
the sea. everything falls into the ocean, because it is lower than all, and
it is the beginning. and then the water comes back into the sky and gathers
together as clouds and repeats the process. it is like your life, your
every thought. you arise out of the mother and then grow heavy and then
you release your breath and you fall back into the mother again. this
neverending cycle is nature. be like the water, let yourself find your way
back to the source, gather together with others, and then fall, let
yourselves fall and find your way by way of the force of gravity. then be
like the ocean.”
here Calf grew perplexed, for though he could envision the cycle, he could
not understand how to detach from it. “grasshopper, how do i be like the
ocean without continuing to break away as cloud?”
the grasshopper rubbed its wings and made a low sonorous hum. “because what
is your essence, what is deepest in you, is eternal, is unchanging, and is
unattached to birth or death or this or that. the clouds can move without
you. at your core you are always the ocean, always the mother, always the
beginning. and thus nature can move without you, within you. this requires
you to be unattached to anything. this requires you to be calm, to be at
peace, no matter what happens around you. this requires that you end all
the conflicts in your mind, that you gain stability in your daily affairs,
that you forever sacrifice yourself to others. you can never be happy until
you are not attached to the idea of happiness. give of yourself. that is
the only way to gain the world.”
the grasshopper belched politely and settled back onto its haunches and blew
smoke rings through each other, catching them with the tip of his pipe and
jingling them like bracelets, so dense were they.
Calf looked above him at the heavens in which the clouds moved. and he
could see that it was beautiful and good, and that it moved according to its
nature. but it was transitory, a fleeting mist that would soon rain and
lose itself to the earth, feeding the hungry crops, falling back into the
sea. and he could understand this, and know himself as something within
this, and ultimately, know himself as something outside of this that was
beyond understanding. the grasshopper turned into a cow and stood looking
at Calf through calm bovine eyes, chewing repetitively on some cud. Calf
prostrated himself before this vision and put his forehead against the
earth, the grass rising about him towards the sun like sages. he prayed
like this for an hour, and then he got up, dusted off his knees, and slipped
back onto the road, whereupon he journeyed into town, and took a seat with
his brothers at the tavern, so that he could consummate an offering to the
gods with a drink, and stand his brothers a round so that everyone could
partake. and they drank together and they sang songs rejoicing in the
spirit, rejoicing in the life that was theirs to give.

Essay of Me by Phil Scrydor

digital landscapes washing over your shore
the vision is luminous but still i want more
the key to the ocean is all over my chin
and the tides pushing me further and further
and further in
(“The Panoramic View of You,” Slitting Throats circa 1982, from the “Lush” album)

I begin my Essay of Me with this quote because I like it, and I listen to the Lush album a lot. I think their lyrics are really evocative and like, vivid, surreal, just dripping with visceral imagery. I wore my hair like Sid Branton’s for a while, too: I had it dyed purple and everything. I like to play bass a lot. There’s just something about plucking those fat strings that’s so satisfying. I don’t know that many people understand that. Everyone seems to think that playing guitar is like the ultimate, like you have to wah-wah and screech and clang in order to be somebody. Shit, try taking the bass line out of your favorite tune, man, it will blow your fucking mind. It’s totally necessary, completely necessary. It grounds the whole thing. It would all fall apart otherwise. A bass player’s got to make a lot out of nothing. Just simple, grounded stuff. I like that meatiness to it, that solidity. It’s like a feeling that I can only compare to like, surfing, when you’re riding the wave. Once you’re up on it, and the rhythm is solid, and you’re carrying the whole tune with you, you just feel like nothing can stop you, like you’ll just keep going and going forever, and then the song ends. I jump around like a monkey when I play that shit. Everyone seems to think that the guitar player has to do all the theatrics, like they have to look all crazy when they’re strumming chords, or bending a note or some shit. But I think the bass player should be the one getting crazy. They’re thumping the fucking whole room with their plucking. They’d better be moving. I dance like crazy when I start plucking that thing. I shave my head now, too, so it’s cool when I wag my head around, I look all hard-core.
What else to say about me? I smoke American Spirits. Have since I was 10. It’s ok with my mom; she says I’ll be lucky enough to die by natural causes like cancer, rather than something like a car crash or a bullet or something. I see her point. I figure, what the hell. If I’m going to die this way, then at least it’s by my own fucking hand, you know? Besides, I’ve got an uncle who’s like 87 and has been smoking forever and he’s doing just fine, other than for a shitload of liverspots. I always try not to stare at them, but they’re like all over his hands and stuff, it’s kind of weird looking. But he’s a cool guy. He used to make shoes for Frank Sinatra–no fucking kidding. He was hip with the mobsters like that. He still smokes cigars. He’s a real cool guy. I wouldn’t mind being that old, even with liverspots, if I was like him. He has a house with a swimming pool in Arizona, it’s a nice house, it’s got a game room and everything. I’ve tried to get him to let me throw a party with all my friends there, at the pool, with the house to ourselves, that would be so crazy wild. But he never lets me, the selfish old bastard. He’s going to a retirement home for sure when he breaks a hip. I wouldn’t want to be old enough to be sent to a retirement home. That would suck a fat one.
Let’s see. What else about me. Now that I’ve shaved my head, I’m looking pretty hardcore. I’m thinking of removing my earring to look even harder, but I don’t know, I’ve had it in so long it would feel weird without it. Like I’d be naked or something. I have this one friend who wears a hat everywhere he goes, like all the time, he’s got this same hat on. I’d never seen him without the hat, until just the other day, I saw him without his hat on. It was pretty weird. I didn’t even know who he was at first. That’s why I’m scared to take out my earring. It’s like people start to identify you with certain things, and then when you change it it fucks everything up. Which is cool. But I don’t know if I want to do that just yet with the earring, because I already just did that with shaving my head. That was a pretty fucked up thing to do, because before I looked like Sid Branton.
Well, that’s pretty much all that I can think of to write about me. There’s a lot more stuff I could tell you, but it’s hard to think of it all right now. I could tell you stories from growing up, but I don’t know if that’s pertinent to this essay. I have some pretty fucked up stories, though, if you want to hear them. I grew up with 3 older brothers; they did some pretty fucked up stuff. I did some pretty fucked up stuff, too, when I was little. I’m more normal now. I play bass a lot and hang out at The Moribund Cafe. It’s cool there because they let you smoke cigarettes inside, and use your coffee cup as an ashtray. They don’t give a fuck there. I play my bass there on Thursdays with my band, The Brazened Nuts. All of our friends come to that. It gets pretty wild. We had a girl flashing her boobies at us one time. We’re probably going to keep playing there.

Koan Brothers

my grandchild wanted me to impart wisdom upon him.

“grandpa, grandpa” he said, tugging at my beard, “what have you learned?”

i looked down at him with affection. “stay away from me.”

Juggland 3

The first time the Juniper Bush spake unto Krispin, he was a-crouched amongst the bracken, unburdening his daily intestinal compilement of waste matter. As Krispin was wont to do whilst engaged in such ruminative severance, he was conversing a-loud as if to a projected wiser double of himself, whom in turn answers his troubled queries with sage assurances.
[Krispin1: Auf! Tha young Lundburger lass be lookin gooood! Why, ah'd lak to bend the naughty girl over m'knee for some righteous spankin' . . .
Krispin2: Peace, warrior! Bear in mind the auspices of her father, Lord Lundburger. . .
Krispin1: Egad! But the ripen'd melons . . . ! the throb of budding fertility . . .!
Krispin2: Hold, ye! Wha would Betsy say?
Krispin1: . . .
Krispin2: You know the consequences of betrayal. You bear yet the marks of rolling pin pon your hind parts even today . . .

And so forth]

Today Krispin is concerned with the topick of love.
“Tain’t nuttin like the fruits of love, ooweeeouuu! love [sniff. . .] why, tis in the air! agh, spring! when ah’m done here, why, ah’ll pick that sprig of clover down yonder, and present it unto Betsy, make her feel like a young un’ agin. she’ll squeal like a gawdammed pig when i set to her with such manly vigor . . . maybe ah’ll even . . .”
Whereupon the Juniper Bush spoke:
“Have you ever been in love? It’s not the most pleasant experience in the world. It’s full of jealousy and pain and heart-rending sorrow.”
Krispin, assuming that it is his customary counterpart, answers: “Naw then, I member Betsy first time I took her back o’ the barn. Tha first kiss, truculent in the wondrous devilry of it all. I almost shudder to think of the magic we made then, in that hay–we didn’t even remove our clothing. . . and yet, so deep, this shuddering. . . “
The Juniper Bush coughs, not all too politely. “Scuse me, Nightingale, but this ‘Love’? What is it? Love is Great! Love is the Ultimate! But do you understand what love really entails?”
Krispin, realizing that his conversational partner is growing confrontational past any self-induced bounds, that indeed, he is speaking to some Other Entity, tries frenziedly to speed his bowel movements and prepare for escape. “Who . . .Jimmy, ye mother fucker, is tha you?!”
“I have a theory, see. I think that love is a conspiracy. I think that love is a myth. I think that love is a simulation devised to pull the wool over your eyes and the rug out from under you. A fantastickal matrix of false information.”
Krispin, straining desperately to release a reticent load, “Love is . . . Love is the greatest thing in Juggland! Ah’m the first to trumpet the virtues of warfare, sure! Ah love to butcher and slash m’way to victory, berserk with dopamine just as much as th’ next lad! . . . .Uggnnggh! . . . But Love . . . in Valhalla, surely, all is Love. The ideal, the true connection in humanly relations. . . . Mmmph!. . . .Without Love . . .”
“Without love, what is the world but death and struggle?” the Juniper Bush asks, dryly, “Let’s be honest here. We live in a world where death is all around us. We’re always killing each other. We’re always killing ourselves. There is nowhere we can go to escape this reality. Except, of course, to succumb to death itself. Is this your love?”
Herein Krispin grows righteously angry at being thus addressed: “Who’s there?! Ah’m trying to peacefully relieve m’self of fecal truncations, like a good citizen . . . It’s not polite. . . Gawddammit, it’s not proper to address me whilst ah am so affianced . . .”
“I’m a juniper bush. Over here, see the fronds a-waving. It’s not so very polite to be shitting on my property, and then propounding the tenets of an Ideal you don’t fully comprehend.”
Krispin contemplates this. “Well, ah guess ah can’t argue with that one. I apologize for the intrudence. Pray, continue with your philosophizing, goodly bush, as ah finish up with me business here.”
“Ahem. The descent into love is the donning of blinders. The slickness of syrup coating the tongue. Synthetic. Mimetic. It is an illusion, a fantasy. And what makes it all so amazing is that the concept was not created by some invisibly structured higher order of beings . . . no, it was formulated by YOU . . . you, digging your head into the wing of
society. Save me, you cried, save me from myself. But let us examine this ‘love.’ What is love? Love is vulnerability. Love is exposing your weaknesses. Love is always letting someone else win. And this, this is a good thing?”
Krispin sits erect momentarily, “Nooo!” he trumpets.
“Love means giving yourself to others at the expense of yourself. Love means letting someone else have power over you. Love means that you are needy. Love means that you are weak. Is this what you are?”
Krispin’s eyes a-gleam. “Gawdam, nooo!”
“We keep talking about freedom, as if freedom is the meaning of love, a right to exist, something ideally we all share. No, i tell you, freedom is not a right, it’s something you earn. It’s something you fight for.”
“Dam right, ain’t tha the truth! Ah earned me right to fair pickins in the mess hall!”
“The process of maturation is the process of forming your own space in the world. This is not a peaceful process. It is violent. Your body undergoes metamorphosis. You consume–you produce waste.”
“True nuff. But stay a minute. What exactly does a Juniper Bush know of love?”
The J.B. seems to sag a bit. “I loved an apple tree, once.”
“What happened?”
“Nearly withered away over it. The tree was felled by a bolt of lightening one night. But don’t try to reduce my understanding to such sentimental precepts.”
“Of course not, ” Krispin soothes the bush, “Why, ah believe ah’ve completed my mission here, out in these woods here today. Ah feel ten pounds lighter, like ah could float away upon these winds. . . “
“See, changing the subject. Always trying to run away from the brutal nature of love. Love is nothing pretty, I’m warning you. So when you use the words, do not use them lightly. If there’s one thing you’ve learned from me, let it be this: love is not anything you could ever want. Love is not anything you could ever desire. It is a burden. Fair thee well, soldier. Remember my words. . . “
” . . . If there’s one thing ah’ve learned, it’s tha freakin bushes can tractate even more than a preacher. . .”
“I heard that!”

This was not the first, nor the last time the Juniper Bush held conference
with a Jugglander . . . .

Juggland 2

(pertaining as to the mead-hall discussion of what to do upon the morrow. . . )

Vince: i speak of the ocean depths, man, into which my ancestor, the second lieutenant of Lord Vespor himself, delved into, wrestling with a squid of mountainous proportion for seven hours, setting the universal record for holding one’s breath.

Gremel: eh? ah thought he was swallered by a great fish, and sat there for seven days, living off of shrimp brine . . .

Jimmy: naw, that was my great grand-pappy, blubber-fer-brains.

Gremel: don’t call me dat, Jimmy. i told you not to call me dat.

Vince: just think. like a long pipe stem, kinda. we could walk along the sea floor and bring back never-before-seen submarine flowers for the wives, just in time for the fertility rites.

Krispin: fuck tha vegetation! let’s grab us some mer-maiden, rumored to reside, languidly and big-bosomed, within the darkened forests of the sea-floor!
All (uplifting mead cups and doing a quick polska about the room):
Yea! Let us meet us some mer-maiden,
said to reside in the submarined eden
of the salty brined oceanic deep!
oh, them big-eyed long-tressed sea gaaaals!
they may not be in possession of feet,
but non-fishy parts are most certainly mammaaaal!

L. Lornus: ey! dont tha fuckin pee in that corner agin, Jimmy! I’m sick and goddamned tired of steppin in yer piss!

Jimmy (grumbling as he exuents the mead-hall): damnation. feels like I’m at home . . . Jimmy doan do this. . . Jimmy doan do tha. . . quit yer laughin, blubber-fuckin-brains! . . .

Gremel: eh, methinks somebody’s been swiggin over-much mead . . .

Vince: And I ask ye, sir Gremel, is that such a crime? I submit for all your contemplation, gentlemen, the question: can one, ever, drink too much mead?

(short silence, excepting for a few frothy sips)

Krispin: I think the only crime right now is that we’ve still got an un-tapped mead barrel over yonder, brethren.

Jimmy (re-entering): let’s go us another fuckin round!

All (forming into an impromptu can-can line):
Aye, let us un-tap us another mead barrel,
unburden its aerated goodness into our cups,
free its spirit in our stomach’s widening embrace–
oh, nectar of Valhalla! golden hearted meeeeaaaad!

L. Lornus: well, ah don’t know about you lads, but ah’ve got to slay me an elk or two. ah need the skin for me drum, and the meat for the wivey’s kibble kiln.

Gremel: some huntin sounds lak a good spend of day . . . out in th fresh pine morn, crouchin amongst the brush to surprise the water-hole solicitude of a horned creature with a swiftly mounted spear.

Jimmy: shut yer trap there, huntin boy! what kind of arcane method of slaughter is this? spear? art thou neanderthal yet? i bet you still catch your fish with such primitive resolve . . . ? (Gremel looks sheepish) Need to keep up with the latest in scientifickal thought, lad. we’ve dispensed with that old predatorial mechanism–it’s all animal psychology now.

Vince: that’s right. we’ve determined that if we pretend to be friendly, then they will almost tan their own hides for us. It’s like this: we begin with the premise that there is an ideal state of being, one in which animal and man alike share the fruits of the most high. we then begin to simulate this very state, as if it should be so, and was meant to be so, and that the brutal nature of our relations was but a bad dream of the past. like the oxen in the field? they think that they’re working for Valhalla. they practically come to us and ask us to be yoked.

Gremel: sort of lak de notion of a carrot pon a stick . . . ?

Vince: precisely. we got us elk who fall over each other trying to be the next candidate for slaughter. ’sacrifice,’ we call it. things proceed just as they did before, except that now, to all appearances, we are brothers in the vision of futurity.

Jimmy and Vince put their arms around each other and croon in falsetto:
Ah, little lamb!
What better way to help the world,
than to better thyself
(and work for us)?
Come help us build a better future,
for our children,
for our earth,
for our G-d
(and for our veal tonight!)

L. Lornus: rmmph. ah like to keep actions honest, meself. straightforward with the spear-waiting. if it was good enough for my ancestors than it’s good enough for me.

Krispin: Braaaaaplth! Scuse me, lads. I’m going to bid ye godnight fer naw. I doth hear Betsy’s rump a-callin . . .

Juggland 1

“hi honey” *smack* “how was your day?”
“i had a hard time with the dragon, but eventually i was able to free my arm from its serpentine grasp and sever it’s thick neck in two.”
“would you like a little mescal, my sweet?”
“aye, that would fuckin do the trick.”
vince settles himself gruntily upon the bench. he watches his wife’s thick haunches sinuous shifting to the cabinet. he’s noticed that her ass seems to have an almost distinct consciousness, as a separate entity, with its own individual outlook upon the world. whilst she is immersed in the activity of unstoppering the bottle and pouring, he can sense it watching him back, protruded whole in his direction, an alien awareness, layered, sandwiched with purpose neither he nor his wife can intuit. he remembers the first time he saw grunhilda at the may fair festivities, glowering in her ruddiness, a butcher’s daughter, at ease around conglomerations of meat. the first thing that caught his attention, out of the corner of his eye, was the rotundity of her nether-regions, glorious in the summer moon light, uplifted in her dancing, quivering with supple eagerness. aye, for they seemed to call to him, and he almost in a trance waltzed within meshing distance, coming up behind her and swaying mesmerized to the beat of the pooka drum. she needed not to look in his eyes, for her buttocks did all the communicating necessary, as they freaked into the dawns early dew.
having been espoused to grunhilda for a good number of seasons now, he has come to observe a disparity between her dumb glutinous hinds, and her outspoken gesticulating tongue. he married one, and has to listen to the other. not that grunhilda is a bad mate, but it’s simply disconcerting for vince at times, when he seems to be having wonderful sign language reveries with one, and gossip mongering verbal warfare with the other. grunhilda herself seems unable to quite control It, and vince finds that a sure fire way to soothen down a sticky situation is to pay caressing attentions to It, to pat It slightly and even murmur sweet and promising things to Its protuberant mass. grunhilda always acquiesces, despite herself–and in this way, they have found a daily treaty in their communal lives, a mediator of disputes.
vince has had such success in this particular harmonizing of his wifely relations, that he has been called upon for advice in the mead hall.
“arrrgh, tha’ little bitch has been snookerin aboot the gadammed village by naw. vince! ya seem to have subdued ya filly right proper. wha’s tha secret, ey?”
“ehem. . . you fella’s ever . . . get jiggy with more than just the sea salt, know what i mean?”
“wha the fuck’s this blarney on aboot?”
“i mean . . . you know, the backdoor and such, in the other way. . .”
” . . . hey jimmy, ah think this pervert’s fucking his lass in the arse-hole . . .?”
so vince becomes a purveyor of anal loving—once appropriately sodden with hops, he delights his rapt rowdy audience with the proselytization of its wonders. they all go home that night and eagerly awaken their sleepy and wholesome wives.
“bessy, tis aboot time we’s tried sometin new . . . “
“ack, sltpkt, . . . krispin! . . .tha’s the wrong way! . . .”
the wives gather bow-legged the next day, seeming to gravitate to grunhilda, in subconscious subservience to her enmassed gravity.
vince thinks of all of this, now, as she bends to pour. like an other world co-existing within our own, part of us, yet living apart from us, slightly bulbous. an eye that views all of our private, darkest, deepest outpourings with infinite patience, embracing our weariness with softened twin cushioning.

The Spray Of Falling Away

yoru awakens one morning to find that he is missing.
he pursues his routine to trail where he went.
but where there were sprouting words there is silence.
clues everywhere as to his passing,
but yoru’s breath is gone, left fingering his theories,
plots of bitterness to blame the darkness.

we stood, Tubber and I, with the symphonic sky spread before us, the clouds bathed in the colors of sunset, the moon a distant sliver glowing.
“i cannot shake the indescribable sense that this is beyond me,” Tubber states, hands clasped behind his back, “that i cannot possibly appreciate this unique and singular death of the day, for it is yet the same.”
I stroke my sideburn fuzz. “But if it were a video game, and you could guide a mythical character through this land, you would marvel at these same skies, stop to admire the majesty of creation. it is too big, too apart from our breathing cusp of life here.”
“and yet inseparable,” Tubber adds, “it is so far and yet so much a part of us, such that we cannot grasp its entirety, can only sense the shadow of its wonder, and yet continue living without.”

the dark masses that gravitate space outward, forever tearing at the spinning center. the people, gathered about televisions, huddled in speeding cars listening to radios, wires spun across the earth to catch their voices together. no one can escape.

horatio awoke to the sound of another day breaking into continuance, into reality, into this-is-something-we’ve-seen-before-and-will-soon-forget. and the lines of repetitive muscled movement trailed into soft always forming skin. all this and more and so much less, because everything is reduced to understand to sell. but suddenly her eyes soft and wanting, transforming everything into her raw existence, her shattering warmth. and gods come out to play in the fields of trivial imperfection, the everyday the eternal
the momentary drama of a chosen space to drop. the golden crashing and crackling snapping over the anchor of the kick drum.

02a/*0000

the lights of the pier rose up waveringly along the whitened curves of the boats. i could see the little peach hairs on jessica’s outlined nose.
there was that silence, where i wanted to say everything, and knew that it would fall forever short.

it is a day, a night, an alarmed cold wake, a color washed set. the lions basking in the sun on tv, pulling down prey; the pitbull on my couch, wiggling his jowls and snuffling; a mom herding her kids to school; an ambulance trucking swiftly into the corridored distance.

I woke up with my shirt all twisted half around my body, I hate that shit. Plus I had crust in the corners of my eyes that cut me when I tried to wipe them out. My mother was already up, as usual, doing her Yoga For Dummies workout in front of the TV in her biker’s outfit. She managed to emit an artificially cheery good-morning in between her panting attempts at deep breathing, which I answered with the swift cocking of my left leg to release a gust of stale pizza-sitting-all-night-in-my-stomach gas.
“Now focus on the flowing out from your lower belly. Imagine that you are a flower stalk and you are trying to garner water to open your petals for the day. Sucking the water up, sucking the water up. There, now open your petals to the sun. Open up your flower and breathe out that colorful life for the bees to see and come to pollenize you,” the TV said.
I filled up a glistening bowl with Lucky Charms and plopped myself onto the sofa, my morning smell settling around me. The chick doing the Yoga on the screen was kind of alluring in a middle-aged Asian mix kind of way.
“I’d like to pollenize her,” I said thoughtfully.
“Loopy!” my mother wheezed, struggling to keep her knees pressed to the carpet.
“Shut up ma.”
I managed to collect 5 marshmallows on my spoon at once. I love the way the milk gets all sweet and thick and the color of the cereal runs into it.

“it all goes smoothly until that one moment in your life when you lose your grasp on time, you focus too intently on one object, and you can’t see anything connected to it, only the object, shadowed, singular, and it becomes everything, and there is nothing left. and suddenly you are lost, and the world is moving apart from you as you watch, breath fogging into the glass.”
–Timothy Martin, inmate of Yellow Bay State Prison, death row.

It’s funny how when people need to reach out to someone the most, they end up hurting themselves and others. As if there’s some kind of pride to be taken in holding out to the end, as if there’s something commendable in it, heroic, as if there was strings swelling in the background and someone was sitting in the darkness and watching you, glowing, popcorn grease on their fingers, and you were everything, tragic, beautiful, and nothing anyone could ever be.

let me put it another way: there’s a whole world out there, columbus, that isn’t named, isn’t claimed, isn’t famed. and it’s all around you.
this is personal.

Loopy’s Adventures at Ye Old Donut Shoppe: Part II

I bowed into the waiting police mobile while at the same time blowing a massive snot rocket. Officer Dibble winced approvingly. The wince is the mainstay of Dibble’s facial expressions, along with his crooked grin. He only grins at those whom he considers his chums–the kind of people he would share a donut with–but his wince is universally bestowed. I think he imagines he looks like Clint Eastwood when he does it, although truth be told he looks more like he’s trying to get out that last little reluctant tip of turd that refuses to slip out with its brethren. You know what I mean. It’s probably ruined many a contemplative afternoon.
He sniffed at me threateningly. “You been smokin reefer?” he asked, staring me down like the dad I never had.
“Naw, Officer Dibble. You’re smelling pizza. I was playing Ninja Star 3. I died on the 4th level.”
“The 4th level?! What’s gotten into you, boy?” He slowed down the car and cruised by a nun, perusing her intently to see if he could make out any hint of the female form in her dark, cryptic folds. “You haven’t been eating enough, can’t concentrate. Gotta get them carbs, kid. Breaded materials.”
“See this?” he asked, wincing and flourishing a welded bicep, “Go ahead, feel it. Go on.” I didn’t particularly want to, but it seemed more of a command than a suggestion. I wasn’t in the mood for a round of noogies.
“Yeah! Now that’s what a man feels like, junior! You think I got that from eating salads?” He stared at me violently, accusingly, as if I had said that he had gotten it from eating salads. I shook my head. “Shit. I’ve been eating meat and potatoes and corn bread since I was three. And there ain’t nothin, NOTHIN, like a good chocolate coated donut. That’ll put some hair on yer chest.”
He drove in silence for a while, letting the wisdom of his words sink in. My stomach sounded as if it were speaking in tongues. I was starting to get jittery. And then we were there, finally, just as my palms were beginning to sweat. The sweet neon yellow sign proclaiming “open 24 hours” shined like a beacon before me. Just as we were getting out of the car, Officer Dibble spotted Ms. Jesperson swaying down the street in platform shoes and a lipstick red miniskirt. “Goddam,” Dibble muttered, wincing, “justice must be served. Get me a chocolate iced custard filled, son,” and he drove off to do his duty. He was always talking about his “duty.” It was his duty to pat down the young boys if they were “up to no good” in the street, and it was his duty to pick up women in his car and “ensure that they are safe and protected.” I wiped my hands on my pants and entered the donut haven, harbor from the sea of life, where things are sweet and fried and go well with either milk or coffee, depending on the time of day.
“Josephine!” I barked, “are you ever a sight for sore eyes! These glazed devil’s food donuts pale by comparison.” I glued my face to the donut window and salivated eagerly. Josephine got out a box and stood ready with her tongs. Josephine is undoubtedly the top donut server in the world. She’s silent, efficient, and she knows exactly what donut you mean when you point vaguely at the donut display.
I took in a deep breath and commandeered the troops, checking for freshness, thickness of icing, and general integrity of appearance.
“Ok. I want 3 chocolate iced, 1 lemon filled, 1 chocolate iced creme filled, 1 chocolate iced custard filled, 3 chocolate iced with sprinkles, 1 raspberry filled, 1 cinammon apple filled, and. . .,” here i hesitated, poised between the sour cream and the maple iced, “and 1 maple iced.” I watched with satisfaction as Josephine scooped the chosen into the box.
“And a chocolate milk, please. Josephine, you are an amazing specimen of human endearment. You make my heart palpitate even more than running the mile in PE once did.” I’m not even sure that Josephine speaks English. But she knows her donuts, and that’s all that I could ask for in a woman. Plus she’s got these really big tits that press against the counter when she bends over to nab a donut.
I took my box and my milk and scuttled out the door into the night, the night that was now friendly, secure, and centered about me. Dibble’s car was parked in a dark spot down the street, and it appeared to be shaking back and forth. I figured that he must be struggling with some dastardly criminal, and could use the extra stamina provided by a hearty donut, just like Popeye with the spinach. I approached the car and took out a
chocolate iced custard filled. Officer Dibble was in the back seat with Ms. Jesperson bucking up and down on top of him and clinging to the wire mesh.
”Goddam,” he was saying, “Don’t make me break out the handcuffs and hog-tie you, bitch.”
“Here you go, Officer Dibble,” I said, holding up the donut. He winced at me sweatily and then grinned at the donut.
“Now that’s what I call service. Go home now, son, and stay out of trouble.” He took a generous bite from the donut and dribbled some of the custard onto Ms. Jesperson’s bared left shank. I steeled myself for the journey home with a chocolate iced and zipped up my windbreaker. Nothing like a walk at night armed with a box of donuts. The desire now was sweet, when the donuts were so close, so warm, and so fragrant. I cradled them
in my arms and envisioned the satiation that would take place before the TV that night.

Loopy’s Adventures at Ye Old Donut Shoppe: Part I

GYNECOLOGIST DISCOVERS INTACT ICHTHYOSAUR FOSSIL LODGED WITHIN PROXIMAL COLON OF QUAKERTOWN, NEW JERSEY RESIDENT.
“Must ‘ave been from that spelunking trip where i got trapped in a cave for three weeks,” says flabbergasted 47 year old Penitent High music teacher.

These were the headlines in my mind when I stepped up onto the curb at approximately 9 o’clock on a Thursday night, crossing over Juniper Ct and moving south on Lincoln St, en route to rendezvous with the sweet crustated circular pieces of sweetness that I like to call “my fix.”
“Ma! I’m going to go get my fix!” I call out to the motionless sack swathed in sweat clothes seated before the TV as I slip into my windbreaker.
I like custard and I like jellies and I like them old-fashioned and I like them powdery and twined and plain and sprinkled.
I depressed my left nostril and blew snot gustily out of my face as I entered Jimmy’s Pizzeria on a little detour. I like to let my desire peak before I get my fix. So I grunted at Herbert as I walked by the counter, and he rustled his paper at me, and I stuck my quarter into the slot of the Ninja Star 3 coin-op. It’s the only one left in town, and so far no one has topped my high score of 14,773,815, set on the eve of February 25, 1991. I remember that date very well. I had just received a haircut, and I had gel stiffened into my hair and it seemed to encapsulate my skull like a helmet, such that I felt very focused, kind of buckled in. I only used 2 quarters. Herb gave me a free slice of mushroom pizza. I had to pee so bad afterward that I went on the sidewalk in front of Jimmy’s, and the Walker kids saw me on their way back from a junior high school dance. They told their parents that they “saw my big wee-wee” and their dad got really mad and told the police and everyone thought I was a pedophile flasher for a while, and I kept getting frisked every time I went out of my house. The whole hoopla kind of died down when one of the Walker kids was found sniffing glue behind the kickball courts. I made pretty good friends with the police in the meanwhile, and they were impressed with my high score.
That was actually about the time that my fix got started. After hanging out with Officer Dibble and his gang for long enough, I began to get cravings for donuts, because he’d offer me one from the pink box he always has next to him in his front seat. He still frisks me down sometimes, kind of to keep me in line and ensure that our relationship appears professional.
I jiggled the joystick around for a while and got to the 4th level, but I missed a beat on the fat guy with a bo stick, and got killed by a stray rolling oil barrel. I may never top my own score, I guess I had reached a peak, kind of like how an athlete can only be so good for so long before they get too old. Maybe it’s because I no longer have the same ambition, the same drive I once did, now that I’ve got my fix.
My fix. I wiped the drool from the corners of my mouth and hitched up my pants. Time to pay Josephine a visit.
“Here I come,” I murmured huskily to myself, cocking a finger pistol at Herb as I passed. He pretended to collapse backwards, and knocked over a stack of pizza boxes. I decided that it was worthwhile to stand and laugh. But soon I tired of belittling the pathetic worm, and continued onward to my mission.
And then I suddenly knew that tonight was a special night, that the planets were aligned for me. Because right as I plunged out into the cold, cruel night, Officer Dibble was cruising by, grinning crookedly all over his ruddy face under his grey spiked hair.
“Hop on in, boy!” he beckoned to me.

Introducing Loopy

FORENSIC EVIDENCE SUGGESTS THAT LOOPY HAS VANISHED TWIN THAT NOW RESIDES IN LAP OF LUXURY IN PARALLEL UNIVERSE AFTER YOUTH FILLED WITH EXCITEMENT AND BUXOM GALS.

these were the headlines in my mind when mom picked me up from the soccer game.
“Loopy,” she said unto me, “you really need to clean behind your ears.”
“Ma. I just finished a game. Oranges and Gatorade only please.”
She handed me a warm cream soda and drove the way she always does, hunched over the steering wheel like a vulture, doing 65 in 25 speed limit zones and 40 on the freeway, peering ahead intently at the road and not hearing a thing I say to her.
“Today I dropped a stool that spanned the length of the bowl, and it was rocky,” I informed her, sipping from my cream soda and burping immediately after every sip.
“Mmm hmmm,” she said helpfully.
“Jeremy said the word ‘Fuck’ as many times as he could. He had counted 316 1/2 by the time Ms Akita grabbed him by his ear and made him walk the plank.”
“Is that right?” she said after a pause. I always have the best conversations with my mom when she’s driving. Me, I could care less for driving. It seems too stressful. The time I tried it I got hives. I’d rather have other people drive me around anyway.
I sat back in my chair and stared at an old man in the car next to me. Now, it is true that if I stayed around after the game and hung out with the guys, I could have all the orange slices and Arctic Freeze I desire, courtesy of Rangsey’s spouse. But then I’d have to act all chummy with them, talk about who is going to be shortstop of the year, or how hot the
latest chick in the Doritos commercial is. Then I would have to pretend to be interesting, and try to say things that are funny. Trouble is, to say something funny, I’d think about it and formulate it and finally settle on the perfect quip, containing just the right amount of stinging wit, irony, and satire, but then when I’d say it, the conversation would already have moved on to gym dicks, or punching bags, or Volvos, and everyone would look at me blankly and you could see the same thought running through their faces like a row of television sets on the same station: “Loopy’s not one of us. Loopy’s trying too hard. Loopy eats fruit loops and watches Crossing Over reruns.” The orange slices aren’t worth the social stigma. I realized suddenly that I am staring at the old man and drooling with my index finger curled into my mouth like a clothes hanger, and we are stopped at a red
light and he is looking back at me with a horrified expression on his face, the kind of expression I’d imagine he’d have if I were a giant troll that waggled my 13′ dick at him and threatened to sodomize him with it. I quickly averted my eyes and sipped my soda and tried to look nonchalant while burping into my mouth quietly.
I’ve always had this problem with staring agog at things when I’m daydreaming. Like in 6th grade, when I was thinking about strategies to beat the final henchman in Kabuki Quantum Fighter, and I got sent to the vice-principle’s office for staring at Katherine Zetger’s oversized breasts, which, unhappily, I didn’t even notice in my oblivious thrall. Thereafter I was known as “Pervert” to the rest of the junior high school denizens.
Katherine’s hockey playing love interest gave me a crack in the stomach in the locker room that I believe broke one of my young developing ribs, because I always get this weird feeling there whenever I breathe too deep.

Just Another Soirée

generalissimo jordan c. lubertwat scans the horizon with pinky extended double-jointedly, his belly protuberant and buoyed up by an equally excrescent bottom, his goatee failing to conceal a conspicuous absence of chin. he cuts quite a figure there, silhouetted before the sun, questing avidly for a cricket ball. “constantine!” he barks, “check that patch of grass!” the sunglass shielded youth springs to attention and bends professionally among the shrubbery. generalissimo lubertwat turns to me and seems to contemplate saying something, and spits instead. i take this as a grudging acknowledgment of my cricket skills. i open my cigarette case and offer a dunhill. he waves it aside with a snort, saying “those virginia slim jims are for women. cuban stogies only for me please,” thus implying that real men must satisfy their oral fixations with large objects. i am about to point out the homoerotic logical phallusy of his statement when constantine straightens up with the cricket ball held to the sky. the generalissimo hacks up some sputum and bellows “now you’ve got it, here comes the googly!” and he winds up, his belly wobbling earnestly. his leg slips a bit and he loses his balance just as the ball comes off, tottering comically on his stumpy booted legs. and dammit if he doesn’t bowl a proper googly–in fact, a chinaman i should say, since he’s left-handed–and takes a wicket. the generalissimo roars and brandishes his pistol, blasting it into the air triumphantly. constantine stands at attention, his clean-shaven face immobile and focused. i am for a moment ready to descry the complete luck and lack of skill involved in the matter, but the gleeful sputtering of the pistol in my ear reminds me of the generalissimo’s unpleasant past-time of amassing and applying tools of torture. i take a drag off my dunhill and shrug, thinking of ways to get him back. he sighs and places a meaty arm around my shoulder, and i gather that the game is over, now that he can possess the after-glow of success, like having the last word in a pointless argument. he guides us towards the pool, where the women are laid out, squealing like seals over their shrimp cocktails. “the ways of god are manifest,” he tells me beneficently, “the day may soon come when we shall have to walk about wearing bio-engineered suits protecting us from all evil. may we enjoy our youth and vigor while we may.” “good game,” i say, interpreting this speech as an attempt at good sportsmanship. we settle ourselves with grunts onto the lawn chairs, and i notice lubertwat’s wife groping at constantine as he passes. the generalissimo orders us martinis. “oh, and i just love the way it bolsters up my breasts. i wouldn’t be able to survive without it,” my wife comments shrilly to the generalissimo’s, continuing some conversation which i do my utmost to ignore. a fly settles onto my arm and sits there twiddling its arms against
its head. the generalissimo belches peremptorily and begins a monologue, seemingly directed to himself, regarding the in’s and out’s of the exercising of the pc muscle. i doze off briefly in the sun, only to be awakened by the unpleasant sight of my wife plummeting into the pool, her breasts dangling before her like an udder. i reflect on what must have first attracted me to her, when we were young and her thighs were rippled with toned muscle rather than cellulite. and i am mildly surprised to remember that it was indeed her breasts, which i used to free from trappings like a christmas present in the backseat of my jetta. “here they are!” i would exclaim, bobbling them affectionately in my hands, “liberty to the oppressed! let them dangle free like apples falling from a tree!”, making reference to those first fruits which tempted man away from god. i would then take them into my mouth and suckle on them. then i would . . . well, what is the use in harping on the glories of my youth? those breasts which were once so succulent now hang off her belly like an old codger’s scrotum sack. she rises out of the shallow end with water dripping off of her like some sea monster and comes over to me, her feet slapping wetly against the pavement. all of a sudden i am struck with the urge for revenge, for the chinaman, for the loss of beauty, and youth, and the trivial demeaning of my life which was once so fraught with ambition. i pretend to jerk upright suddenly from a deep sleep and knock my wife heftily onto the generalissimo, who is solemnly engaged in sucking the remnants of juice out of the bottom of his martini glass. “zounds!” he explodes, “get this bovine off of me! my leg is broken!” constantine bounds out of the house and begins the futile effort of trying to lift up my wife with both hands. my wife is lowing to the heavens above, and the generalissimo’s wife comes behind constantine, ostensibly to help, but she seems to be doing more pulling on the boy than on anything else. soon even the pug, which doesn’t do anything other than snuffle and fart all day, gets up wearily and gets in on the fray, yapping frenziedly at them. i take that moment to pee in the pool unnoticed.

My Name Is Bill

when i lost my legs in ‘81 i thought it was the end of the world. i was incomplete, shattered, a fragment of a man. laying in my hospital bed i knew that i should be happy to be alive, that i should praise god for saving me, that i could still think and fuck and feel. but all i could think about was how i could never go up those wooden steps leading to my room two at a time again, hearing them shift and complain beneath me. i was somebody to pity, not fully human, deserving of a parking space right at the curb, colored blue, using special ramps to arrive at the door. people would move exaggeratedly out of my way and avoid looking into my eyes. i would have to pee like a woman.
i had to be treated for depression for the next year. i would shuttle awkwardly about in my wheelchair with my head down, only going out to rent movies and buy cigarettes, microwave chicken pot pies, and booze. i felt ashamed of my handicap, and what made it worse was that i could still feel my legs, that they were still there in my mind. i remembered what it was like to walk down the beach and feel my heels sink into the sand. i was something grotesque, stumps waggling about, children with fingers in their mouths staring fascinated and vaguely frightened. after a while i began to get used to wheeling around, my arms grew strong and sinewy, my chest filled out, and i began going for scoots around the park and the beach, checking out the girls, getting a tan. i discovered that girls sometimes have a strange attraction to disabled people, like it
makes them feel special, like they’re giving you some wonderful wild gift when they fuck you. charity sex, i call it. i’ve talked to other guys in wheelchairs, and they agree. a man in a wheelchair in a club is going to have a chick freaking him, guaranteed.
i began to realize that though i may have lost my legs, my mind had regenerated and transformed in a new way: i was a renewed form of human being, welded flesh with steel, a modern day centaur, a metamorphosed creature, evolving, adapting to my limits, discovering my peculiar freedom. my legs were gone. but in their place was a set of burnished wheels.
i don’t feel sorry for myself, i don’t feel like i’m missing anything anymore. i’m experiencing things differently. my wheels are a part of me, they are a part of my body, an extension of myself, just the way my legs once were. am i as agile? no, but i’m faster, i’m smoother, and damn, downhills are a piece of cake.
i have hope for the future. i can see a day where bodies are no longer important as anything more than command centers for a vast inter-connected network of minds. when we’ve learned to adapt to our new tools, and to hold them close to us, to cherish what new horizons they give us, and to never lament the loss of what is past. things that occur to us, the will of God, whether gentle or violent, are things that change us, irrevocably. the
only thing to do is adapt. the only thing to do is grow. all that love and pain. all that fear and defiance. all that loneliness and friendship. and this is the way new worlds are born.

A Glimpse Of Shameless Expression

joy, the movement of the body full of light, bouncing, rippling, limbs loosened, unfettered by appearance. she stood on a street corner dancing, wobbling about to a rhythm only she could hear, cars streaming through the intersection glancing, passerbys milling past the curb to the flashing call of the next sidewalk shore.
is it that people have seen everything? world-weary, dulled by the daily accosting blur of difference? or is it that people have seen nothing since that moment in their lives when someone beat the wonder out of them? childhood distilled to a residue of hidden malice. indifference.
there is only one language that cannot be misinterpreted: the unwithheld delight of the soul: the springy swinging of a dog’s bottom when you return home; the croon of a baby at the gift of attention, fingers waggling in bliss; the resounding, enveloping waves of beauty that emanate from a singer striking the depths of a note in a song; the radiant eyes of a stranger who knows herself in you.
sitting by the window in the bus, stopped at the light, i watched her standing there bopping about. i smiled to myself and felt happiness spread into me. i felt the potential in people, the delight fermented, waiting to be uncorked by a loving touch. there is so much more to every moment. if we could just stand like that in the midst of the crowd, and let our feelings flow through us, instead of running away to the next safe haven, instead of pretending not to understand. what is it in our lives that is more important than how we feel?

Tattoo

she stood seemingly perfectly arranged, admixture of coyness, bemused tolerance, majestic sideways downturned eyes, suggesting the line of her spine turning up into her ass, awareness of herself twisting towards the viewer. i stare at her for hours as i get my tattoo. yakuza wife. flesh property of some shadowy presence, the trophy of a name shrouded in smoke.
i could look at her forever, her hands folded into each other as if cradling a vase, her legs beginning to spread. as i watch her, body covered in needled colors, i become aware of her embedded calm, of her sharp poise. her body is loose and taut at the same time, her right breast jutting upwards, her nipple a soft punctuation in the outline against the darkness.
the body glove of her tattoo somehow makes her nakedness detached, protected from the desiring capture of the camera. her body has already been visibly claimed. money, power, ink penetrating the skin. i wonder what she is like in her unguarded moments, in her unconscious dreams where she is unmarked, innocent, and unprepared. but maybe we have no such space within ourselves, and everything we are is touched by someone, fingers branded in our veins, eyes pricked into our souls. there is nothing, perhaps, that can be hidden.
only claimed, renamed, and tattooed.

On and Off

i fall into the frames of space that swims eternally repeating before me, an old woman hacking into her arm, the bus driver singing a song in spanish, my fingers folding into each other. positive thoughts, i think. i can do this. think positive. i stare at buildings passing as if they hold some essential mystery, demanding my intentness. thoughts, think. i seem to be breaking into pieces. the airy hiss as the lighted box shudders to a
stop, like a gargantuan sleek beast cutting a swift fart. a kid shoulders his way to the concrete, enveloped in earphones. thoughts do not seem to matter at this current juncture of time. voices swarm through my arteries like an overbearing shock of electricity. move, move move, i tell the red light telepathically. i glare ferociously at a woman standing on the corner with a handbag. she has very tight calves, sweeping down out of her skirt into the sharp points of her heels. alert, i crane my head to capture this detail in my mind. it seems that this might save me. but a bottomless pit of frenzy opens in my face as the bus stays still, and i stroke my right ear to hold on. and then. it heaves, the doors swing closed, and the self-contained world continues its hurtling way to the next stop. a maid pulls the string and the sign lights up. she stands, wobbling against the metal posts, her breasts weighted to her belly. the kind of woman who is ignored by eyes searching for stars when she walks the streets to her job cleaning a rich family’s floors, hispanic, stocky, painted lips, hair tied back. yet looking at her standing in the air-conditioned bobble of the city’s mass transit system, i find her beautiful, her eyes prepared firmly for her exit. i feel a quiet breath of calm sweep into my mind and i look around me with the discovery of inner light, avoiding eyes, the abstract humanity of our containment, rustling paper bag, varicosely gripped cane, soft tufts of neck hair, intermittent coughing, the announcement of street names. a waiting room for the appointed daily grind of employment. i pull the string and stand swaying in the boxed movement. i step off into the day centered, part of a puzzle, fit into the jutting shapes of an uncompleted picture. patience.

urban stories

Act I

i begin my day with a banana and chai, trying to remember my dream of the night before. it had something to do with walking in puddles of beer. i try to understand the greater significance of this. i take a shit, shave, do all the things you do in the morning, trim my nose hairs, clean out my ears with q-tips. i get in my jeep and get in line on the boulevard. there is this girl in a honda next to me, hoops in her ears, shorts on that are pulling up around her tanned slender legs, sunglasses on. we are inching back and forth next to each other for a good three miles. oh man. look at those lips. she knows i’m looking at her. she keeps pulling on her cigarette. goddamn. kind of wavy brown hair, with a bandanna on. got that kind of bad girl look, like she could care less that i’m having adolescent fantasies looking at her slim right arm extended trimly onto the steering wheel. i tap into the back of the lexus in front of me. this fucking squirt of a kid comes popping out of the car, looking around the back, running his hand over it and examining it as if it were a fucking bank statement. he comes up to my door; he’s noticed the honey, too, i can tell by the way he seems to be imitating himself, the way chumps act when they know a hot girl could be watching.
“there’s a scratch on my car,” he tells me.
“get back in your car,” i tell him, looking straight ahead.
“could you please give me your information?”
i look at him. cars are starting to honk. the chick has moved forward a couple of cars. goddammit. he has spiky gelled up hair, one of those young shits who think they’re hot stuff because they work in some office in the film industry and eat hors’ d’oeuvres at parties where sometimes movie stars are seen. i briefly contemplate ramming into his car and driving away.
“get back in your car. this is what bumpers are for. get mommy to buy you a new one.”
“i’m going to take down your license number.”
i suddenly kick open my door, slamming him to the ground. i close the door and start to pull over to the left lane. he has the presence of mind to stumble out of the way.

Act II

i consider myself an artist on the scale of the domestic. i take pictures, family portraits, babies at the moment when they forget to cry, kids brimming with awkward sexual fervor and one of those ridiculous caps they make them wear for graduation, girlfriend and boyfriend, a boy and his dog, a girl and her baton. i’ve learned that even these posed pictures, prepared teeth baring for the future, can contain an element of transcendence.
it’s all about the right setting for a person, the balanced lighting, the immaculate sense of timing for pressing the button, a certain amount of coaching, luring, baiting.
when someone comes into my studio to be photographed, i make sure that they know that it is i, sarad gordon, who am taking their picture. i am not a watchman, capturing them on security camera. i am master of the ceremonies. i lead them to the altar.
there is nothing certain about what i will see in a person. i have an idea, to be sure: as soon as they walk in the room, i get a feeling. i understand instinctively where to position the light source, at what angle they should be facing, how much needs to be revealed. but as to what will come out in the photo, i do not know. i have an inkling, yes, i have a feeling. this is where the art comes in. i set them up and then they come out on the other side and it always surprises me.
sure. it’s an unrecognized art. other people look at these things i’ve made and when they say “that’s a good picture,” they mean that the person looks good, not that the picture is good. there’s a difference. but i take pride from that anyway, pride in my craft, so subtle that you don’t even know i’m there, even when it’s looking you right in the face. but i gotta say, i’m not out here just to make people who come to my studio look good. i make them look good enough, good enough so that they pay me money and i stay in business, hey, there’s no denying i’ve got my share of bills to pay. but i’m not trying to bring something out of someone that isn’t already there, you know what i mean? i come away from a good day’s work feeling like i’ve seen something into the nature of god. yeah, i know how it sounds. but growing up, i went to church, i had real religious parents,
you know, hard-asses, and i’d watch them get all crazy in service, holding up their hands and crying, the whole works. and now that i’m at that age, that age where you start holding onto whatever piece of beauty you can find, i find that i get those feelings when i’ve caught a vision of a face that i wouldn’t have normally seen, when it looks like someone’s soul is peering out of the cage of a silent photo, seemingly aware, eternal, selfless.

Act III

a scent spoken wheeling past to future, your radiant warmth swarms my senses. i take a step back to get a good picture and capture your readiness for me. you are there everywhere i can dare, eyes flaring in confrontation, dervish focus projecting my dreams into )ssssshhhh) nothing

unless i act,
fast breaking forward to beat you to yourself, running to the rhythm of my hunger til the dragon scales fall like rose petals upon the sky reflection of a lonely lake.

waves crest off the make of us, veins rushing with rising river of blood, the sound of my vision flooding your lungs, you speak my name, but you are already shuddering, distant, with the light. what do all these words mean, falling into succession as if they might lead us somewhere?

look around us, the grass pungent and grasping, a tree curling into lush shadow, a background exploding into particularity. the smell of fresh cut things. the inevitable concrete enclosure, squared existence, extending out into infinity, a veritable ocean of building movement. i am showing you something. i like it when you smile.

this entrance into the belly of a mechanical fish is not pain–it is an awakening, a transformation, a meditation. the net of a stocking will pull me back out of the bottled water of my silence. life is not meant to be hidden. i will make my mark upon you

The Story Of Being Alone

the shot of a glance. kurtle decided that to be was to not exist knowably. and to hold it in, until the dreams were destroyed completely, brutally. he took in the hit of inspiration and died honorably, soaring into the mud in pieces. this is what happens when you have nothing and want everything.
kurtle created fantasies which turned into nightmares. and then they were nothing but awakening pain, full of watching, full of someone else’s eyes watching distantly, shutting off the understanding. skin. stranger. at the wrong place at the wrong time.
‘nothingness produces snow; quiescence produces yellow sprouts (Chang Po-Tuan)’
the silent bearing will lead to spring. kurtle sees that now the sails have sunken beneath the weight of their own production, waiting for wind that will be strong enough to lift them. thirsty in the sun, there is nothing panic will do. this is something of survival, not of triumph, not of victory, bringing home the spoils. i am lost, kurtle exclaims, looking
into the horizon, i am pointless, dying in my ignorance. the only thing that will save me now is not myself. the only hope i do not possess. i may die here, and i creep forward heavy still, never knowing.
and suddenly the rain comes, part of the season, part of the wind, part of the time. kurtle finds himself alive, growing into himself.

the other is an illusion. it was his desert. his jungle. his mind. his desire.
and what is left? who is kurtle? what shell shade under which he hides?

there is only the point at which he departed, and the point at which he arrived. there he is, sand steps painted on the dunes.

now where are you? where do you fit in?

Finding

yousseff crawls into the gap between the slats straddled together aging brown. called fence. he pinpicks a stem of grass and twirltwists it into his left nostril, giving him tingles shuddering. breaking on through to the other side. the neighbor’s yard. standing man permanently smiling over the flowers. ducks swimmering in a mini pond. overshadowing trees around the edges, youseff pretends that he is an investigator looking for the alligator’s tooth, the mystic jewel of the keys, buried by pirates past.
could that be red beard, blue beard? no, pirates don’t wear caps like that. plastic. it doesn’t really figure into youseff’s imagining, it just surprises him suddenly when he doesn’t expect it there, posed miniature and unnatural. he slithers forward like a snake, stealthy. could be natives with their guns guarding. or nazis on the quest for ancient booty. everyone searching, searching. but he is the one destined for the secret, guided by the star of his destiny. a snail lolling on a leaf. he pokes it with a grass stem, watching it shrivelshrink into itself. he throws it into the pond. circles, moving outward. a phone ringing. he hears a shrill voice calling, filtering to him through an open kitchen window. Walter, WaaulTeeer! Yousseff feels the sicklysweet rush of adrenaline course through his flabby young body. he run-crawls back to the fence, feeling the imaginary bullet fire of enemys eyes barreling into his bottom. he catches his finger on a splinter as he pulls through, tears stinging out of his eyes. unfair. not fair not fair not fair.

Part VII

room where tension is gathered. they are quivering together, adrenaline fear spurring motion, action, instinct. a drawing apart not based on supremacy, but survival. the arrow will land. where will it strike in the midst of the dense foliage of the networked city? she crouches before him, poised for death, charging for the leap across the wire, sparking flashing movement into the unknown. her victim. invading his innards to let the hidden life spring into her mouth. revealed. consumed. a sacrifice to her emptiness, her need. her lost.
he is already dead. she lowers her gun. he is already dead. she had cocked her defining finger at him and saw the fear. she knew what it was to take life. to take power. to wait for the moment captured.
and he is just another nothing. he offers her
nothing.

a coffee table between them. issues of National Geographic. she places the gun, untensed, over the surface of a spouting volcano. traveler. tourist. no. she relaxes once again. i am here. living, breathing. looking at death. death there, looking back, shaking, changing. he, too, is relaxing. understanding. he traveled down the barrel sight of a gun and arrived back at his place, standing in the light on the rug. rain stopped. the liquid breathing of cars. her eyes, taking him in, casting him out. a pause. a period. the bullet never struck. it passed through her mind and he saw it moving away from her face. he opened his mouth and he breathed out and he knew that there was this. no escape. their sentence pushing him forward into a universe that never existed. he is free. he is blind. he breathes in. eye water falls from the slits of his eyes. “i’m sorry,” he murmurs. ” i’m sorry.” this is not a drama. this is a birth. she sits down and watches him.

Part VI

sitting in the corner of the web, legs attuned to the quivering of the vehicle shuddering to a stop at the curb outside. she feels strangely alive, lucid, luminous. she can feel her eyes large taking in the meager light sifting through the blinds, objects phantomed, rising ominous, featureless out of the void. everything seems to say something. specks dancing before her vision. the network of my body interfacing with the unseen world around Me. things passing in, transformed, passing out. this is not a plot. this is a center of gravity. a hole where things fall in and disappear, arriving someplace unknown. multiple surfaces charging through me. slice. where am i? who am i? slice. chop chop. you consume my exhaust, you suck from my pipe. we pass. we pass. we circle, we move around the sun.
the jingle of keys. the slam of a door. this is information. things are moving. she senses the lines pulling in to herself., breathing becoming conscious, filling, emptying. light cutting through the darkness. a sudden shock, dilation of emptiness, she squints, hands clutching her knees, toes curling. her stomach pumping like a heart in a workout. the attack as the new world opens. the closing. awareness of herself in an altered situation. she has been waiting for this moment. she stands. he stops, keys in hand. looking at each other. revelations flooding his brain. a knowing that must be stopped.
“what are you doing here?” accusing, territorial, frightened.
her eyes glittering, focusing. her body heated, balanced. she knows why she is here. she has come for herself. there is nothing more that she wants. walls around them. skywater running down the creases of his coat. inevitability. the attraction that in the beginning made him aroused. plunging into slickened yearning. losing himself. filled with blood. breaking into someone else. life bursting through the cracks. a moving against together. now he feels sick. now he feels tired. a desire only for escape. she knows too much of him, and knows nothing. how it takes a stranger to show us ourselves, lost in fantasy, our time limited to how much we paid. she draws out a gun, flashing in the living room light, pointing it at his face, clicking into readiness. she is serious. he believes. he raises his hands and drops his keys. the threat hangs between them, heavy, wordless. she is crazy. she has lost it.
that’s right. now he understands. he took her, entered her, left with himself swimming, eating into her and growing, taking everything she could feed. left before she was ready. leaving her empty, leaving her hungry, leaving her waiting. now he has opened the door of his shelter to find her there, facing him with the barreling vision of his death. the tunneled end of their ties. it is bound. no. seeing himself sacrificed. this does not have to happen. no. this does not have to happen again.

Part V

herself. destroyer kali multiarmed and vociferous. swaddled victim metalloid and chopped. her horus lost to the void of the nameless past. disembodied, frozen. i will resurrect him. the father so-called creator. he must face up to the reality of his dream. trying to sleep away his discontent with the flagon of the spirits. i have come to wake you. you lose your sense of direction and it’s only a matter of time, time, time before you get pulled under, crash into yourself cast off into someone else, confronted by buried feeling, by everything you’ve drawn apart from yourself and flushed, dripping, ignored, cut by your own mind. my image made in you. your rib i broke throwing the brick. the child you sacrificed to your fantasies. self-defense. self-defense. i’ve moved past myself now, coming back to you. i am reaction, i am reflection, i am the light meeting the absence of your gaze. we will meet again. yourself gathered against you. the rain greeting my eyes loosened to eternal night.
she steps forward, onto the curb, unlatching the gate and swinging it forward with her foot. the sound of rain breaking puddled into the concrete. the freeway rush waterfalling down past locust ave. she crouches and looks in the cactus pot. no, it’s gone. it’s all right, she thought about this. unwrapping the screwdriver and hammer from her purse.
breaking the lock with a swift knock to the screwdriver’s head. cheap. stepping past the door into the stale air of the room, the lamp with the yellowing shade, the crusted rug, the twin cracks in the ceiling running across each other like lightening captured in the plaster. white. the jimi hendrix poster. a framed art deco landscape as concession. she closes the door. the rain outside falling quietly. she feels herself standing in the space of the room, water wetting the floor, breathing like an alien, like a ghost invading something no longer her own. it is noone’s. heated words floating in these walls. cold words, sharp words. forgotten caresses. stifled love. who is she? who owns this space? she is here, waiting, sitting in the corner in the dark. do you feel the wires trembling? a history will end. a mystery will begin. suspense. suspended between yourself and another, where will you end? watch. we will meet again.

Part IV

well though it may be warm, the clouds gathered together in the shroud of the night sky decide to spontaneously erupt in a tropical sort of way, billowing in blotching sheets down the windshield, wipers working to clear the vision forward, the red lights of cars behinds blurring. in this sudden tempest she blinks her eyes at herself in the window, surprised at the coincidental mood of nature. here she is, back at this street. “it’s here,” gripping the back of the driver’s seat, “make a right at the light.”
she had left it sobbing. now she is calm, and the sky is loosening itself around her. how she can sense it, how she can smell it in the air, electrical. how many years have passed? how old has she become, stretch marks on her side? turning past the gnarled tree writhing on the corner. the iron grates over windows. the small rectangles of dying grass leading to concrete porches with screen doors. fading colors of yellow, brown, red.
little boxes of life, rented, sold to families who sit in the living room grouped on worn sofas around a small tv with bad reception. there. this one. 4209. this squat home that years tore lines into her forehead, furrows between her eyes. the sound of dishes breaking. learning the hard way how everything we do affects one another. how we tear at each other every day to stay the same, to stay in control. not accepting nothing. Not looking past the surfaces always crumbling away into some failure. nowhere to go, nowhere to turn but holding on to what is there, what is sure. and that becomes anger, immediate, incessantly gathered, easily spent. anger, apathy. reassurances of the radio voice, settling into patterns, statistics. listless sex in the blue light of the tv. numbers caught in the web. led up to the gaping mouth of something looming, many eyed, inhuman. sucked dry, bitter, harmless. the thick tongue of cheap wine raised in the night. the sound of dishes breaking. dogs asserting themselves. airplanes passing overhead on their routines.
she hands over her money and steps out of the taxi into the rain. she stands there, feeling the rain warm, gathering itself into her hair, weighing down her clothes. dripping, dripping. she does not mind it. she has nothing to lose. she has nothing to hide, keep safe, keep dry. she is ready. she is ready to clamp her mouth down onto something filled with life.
come into her net. he is not yet there, the window dark. the rain outside of her. how she wept when she left. with her burden to carry, to unleash into the world, dripping. now there is nothing left. outside of her. she breathes in, the rain dripping from the tip of her nose. to take, to give. to become that which she wasn’t. this hollow in her belly. breathing. to die to live. rain, dripping. dripping

Part III 1/2

and into the streaming flow of the freeway the taxi merges, concrete lined vein through the city. smooth headlit sailing in the night. veins filled with shuddering energy, caffeine nicotine glossed cars, rectangled fleeting glimpses of unreality hanging in the air, large glistening bottles of zima, Got Milk?, short sly pretensions to win you over to their side suddenly, to give you an unsuspecting affection for a name, for a look, for an image. forced associations. you take them for granted. sometimes they crash into each other, bodies ripped apart in the fray, blood spilling into the roadway, everyone slowing down to stare. but it is cleaned up quickly, efficiently. commuters are informed by the radio. the bird in the sky watches over the flow, reports changes. i watch her face looking out the window of the taxi unseeing. but who am i? i am just another passerby. we look into each other’s windows only to verify ourselves, to reassure some desire, some need. we sit enwrapped within sheets of manufactured metal, buckled in. we rush towards our destinations, anger charging against those who get in our way. objects in our path. i can not feel her tonight. she slips away in the stream, lost in the noise of a million other travelers speeding on their way home. i will wait until she is on her feet again, out of the projecting hustle of humanity. i will wait until i can feel the silence again, the embedded weight of her space folding into nothing. she has something to say. she has something to do. i will let her go until she is ready to move on her own. i have to stop telling her what to think. i have to learn to listen. shh. do you hear? do you feel the pressing emptiness of our connections, the spaced gaps through which sparks flow flying across into sudden meaning in their death? there are images we project, smiling, acting. but there are also images indefinable, glass underneath which the water flows eternal. i am not trying to capture. i am trying to relate, to communicate. linger with me. she will come.

Part III

she stands at the curb and hails a taxi with the adroitness of the purposeful. a typical yellow black checkered vehicle halts impersonally ahead of her. she steps into its cigarrettecologne tinged interior, its well traveled space. how she has flown to get here, railed, ferried, crossed bodies, gotten all her passes torn in two. a journey of the heart, following its strings attached, entangled. like a fly in a net she is wrapped closer, tighter, pulled in to the waiting. but these fangs she feels above her head are hers. she tugs her skirt around her legs and watches the silent flurry of the world pass in to segmented distance.
cold-blooded, they will say. reptilian monster. but she feels her blood’s warm coursing through her veins. she can no longer pretend, not after watching her child die, passing away into invisibility from underneath her pleading hands, his rising and falling chest stilling, silent, unresponsive.
there is only one end for all of us, she knows. she watches her reflection in the glass passing over the rushing streets. it is a matter of how you meet it.
she will meet him. thought is no longer relevant to her. it is not a matter of plotting, getting things right, setting them straight. it is a matter now of moving forward, slipping into her destiny, riding the tide of her emotion until she hits the shore, beached, naked. she will not be stopped. she will spill out into the waiting mouth of the earth, and it will be too late, too late, too late. the driver looks at her periodically in the rear-view. he coughs sometimes into his hand, threading the cab through the bustling color lighted streets, cars pressing around each other in a herd, breathing, roaring, sudden beeps. here she sits in its midst, alone, detached in her brooding, sheltered in the machine. moving all together alone. together alone all moving.

Part II

and at the end of the tunnel there is a . . . what? you think there’s light down there? that’s what we call a mirage. desirous images projected in the hazy heat of the mind’s throbbing. death seems to lurk everywhere, and yet there are no walls, no sudden boundaries marking the passing from one realm to another. no. she is come to face the bleakness of her reality, stand in the moon cold, reflective, strong. she strokes the smooth cool of the butt of the 9mm with clipped fingernails. acceptance? ha. what these people call acceptance is running away every day, bowing down, serving, stooling, selling themselves for survival. she is the true acceptor, wed to the one true and final love of her life: her death. and his. and his. but alone, separate, separated by whole lives cut off at the stem, flowing out of the genii bottle into everything, dissipation, lost of all the tightened, strained, embittered years clutched around their hearts like clamps, tightening with every moment that reminds, with every new day that memory breathes behind like the wizard of oz. she is come to unveil. she is come to reveal her emotions, let them pour out untrammeled, naked, red and flowing. no torture of the mind. no more years of frightened waiting.
the beauty, the bittersweet pain of birth and of death and of resurrection. transmuted into the earth. transformed into the sky. one with the universe that feels nothing, with the space that moves into itself.
a phoenix flies on a neon coloured poster proclaiming “JIM’s BURGERS: Had a bad day? We’ll serve you right.” a trashcan stands shining against the wall, its flap held open by an excessive load. the air here moving through the lobby is warmer. it is a warm night. she steps out into it through the open doors sideways, losing the sense of travel behind her, sidling back into herself, walking firmly, briskly into the city night air, the electric humming rush of cars, the urine light holes of offices beaming out of buildings hanging over in the sky. she feels a sudden rush of love-hatred for this city, this street, this district. she is its product, child of its alcohol dugged nights, its palm breezy days. how she will show them. how she will make them see.

Part I

the passenger arrives, gun a ready, taut after centuries of sleeping, starving for change. the magnetal doors slide apart, aglow, hissing in a dramatic sort of hydraulic way. she steps across the gap into fluorescent light, tiled pillars, papers against the wall fluttering still in the afterbath of the halted train, a catacomb of entrance, the passageway out of the dream of rushing, sleek metal on rail. she is at a point, a place, a station called Heranta. i will not describe her features. what is important is how she holds them, carries her cheekbones forward sharp and balanced through the waiting air, trailing herself like a stone dropped in basin-water, folding in to her center where the breath falls emptying itself to be renewed, finally relaxing little by little after all this time, after being so stiff for so long. now she is ready.
i will not watch her climb the stairs. no, this is not a commercial.
through the hallways, lighted and strewn with all the miscellany of a days passing, the inevitable fallen and crumpled words, discarded gum, wrappers.
her steps echoing in architectural space. what thoughts have moved through here, what driving purposes, what crossed paths, what streaming current of humanity, with wondering, grasping, hardened faces floating around each other like fireflies, like ants all following their own trail to some knowledge of shelter, sustenance, identity. tugged along by the lines of their relationships, the gravity of the assured.
she is come to meet the end of a long roping winding sharp-hooked and painful road.

Placards of Place-time

cow1 chews placidly its cud and turns to cow2 and says
the sun, the blue sky clear, my haunches thick and sinewy and warm
cow2 chews for a while, batting its tail around. cow3 ventures closer to them.
jasmine, the color of spring. my nose wet. this field green.
the cows chew together, the breeze sifting through the grass.

lickety split the congo boom bapped into the room cavernous and sharp-edged. kraft lit a cigarette and waved it around in the air like a baton whilst downing a jaggermeister fresh cold from the tap. henrietta wiggled her mane around behind her back like a snaketail and tapped her heels, one-a-two against the rung on her stool crossed. some folks got real funky and shook their stuff around on the floor in front of the stage. i got the feeling that this was beyond me, that this was beyond all of us. i smiled at a woman sitting pretty in the mirror at the other end of the bar. all of a sudden my day at work didn’t matter. everything fell away from me. i slapped kraft on the shoulder and we drank together. alright man, i said to him, alright.

the dolphin stroked its body into the air and flopped back into the water, making a splash. it chortled with glee and nudged its companion.
get this, i heard from ceetpeoeo who supposedly heard it from a gull that the humans capture us and gather around in rings to watch us do that.

A Day In The Life Of Johnny

and when and when the sky had spoken enough it stopped. suddenly quiet after a torrent of meaningful breaking rain and pauses. the greenness glistens where the clouds melt, light parting through shafts. snails lay somnolent, oozing into the sidewalk with the passerbys. the drying patches of water. the gleaming surface of things. how the machines look ominous covered with nature, luminous, flying.
i step out through the glass doors like a fly out of a hole. into the quivering air i move, smooth, concentrated on myself. i am hungry, and looking for food. nothing seems to be right. after walking down several miles and back, i finally decide on in n out. i circle around the building and approach from the rear. i order my food and break my 20. i am businesslike and efficient with the cashier. i almost sound genuine when i say, “thank you.”
i wait for what seems like a fairly long time to wait for fast food. i fill up my small cup with dr pepper. i sit down next to some girls on the volleyball team or softball team or something. i notice them just enough to be able to ignore them as simply a presence. i make eyes at a woman in jeans sitting with her husband and her 3 children. she looks fit, trim, immersed in her professional life. i look around me, at the neon signs, the pristine red and white tiling, the soda machines lined like sentinels. i practice showing no emotion. i feel almost buddhalike, other than for my quick glances at the young girls in line, one chinese vixen checking me out from behind her friend. i try to look interesting. i flick my eyes randomly at the people gathered around the square white tables eating their food. i meet the eyes of an older woman with a sagging face casting a look of what i deem to be terror at me. she seems to realize at some level too complex for her to articulate that i am not what i seem to be. i suck continuously at my straw, tasting the soda against my tongue. my number is called, and i take my bag and i curl the top and carry it out. my purpose in the world achieved, i stride back to my apartment knowing that i will soon be eating, sitting at my table, reading a book, listening to jazz. a tall girl approaches. we meet where the cars form a passageway leading into a garage. i glance at her as we face each other, and discover that she is beautiful. i find my eyes focused onto her lips as we pass, full, glossy lips, the lower one slightly open. she is looking at me with what seems to be a mix of amusement and interest. she knows that she is beautiful, but she senses that i am beyond her immediate reach. i wish that i was at a party with her, drunk. something might have happened, in a closed environment. i arrive at the door.

did u see the picture honey

hamie ran his wheel steadily into the night. he stopped to nuzzle droplets out of the water tube. hamie looked out the bars of his cage into the blue light of the room. hamie thought of grass. he brushed his forepaws against his mouth. he nibbled on some pellets. he pooped some pellets. hamie thought of his fur. hamie groomed himself.

in another room, gracie sat curled in her loveseat, reading shakespeare. she absentmindedly curled and uncurled her hair with her finger. her black painted toes wriggled intermittently. berlioz’s symphonie fantastique played softly in the background. cars hummed by in the street below, muffled by closed windows. a trashcan lid falling in the alleyway echoed in the night.

jezebel stared wide eyed at the sound. her tail flicked and she glanced briefly at gracie from the windowsill. jezebel watched the swinging of the grandfather clock in the corner. she thought of rocks, of trees. her ears swiveled to and fro. she groomed herself. she kneaded a warm spot into the pad on the sill and curled herself into a ball.

out in the night, in the alleyway, frank muttered to himself. frank sifted through a trashcan, picking out the remains of a tv dinner. he sniffed and muttered to himself. lord knows, he said, lord knows. he found a sketch of a building on a torn piece of paper. he sniffed. he turned it around and peered at it in the moonlight. hand of a higher power, he said, lord knows the road and everything on it. he stuffed the paper into his knapsack and chewed on a cold piece of chicken. he thought of a movie he saw a long time ago as a kid when he snuck into the theater. didn’t know the name. lord knows, he said, all the pretty hair and frame smiles. he rubbed his nose.

The Lecture

the prof stepped up to his podium and wet his lips, gazing before him hunched over, peering out from behind twin bubbled panes like a curious bird. he looked down at his lecture, written the night before on a double shot of cino. he decided that he had nothing to do with it. he decided then, there, that this paper before him was part of the reason for his failing marriage, for the bitterness of his child, for his failing kidney. he decided that this paper, written the night before to read before his class for 2 hours so that they could copy it down onto their own pieces of paper so that they could remember it later for the final where they would copy it down again so that he could read it and grade them–he decided that this piece of paper had nothing to do with him. had nothing to do with the faces gazing vacantly towards him. had nothing to do with this room with its bolted down desks, its bolted down windows, its air-conditioned cool. had nothing to do with this feeling churning deep inside of him. he spoke.

there is perhaps a reason why the word “mad” is synonymous with both “angry” and “demented.” when someone is mad, in either sense, they pose a threat, an imminent danger to society, to well-being, to the way things are.
i have found a kernel of anger in my soul, and i tell you that i have chosen to cradle it within me, to let it tremble within me, to cherish this spark, to nourish this into flame.

think of someone you know who is happy. think of someone you know who is content with their cell-phones, with their money, with their clothes. think of how they fit in. think of how the fire burns.
how cold we are, giving so little of ourselves to each other, so far away. when we drink liquor, how we become heated. when we watch the movie screen, how our eyes sparkle.
when we discover love, how we get scarred.
o, didn’t your mommy teach you not to play with fire? they teach you that red is the color of anger, the color the dumb bull charges, the color of communists challenging a regime. when you close your eyes in the light, you see red, red, life blood fluttering through your delicate veins.
some people become afraid of themselves. some people become afraid of each other.
white, white white. the color of skin, the color of purity, the color of the found, the color that takes all the colors into itself.
blue, blue blood, black blue, the color to describe a bruise, blue, the color of the police, the color of the cold, of the lonely, blue.
where is the color of the rainbow in a flag?
red white and blue, this is you.
i lay in bed at night listening to myself breathe.
i buy chicken mcnuggets on tuesdays and eat them quickly, dunking them in mustard sauce.
i listen to simon and garfunkel on the tapeplayer in my car on the way home, stuck in traffic.
i watch the news at ten with my feet on the coffee table and my dog bitsy curled up beside me.

i am angry. i am mad.

and i am no longer afraid.

and when i look into myself, i see so many colors that i am blinded. and i feel a heat so strong that i am rising.

i am mad, and i am going to tell you about it. i am mad, and i am going to share it with you.

(at this point the lecture ended, for several of the bulkier male students –to be specific, #74, a tight-end on the football team, and two members of gamma pi delta–arose from their seats and wrestled the professor to the ground and then trussed him like a chicken with his shoe laces. the students consulted each other to decide what to do with him. it turned out that one of the students had a hit of ecstasy on him. so they forced it down the professor’s throat and they gave him back rubs and made him smell menthol and wiggled a laser pointer around on the wall until he cried and hugged each and every one of them. they all danced together.
at the end of the quarter, they took the final and they did fairly well, with the majority of them obtaining a B average–there were several A’s, and a few C’s.)

Listen

–and then what story is there to tell?

the old man looked at his gnarly old hands and you could see the sadness, in his face. the time of loneliness, of self-doubt and suffering etched into lines folding into each other, criss-crossing, textured.

–i’ve lived with myself so long i don’t know how to begin.

i thought of skin, of the truth and lies of skin. how we bear our selves in our lives, traced through our skin. how we wear our masks, our identities. our emotions. we watch movie actors for their faces, for their balance, their poise under the barrel of the camera gaze. i watch the old man.

–it seems sometimes all i’ve learned in life is how to prepare for the
end.

but how will i hold up to this scrutiny myself? i can’t look at the old man without relating him to myself, without feeling his animal presence, however faint. we are not made for cameras. we are not made for narratives smaller than the scope of life and death. we don’t fit into romances, we don’t fit into plots, into schemes, we slip out of our tethers and find ourselves speaking words we don’t understand. there is a something that moves
through us, past us. we find ourselves drawn to the edge, drawn to the darkness, drawn to something beyond ourselves.

–and then what story is there to tell?

the old man smiles at me, and as i meet his eyes he seems momentarily full of secret life and vigor, a hidden irony creeping into the crinkles of his eyes. and i seem to share the joke, whatever it is, for i find myself understanding something, and smiling back.

–the truth.

the old man says. he looks into the fire.

–the truth seems to lie in the silence.

Direct

hertice p. domo: so where does one sluice the juice?
jaz: perhaps it is more a question of when. because i believe, i really feel deep down somewhere, that the passageway will be there if you just do it at the RIGHT TIME.
freda: i extemporize with every breath. what other way is there to live? let it go. i find that it all ends up being something that has happened before in some form or another. nothing is ever wholly new, wholly distinct. you would be lost. i don’t even want to contemplate such possibilities. . .
hertice: right. it’s like blindness in certain areas is required.
p.: to be aware and not aware at the same time.
domo: to see where you’re going and ignore what is unessential to you.
freda: i find it hard to ignore, however, the perceptions of all those around me. they seem to demand my attention. they seem to need me to smile at them, to perform for them, to give them something of myself.
hertice p. domo: devouring. the crowd devours, it swallows you up, it cuts you down if you pause to understand what you’re feeling.
jazzy j. rockefeller: here i am, fragments. my body, desired, desiring. we dip into each other, lose ourselves in the spray, become something ferocious. it’s terrifying.
freda: and yet–all this space, all this distance in this claustrophobia. it makes me want to hurt you to make you understand. how i want to get away from you, how i need you to lose myself in. how i understand myself only through you.
jaz: and i don’t like what i see.
freda: so i smile.
domo: and so i pose the question again: how, or when, to sluice this juice? because i feel all this, and where is it going to come out? how? i lose it all in the midst of anonymous faces, i lose everything, i feel ready to destroy myself in order to regain control.
freda: perhaps it’s a matter of contact. i find my energy calmed when someone reaches out to me and touches me while talking to me, letting me know how they really feel, animal. but personal, real. not some empty predator in the jungle sucking my blood in the crowd. but giving me themselves in little, silent ways that i’m scarcely aware of until i realize that i feel good.
hertice: right. communication, learning to pass the light unseen. but it’s not always there.
jaz: and when you’re not getting that connection enough, you get a build-up. you get negatively charged. you need an outlet.
hertice: and then how can i reach out without causing destruction, leaving a trail of pain in my wake? the wall builds, my surface becomes a mask and you look into me and what do you think you’re seeing? everything is bright and neon and shrouded by some pop snippet like a car commercial, dreaming “buy me! buy me! buy me!” and then just when you feel safe suddenly i come out of somewhere invisible and destroy you, devour you, take you into myself.

[hp explodes. blood covers jaz and freda and the walls.]
fade out.
show a pan of the sea, dolphins swimming, gleaming their sleekness into the air, melancholy, yet perky, acoustic guitar plucking.

[domo's face appears in the clouds in the sky, looking down. he smiles beautifically.]

jaz: he looked in, he shouldn’t have looked.
freda: i think there’s a new Tarantino movie out. Let’s go

Chapter three: the story of the mongoose

falling down the path of looking down the path of being on the path of it all. i saw a drop of singularity sitting, forking it’s tongue at me stolidly. i told it, i says to it, “hey. this is my road. where you going?” the snake told me it was not going anywhere, and that this was the very problem. i thought about it, but then i realized–that thinking was part of such a problem, was in fact the very essence of the intricacy. so i gripped the snake until it shot venom and then it decided to move on, yes, then i moved on, and i forgot all about it.
but such things come back to haunt, to possess, to range in sudden rustlings in the night. i had a dream where i was trying to put on socks to cover all the blood that was covering my feet. but then the army was outside with it’s guns, pointing in outside behind the glass, and they knew i was in there. can we ever cover the past completely, or will we always slip out and end up being targeted, being judged?
i did what i had to do, i informed the jury. they tried their best to look weighty and objective.
i did what i do. i’ll always choke the snake until i am alive again when it threatens my passage somewhere. i need to keep moving.
if you see–the path of my ancestors moving through my mouth. i chortle with the sun and the moon in my system.
so when an identity stands blocking, the struggle commences, age-old, one side to the other and back again. everything and nothing. everything and nothing. i see the light at the end of the tunnel. the tunnel be dark. what am i passing? what is my objective? i think the perspective needs to be recalculated on a constant basis, or else the serpent’s just gonna spin you into a stand-still frame snap to in-attention of some lie, some habitual day-to-day death that eats you away like cancer.
it’s not my road, technically, i says. but i’m traveling it. the audience laughs. i’m not sure if it’s real or imposed.
but the fact is that my movement exists in opposition. thus i do not pay anyone for my rights. i just take down the signs.
the police are after me. they want to lock me up. i have to shoot the venom very often to free up the pathways of my blood. i often have to take a life from death and cover it up and pretend that it is mine.
i will stop myself.

Chapter two: somewhere going?

i was a little gorgon child, snakes in my hair growing nappy and long and glistening in the sun. daddy, i said, wrapping myself around a gristly ankle, can i go play with the daffodils in lincoln park? he belched purple smoke and grunted. i pirouetted and sailed off beyond the mountains to my destiny. eagles cried alarumed on their way back to the nest. i zigged, i zagged, playing the multitudinal parts demanded by my latest turn of thought, the voices in my head, chirruping with merry songs. i am galgorna, priestess of the nile, watch the moon bleed into a flood springing life from reticent banks! i bowed backwards in the air, pretending to shower seeds from the air into the stone streets below. i am thrush, listen to my song! i am raven, listen to my laugh! caw, caw caw! i spun around in the air like a whirly did, letting myself slide through the misty breeze. i didn’t know any better; i was happy. i felt this boundless promise within myself, this endless whispering of hope, unconscious energy fluttering innocent in my veins. i saw myself as any little piece of everything i saw, the waves, the sun, the trees to climb in, dancing tall in light. perhaps this is only remembrance. i think we tend to idealize our youthful past, forgetting that it is filled with lurking shadows of terror at every moment, both waking and dreaming. but i certainly was full of life, swimming sprightly to the park. i cart wheeled in the grass, my braids filled with a life of their own. i felt electrical, i felt alive. but it began when i bent to examine closely the daffodils. i crept towards them and stared wide-eyed into their eyes, imagining myself in them, soft, varicosely petalled. the shadow of a cloud slid silently between us and the sun. i seemed to take the daffodils into my eyes. but the more it seemed i could feel their life, their energy, the more they visibly shrank before me, until they withered, they wilted in my eyes. i cried softly and looked about me. i seemed to become aware of myself, knobbly knees spraddled against the grass, hair wagging serpents in the wind, breasts humping apple-like through my t-shirt. i needed someone to smile at me; i remember thinking this quite distinctly: i need someone to notice me and to smile at me. i watched a boy playing with a stick over by the swings. he was pretending it was a sword, running the dialogue as he swiped the air. deep voice: haha! so you think you can beat me, randolph! take this! boy’s voice: it’s time to avenge my father! you must pay! (csshh! csshhh! swords clashing, spittle flying from his mouth as he swung valiantly). i approached him walking, watching him as if my life hung in the balance. he continued to fight, unaware of me as i stopped alongside him. he knocked the sword out of the enemy’s hand and was poised for the final blow, to be accompanied with more heroic words, when he noticed me. he looked at me curiously, appraisingly, in the way little boys do, seeing what i had to offer. i looked into his eyes. he stopped, the sword dropping from his hand, his eyes narrowing. he turned into stone. no, i said. no. come back. i bowed my head and i cried. and i cried. something was different. something had changed in me. and i knew nothing would ever be the same. and i knew that no one could ever come close to me again until i allowed them to destroy me.

Chapter one: a beginning and a middle and an end

into the possibility Henry entered, until up to his veritable armpits in cash crop honey dew trickle down thoughts. all will pan out to gold in heaven, Henry figured, by the light of the dangling lamp in his office study. Henry chuckled. what are you doing up there, a shrill voice wavering muffled up the stairs inquired high pitched. the curiousness of fascism, Henry bellowed, slapping his thighs, that only wants to verify what it already knows, spittle spraying from his mouth. he danced in front of the window, wondering if anyone’s anonymous eyes were taking him in. my thoughts are destroyed, he thought. he sat, poomp!, into his lazy boy chair and lit his sherlock pipe, puffing lugubriously. the world, he wrote onto his notepad, is at my fingertips. he looked out the window into the night and knew his divinity. and the money! the money, oh the pyramid eye faded greens, so powerful, so cryptically liquid in papered thinness. it could not be denied. it defined him. not to defy, but to redirect. understand? Henry. trees growing up canopied over layered concrete, magically dancing through with wind, the child laying back watches the music of invisibility. better than tv. it rises suddenly, upswells, the leaves moving in swirls, shakes, riddles of the melancholy beauty of movement. it subsides before comprehension, almost-visible words melting into silence, and then into something else.
i am a pacifist, Henry whispered, stroking his chin as if to ascertain his face was still there, i do not believe in violence. i believe in softness, i believe in smoothness, i believe in the wholeness of layers of skin. why to cut it up? why to dissect? why to strike back? why to maintain control?
he was quiet. a voice in his head answered, and told him what he already knew: because it is beautiful. the explosive energy of destruction. because it is how you know yourself. because even as you are dipping your tongue into the stream, you have already departed. because the light has reached the other side even before it has entered. so fast. so fast. because you know that it will end, that it must end. because you know that it will continue. because you know that it can’t be stopped. because it has happened before, and it will happen again. because because because.

Cells, What Picture Now?

i was flying by the river in my car so fast, air conditioned in the evening heat, in my self contained machine hurtling into the future. trying not to think, trying not to remember. turning on the radio loud, singing to its anthemic pop. where was i going? i didn’t know. i didn’t care. i was moving. i was stretching away down the highway, losing the lights of the city behind me.
trying not to remember. i didn’t care. i was stretching away down the highway, air conditioned in the evening heat, turning on the radio loud. i was moving. where was i going? i was flying by the river in my car so fast, trying not to think. losing the lights of the city behind me, in my self contained machine hurtling into the future. i didn’t know.
i was moving. i was stretching away down the river in my car losing the lights of the city behind me so fast, hurtling into the future, singing to its anthemic pop. turning on the radio loud in my air conditioned machine.
i was moving through the evening heat self contained, trying not to think. where was i going? trying not to remember. i didn’t know. i didn’t care.
i didn’t know. i didn’t care. where was i going? i was moving.
i was flying by the river in my car so fast.
trying not to think, trying not to remember.
i was stretching away down the highway,
losing the lights of the city behind me.
air conditioned in the evening heat.
my self contained machine
hurtling into the future.
sing along with me now.
turning on the radio loud.
singing to its anthemic pop.
i was moving.

A Nighttimed Story

shela opened herself to the night moon vibration, that pulling hum that yearns at the sea, beats at the land, trembles the edges like an amorphous thing. a thing. an alien is what she felt like. something reaching out across deep and silent depths and touching her face, sliding wetly over it, through it, her skin, her body unsure as to whether this was ecstasy or pain. her boundaries being continuously penetrated. shela decided, seeing only death in walls, in antagonism, secrets, gossip preventing the alternate reality of a parallel universe, that she would open herself to the night.
that she would let the sea travel through her like a conductor, the energy flowing through her and shining somewhere far away, timeless. she would be in the middle, shifting, always shifting, first one thing then another, disappearing and suddenly popping up surprisingly out of invisibility like a zit in the night. she would be passively disruptive. she would make the line dance like a lucid burst of static, like the shining randomness of a rain drop dance on the window, streaking down, making the night into a warm heaviness, a weighted unintelligible word singing subconsciously through your bones as you hide sheltered in light.
shela became a tentacle of unseen force, waving supple leaves in the whimsy of the wind. bending rippling cells of passing light, her breath never caught.
you won’t find shela in your history books, although she is the mother of all coming moments. from her sacrifice of self to love something she could never be she comes to be everything, caught up in the infinite movements of the universe. she is divine, because she is exactly a point in space, solidly an object of time, yet she could not be placed on any scale and measured. she is something that comes and goes, but stays with you forever.
so when she knocks on my door at night, come to call me out of the bed of my dreams, i throw away all my past, and i take her into my lungs. and when she is gone suddenly, i settle back into myself and remake the sheets. she is not mine. she is something i am grateful to touch. i know that i live in a different world. i know that when she comes everything changes. i know that nothing is certain. i know that i need to live.

Voices In A Hearing

the magistrate roosts worriedly upright, his eyes gleaming with the horizon city sun reflection: “i hear myself speak. a distant spark at the end of a long line, cross worked, networked into somewhere descending across the sea, draped over the heaving mountain-breasts of the earth, dangling its way into your life-moment like an infant dropping raw and alien into the electric light.”
judy, 37, the schoolteacher, drinker of neon colored wine coolers, sits purposefully crossing her legs so that her right flank displays a succulent parting of the upper and lower femoris: “i can tell you about infinity. what it feels like growing. it passes every year through the plateau doors of my room like water breaking out of warm and fetid captivity. i hang on. i dominate. i stalk through the minds of children like a whipping wind, pushing them into corners, enforcing alphabetic order, teaching them lessons.”
frat boy #43178a-0023 conscientiously ignores any displays of difference, knowing that he is entitled to whatever he is told to want, that there is plenty of meat in the market for the righteous upholders of the Status Quo. Sensing a weakness in lengthened silences, he speaks loudly, his papered face eagerly pink with the confidence that everyone is just like him: “sections, divisions, ranks of ignorant flesh devoted to keeping knowledge, understanding, true perception of all living things confined within small silent, violent sectors of space. we take pictures of the area and watch it moving in real-time, live, motion-picture fragments keeping it far away, shocking, unbelievable, unrelated to any of the headlining events of your own life. we ride on soft cushions of ignorance, never knowing what hands are keeping us floating. sailing into death tanned, crew cut, and smiling for the camera.”
coffee percolates deftly in the corner.
bobby the bum’s eyes are filled with gargoyle brightness, his aura uncertain, jagged, the indistinct medleyed color of waste. he hunches against the wall, an invisible horror lurking in the shadows of purposeful, structured minds. he looks goggly-eyed askew at a cruise liner pacing silently above the city and farts explosively, with a gurgling, sickening trickle that smells vaguely reminiscent of styrofoam: “lies, lies, manufactured data, it’s howdy-doody time! there’s a suspect wearing jeans and a blue hoody down the corner looking at the clouds. put all the death into a box and keep it cordoned off with clearly visible lines on maps and make children memorize, other countries recognize. name the child, call it horus, label it into a room set up just for it. death, lies, information flooding out reality. the truth is out there, dispersed, silenced, made into static, into noise, into just another piece of a million pieces of a universal hole. the baby screams watching silent fingers twitching the mobile to dance for him, sensing that it is reducing him into something he cannot believe. can you hear yourself? is that you? who is speaking through you?”

Everywhere Here

we went down the road long way before we come home. and in the interim the rain it fell round, and like a spell we found that we were empty. we were free of all associations past present and future. ghosts spoke like wheels in our skin, through our minds. we were captivated by our deaths. looking for shelter, many of us tried to stop off the path and get dry. but no turning back. we’re addicted to the end, we said, shaking our heads.
here we are, moving, looking for a farewell. ain’t gonna be peace, never. everything is wet, sliding, glistening with everything. we try to be cool, we try to be hot, we try to be something, but it slips, it falls, it rises, it melts into nothing we can hold because it’s ourselves.
well breathing with the world we come to know the road is our home. the rain it falls round and intermittently the thunder scares us, and we see things clearly suddenly before the rune has rung back silence and darkness has swallowed the world again. and death, darkness? no, that was not the fear. the fear was the light, blasting, laying everything so crystal clear, so perfectly sudden, so known before understood. and emptiness, oh, we
are shelled by the enemy of ourselves. so we are hard
and we are soft,
and we are home, now.

Of Nature: A Dialogue

“Hello. I saw the birds fly spiraling up around a tree and away into the sky and I thought that maybe something was coming, maybe I would climb this hill and someone would be there, waiting,” Hans said to the girl laying upon the top of a grassy slope.
“Greetings. I come from the land of the dolphins, and I enjoy the 6:00 news, followed by a quick game of rummy. I just got my hair layered,” Gretzel replied, squinting up at him.
“I’ve watched whales out at sea swim in slow majestic families into the sun to blow a spout of water into the air,” Hans said carefully, bowing slightly to peer at Gretzel’s hair, “And yet, and yet, all I seem to grow is ever more distant from myself. I seem to leave pieces of my heart in every scene I witness. And then what is there to bring me back to the home land? I am everywhere, dispersed, and I sense that there will be no return, only greater distances, only greater lines, greater boundaries, all encompassing closed walls to keep me from going crazy.”
Gretzel eyed a squirrel that was eyeing her and watched its tail flicker cautiously. “I don’t know about that,” she said shortly, and then puffed out a breath, relenting, “well, I mean, I do know what I need to keep me going, and that’s Marlboro menthol milds, frequent cunnilingus, jamocha milkshakes, and French hip-hop.”
“Jamocha?” Hans said wondering.
“Sure. Arby’s.” Gretzel sat up, hoisted a pack of cigarettes out of her jeans and promptly lit one, a determined line forming between her eyebrows as she married the flame to the tip of the cancer stick. She exhaled audibly and said thoughtfully, “It’s a certain lack of thought I think you’re on about. But is it really a loss, after all? I get a pretty brown study out of watching Blind Date, as it is, thinking about human nature and what not. Mademoiselle can send me into whirlpool depths of introspection.”
Hans nodded eagerly, sitting down beside her. “Yeah, exactly. That’s what’s scary. It’s like I’m drowning in the hooks that are supposed to draw me out of the water. I mean, I should be safe behind glass, right, in the car, on the boat, in the theatre? But suddenly I find myself inextricably bound within the scenes I’m watching, and beyond the script, beyond the moment, beyond the action, there is the sense of an incredible danger, raw, lurking. Outside of the lights. Outside of what we’re watching. And I FEEL this, you know? And everyone feels it, it’s just that we learn how to smile, we learn how to laugh, we learn how to settle into these habits and keep ourselves feeling like we’re nameless, like we’re faceless, like we’re tourists snapping pictures to show to friends in a book with labels when we get back home, when we’re no longer in the air, in the water, in the world. But there’s too much. There’s just too much,” Hans smiled lopsidedly at Gretzel, noticing that her lips were shaped like a line sketch of a seagull flying smoothly off into the sky, “And there’s no turning back, no quiet space outside of the storm other than what’s brought to you live right now.” He trailed off, noticing that there was light emanating from Gretzel’s eyes into his own.
Gretzel smiled patiently, puffing a jet stream of smoke out of her mouth like a dragon.
“Yeah. All we got to know is what we need. I mean, anything you want is out there, if you’ve got the name and the paper to own it. But what we need is pretty simple: we need attention, we need mints for after our meals, we need a puff of magic every couple of minutes, we need connections, and fast ones, dammit. If you’re not in my movie, you know, then you can mosey off down the street like all the rest of extras. But there’s always the center of attention, there’s always the focus of your eyes. You look around and you can see what you need to do. Someone’s willing to pay to watch you do it. So you can watch and you can do. Either way something’s happening. Something’s going down all around us. I knew you were coming. If there was something wrong with me, if there was something wrong with you, one of us would have run away by now. There’s nothing wrong. There’s just how much you can take.” Gretzel sounded tired suddenly, and she snubbed the butt of her cigarette into the grass.
Hans waited, feeling the blood in the right side of his temple pulsing. The darkness was all around them, closing in. He closed his eyes. “I want to take everything. I can’t take anything. There’s just the gifts of god, for lack of a better term. Magic happens when from unguarded directions, and that’s exactly why it happens. I am a destroyer and a creator at once. What I create with my body I destroy in my mind.”
Gretzel watched Hans warily, sensing the danger menacing. His face seemed to stretch out away from his body like a giraffe. But, she thought, there is still a light shining, slipping through the cracks. Like a laser, pointing. She waited, listening to the passerby’s chatter.
“What I need,” Hans said slowly, tasting the weight of the words on his tongue, “is you, now.”
Gretzel looked at him, thinking about what outfit she was going to wear to the party tonight. “Ok. I need you let your phoenix out then, and stop trying to look for your mommy. The sea is thick. Respond to yourself and I will ask the right questions.” She laid back down on the grass.
Hans fell around her
and ate her.

The Worm Parable

How can I be two million places at once?, the little worm asked from atop a cherry tree. He pondered and he pondered, and yet all he felt was a building yearning in his tummy for lettuce leaves. And so he finally slithered down the tree and filled himself with fat juicy green leaves. But he was nowhere near to solving his riddle. So he sate with his full belly and thunk some more, lazily, drifting between drowsal and logistical delusion. He recognized, for sure, that the basic dilemma of the situation was that in order to be there while still being here necessitated a kind of astral-hyper-mental projection beyond the confines of the visible temporal space-world of his slimy yellow limbs. But the fact was, firstly, that he had been hungry, and so could not move beyond the immediate stimuli of his hunger. And then the fact was, secondly, that he now was full, and so could not escape the groggy inertia of his stuffed stomach. Really, he thought, I am bound by my appetites, and either I have not enough or too much. How can I be hungry and yet be full at the same time? Then my mind could be everywhere, anywhere I think to be. And yet there was this basic problem of time. The little worm was a little worm and felt that perhaps one day he would be a tremendous dune worm like his ancestors. But right now he recognized himself as a little worm. And once he was a littler worm, a tiny worm. I am trapped by my growth, he thought. If I could just be everything I could ever be and ever was right now, then I would no longer be confined within my self now.
The little worm tried to be all the worms he could be, at once, but he saw himself in the reflection of a dew drop on a petal, and he felt everyone inside of him fall away.
Is all that I am illusion?, he wondered. Is what I see now before me another dream that will melt away in the sun, is what I feel within me another desire to be stuffed momentarily, another hope to be made starved?

And the little worm decided nothing.
And he slithered away to sleep until he was hungry
again.

Machines of God

Tin Mo was mule. He carry up hill down to village. Swatted with stick day long. He make us money. He carry us food. He eat us scraps. No complain. Only move he make to ease his existence was to clear the flies momentarily from his ears with quick flip. This bastard intermixture. This nothing object. This burden beast.
Why does Tin Mo not kill us in the night?, i wondered as child, Why does he not strike back with strong feet when we stand behind, pressing down his back with load?
I remember now Tin Mo. He part of us. He part of me. Why fight what is part, even when it pain. Even when it not see you, use you, turn you to earth machine. I feel him in my feet, up migrating to class in university city. He part. He me. I carry burden of past in mind. Tin Mo history-past memory-piece that keep me complete in quick stream of commercial bulletin shards. My feet strong, plodding, forward heavy up hill. In info-ocean I move solid through image-waves.
Desolation, yes. Hesitation, no.

Osirius

and then i begin to forget myself. and it is good that i do so, for i am becoming trapped by the mirror every morning, seeing only the death mask, emotionless, frozen. and so i forget myself, fumbling my fingers against her passing breath, touching the space in my mind where she just spoke. is it wrong to speak of god as a woman? god is perhaps sexless, but i like to think of her as woman, as something beyond me that creates me, that i can press against and thrust against and beat against but only lose myself in. she accepts everything i do, even when i scream, even when i punch the walls, slam the doors, stare at myself in the mirror all day trying to scare myself. sometimes i try to kill her, stopping everything that tries to come out of my mind. but i think i love her, i think i do because then i forget myself again, and i find myself reaching out in the night to sing, i discover myself looking away from myself out the window at the street, listening to the night, listening to the night sing. and then maybe i slip out a few words, maybe i smile, maybe i look the same, but something’s come out of me, something’s changed. i figure that i must love her when i lose myself in dreams like this. i must be still alive.

if god is a woman, than i think that i’ve got a reason to believe.

but then i’ll remember myself, i look back, and i’ll catch my breath, my face setting into the lines where it’s been broken by time. what’s the next line?, i’ll think, where was the word that i’m looking for? my muscles snap like reeds in my ears. i look at myself, frozen as a rock in the mirror. when will it finish? i’ll think, when will it be complete?

she waits for me patiently, the night, singing, for me to fall asleep, for me to forget myself.
the sun rises and the garbage men wake me,
and i wonder
has this happened before?
why has this happened
before?

joe

\\\jurisdiction. coming off of the royal poop deck like a king of some mystic, ancient world. biting into a corn dog, dribbling Squirt down my chin. i look out upon my precinct, the corner of 64th and Krinkle. good. i pull at my crotch authoritatively. ain’t noone gonna tell me what i got, cause i KNOW what i got. my secretary tells me i look like David Hasselhoff. It’s not really my face exactly, but that presence of domination, of a manly blandness. that makes sense to me, cuz i remember back when i was a kid, watching Star Trek and eating Mom’s meatloaf, how i could relate to Captain Kirk, his potbellied assurance, the suave way he moved in his futuristic 70s uniform, as if it were a second skin. I think I’d be popular in Germany.

jacobs wife

1053L: jacob told meto to sit. it was a foggy night. sandwiches in the dark. i sniffed hopefully, alert.
1054[input]: i was the lettuce. i was still crispy then.
1055224yg: jacob was coughing, nostrils flaring, watering eyes. when he finished, he chugged me down; i quenched his thirst. gatorade: more efficient than water, and better tasting.
108652:L there is an intense concentration in the gut that takes place in the act of consumption. a brutal silence accentuated by smacks and swallows.
19057hrlo”: marlboro reds. 1 every hour, two after a meal. surgeon general advises: when you give away your mental freedom, you poison your body to survive.
1hru90: i am a teapot, short and stout.
1060gy89: none of it mattered. but it was complete somehow, harmonized by the chipping of the white paint on the side of the window.

ornette coleman::oedipus rex

and sight–i used to see a lot of things unfolding when i looked away, like faces caught in emotion in cigarette smoke from someone’s cigarette when we were sitting on a bench and me looking at the clouds, or a something that might be a sprite or maybe a demon coming from the shadows cast by a chair i was walking by, anything. the world just kind of jumped out all around, like a kaleidoscope all about what i was focused on. the subway, i remember, was a nightmare, all these forces struggling around me, and i would look and there would be a gum wrapper twisted on the ground, a businessman staring at his shoes, a grimy bar handle. it didnt feel real, that’s for sure, it felt like comics, each moment captioned. except no one was looking cept me. nothing wanted to be looked at but had to be felt. it was like noise, just a lot of noise like when you turn a radio in-between stations or that fuzz shit on the tv. i remember i liked to stand around trees, they glowed, they were smooth. but even them had murmurings whispering away in my mind, dancing around my eyes, made me want to lie there forever just breathing. there was never what i would call peace—it was just some things were broken and some things were smooth, flowing. it was all these stops, you see, like i couldnt stand being around traffic, all that wasted energy, i couldnt see anything like that, i had to go to my room, lie in the dark, listen to my aquarium running, stare into the dark. yeah. i made sure no light could come in, that way i couldnt see nothing, there was nowhere to focus, nothing to scream for attention when it wasnt being seen. that way i could feel things and i wouldnt have to look, wouldnt have to be scared of what i might never see.

Listening To John McLaughlin

And yes, there was a corner, and i stepped around it and there was the sickly yellow light falling around Feline smoking a cigarette looking straight into my eyes like she knew i was coming. i didn’t move a muscle in my face, played it cool, like i knew she knew i was coming. bummed a cig from her and flowed off of our last conversation, talked about angels, i remember that kind of shit, forget her name, just call her feline cuz she’s got those sharp kinds of looks like cats give you when they’re not sure whether to sass you or to run, and i say how i thought at first she was an angel standing on that corner with the light and that hair, standing there like she was gonna save me. ‘from what,’ she says, she’s got my hook, her pupils measuring me up like a camera, i can feel her watching somewhere inside deep as if i were standing on that corner in a tv on a stage in a coffee table somewhere in her childhood home with a shag carpet and the freeway sounds billowing from just past the hill like an ocean, and i say, “save me from spending this night all by myself and ending up on my couch listening to my neighbors spitting.” but now she’s somewhere else, looking at the other side of the street, and i listen to a cricket singing in a crack by the curb. then she smiles and looks at me again like she’s decided something, it makes me feel like an open wound, and now i know that she’s waiting for me to say something so that she can let go and spend the night with me and that i won’t try to hold onto anything because she knows instinctively in that mother-goddess heart of hers that when an understanding passes between two people, a sharing, someone’s gonna try to hold onto something, and i pull on my cigarette and i smile, into her eyes, i let her know that i’m following her, that i’m not going to run away from what i’ve already shown, that i’ve already let go of everything and that i could walk away right now and go home and lay on my couch and listen to miles davis and my neighbors spitting and that either way, i knew, she knew, that we were beautiful together