updated: Laredo Priceless, S 44th St. btw Baltimore and Chester

Laredo rung the door flipped open a hand mirror before her sometimesgoldsometimesgrey (her alwayscorneredeyes) gypsum eyes—pulled a tendril of auburn hair across the sculpted arches of her eyebrows—and pressed the yellowed intercom. Someone, a girl’s voice she didn’t recognize answered in a tentative   crackled Hello?, and Laredo said her name and closed the mirror and opened the buzzing door. She walked up the thin stairwell holding the burnished cherry railing with fingers painted a verdant indigestible, yes, almost hallucinated red. Her eyes starring / languid feline passage at the peeling aquamarine wallpaper printed over and again in golden Jardin motif variations; passed the second floor without lingering and as she made way up to the third floor she heard music / rhythmous piano / Philip Glass / “Music Box”, where the door was ajar and she saw the familiar sight of Clay leaning over a verdantly jungled terrarium sprinkling flightless fruit flies out of a quart container upon a carpet of emerald moss where Laredo could see the tiny golden shapes of some of Clay’s terribilis dart frogs striking at their minute prey. Fiona was sitting on a worn ugly orange couch sketching in a pad. She looked up smiling. Well, hey there sweethearts, Laredo said in a raised voice over the music, leaning through the door frame. Clay turned around and capped the lid over the swarming flies. Yall comin up? She said. Mhm, said Clay, leaning down and putting the fly culture down with the dozen others below the rack of terrariums and aquariums.

She smiled turned and ascended the last flight to the roof top. She opened the door and stepped out onto the silver rooftop where Greyson sat with the unfamiliar faces of Charlie and Charlotte around the patio table drinking bloody maries. She said hello to Greyson and took briefly the hands of Charlie and Charlotte as she sat down. Greyson made her a drink and conversation gradually filtered in through the silence as Greyson explained how the three of them had been up late after walking home from Dalak and the two of them had slept over. Fiona and Clay came up and Greyson likewise prepared them drinks. Fiona began to break up some pot from a pill bottle and rolled two joints. One was passed around and Clay ran down and brought up a laptop and put on some a mix of Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring broken up by Velvet Underground bootlegs and The Castanets.

Laredo hadn’t shaved in a few days and kept rubbing the stubble growing out of her cheeks; stared absently at the red impression from her lips upon the joint she held / her arm cast out across the latticework flora of the iron patio table. She passed the joint off the Clay and responded (after some length) to whatever Greyson had just said a moment before.

My roommate plays this online video game they’re actually called MMORP that is massive multiplayer online roll playing game it’s called World of Warcraft WOW for short, the table smiled, and the guy literally spends most of his waking hours playing this damned game which by the way just about gives me the whole place to myself and during a break when he was microwaving some instant mac and cheese he told me this interesting story, this is just another example of what you had been talking about, she said, looking at Greyson, who nodded, how this husband and wife played together—Clay started wagging his finger like he wanted to say something, Laredo glanced at him before continuing—and she came down with cancer or something and passed away and her husband and their guild, they have these guilds people form and join, you know HordeNinjas or Excalibur et cetera et cetera, and they had a formal funeral service in-game. Everyone took off their armor and put down their wands and swords, allowed their magical wards to fade and like you know were actually saying their goodbyes to this woman who actually Had died mean forget about that she was a level seventy gnome warlock, that was besides the point this is real human loss, a funeral service on virtual ground. Now that’s something special. It may be weird or disconcerting but it’d be fair to say that this funeral rite was more different from all the others before it than any of them were from each other whether contrasting the internment of a pharaoh or the millionaire jettisoned into space or even the pits of genocide chewed into the earth of every land at some point by men. She took a breath and passed an empty glass over to Greyson, who began to mix her a drink. And so that’s crazy in its own right of course but the story has a fucked up turn. Clay leaned back in his seat. Because another guild, let’s say the Anthropophagiacs, appear all of the sudden spells firing axes swinging arrows flying and slaughter the whole solemn assembly. Now they’re not dead you know this except of course for our Gnome sorcerer i mean this isn’t first degree or anything but all there characters or avatars what have you are dead. And and so they all appear, she spreads slowly spreadeagled hands across the table, one by one maybe in some adjacent Elven town, and there is their friend, departed, this Gnomish digital body standing there vacant, the occasional animation passing through like a shiver, standing amongst them unmoving because of course somewhere in a room perhaps beside the widower she has left behind there is an empty seat a silent keyboard and the screen where her company stands before her gnomish body and pop-up sidescreens of all its attributes chatting away in outrage which is was of course not in some pseudoshakespeareanpseudotolkeintalk but in straightup video game slang English and they chat in outrage but most of them stare at the empty vessel that is never going to move again will only disappear when her husband closes the program or shuts the computer off in tears. And that is the moment when it sets in for them all and the really let go[AC1] .

Let’s look at it. Clay said, pulling the laptop into his lap and beginning to type—after a few moments of people smoking in the air: Serenity Now bombs a World of Warcraft funeral. From jon01, A girl who played World of Warcraft died in real life and the friends she had met in the game planned an in-game funeral for her. They posted about the event on the message boards and urged people not to bust it up. I don’t think I need to explain what happened; the video speaks for itself. I didn’t make the video. I just uploaded it. Category, Comedy. Over three million hits.

I laughed accidentally from behind my hand. Comedy. Shit. He set the laptop on the table. First, some comments. There are, by the by, over twenty thousand comments on this. Alright. He inhaled dramatically and began reading, Serenity Now has officially become the guild with the most retarded fags. Pat yourselves on the back you no-life having homo-thugs. It’s pathetic enough u guys don’t have real lives or friends(obviously if u have time do shit like that), now you carry it over to the cyberworld. Now your complete losers, congrats! I guess somebody was jealous that they don’t have friends who would hold such an event for them. Haters! Get a Life! Your video is gay and so are you!

A response: As opposed to the incredibly rewarding lives lead by people having online funerals in a video game? Face it, none of these people have lives. And then: wow, that was real insensitive. no matter where, real world or virtual, a funeral is a funeral. Followed by  frowning face constructed of colon, parenthese, and all.

Okay, get this. He continued, slowly, You talk about this like it is real. I have watched my friends die in Iraq and Afghanistan. You pretend to be warriors you are little pee-ons. You matter to no one. You have no honor. Want to fight for real be in a real war not playing with your computer join the service do your country a service and die for it. Just a bunch of fuck heads. Semper Fi To all my fallen brothers & sisters in the real wars. And in response, two more comments: It was a real person who died, dot-dot-dot, followed by someone else saying, nah joining in the war is one of the stupidest things a human bein can do because america just wants to play police and they brain wash u at a young age because they have the unlimited power source human life they can spare at will without force because they are so brain washed people are actually stupid enough to join.

Damn. Okay, I’ll stop soon but, Tears of fire says, he continued, starring at the screen, If I was trying to honor a persons who’s life had ended and it got broken up like this by some assholes, I think I would have gone on a fucking real life killing spree once I found where the fuckers lived.

Clay, Greyson interrupted, looking at him with his head tilted.

Okay, two more. You want to compare this behavior to real life? Fine but then do it correctly. The two guilds are at war. If you are warring with an enemy country, gang etc. and you expose all of your forces for a funeral or not you should expect something like that to happen. The funeral holders have no doubt done things the assaulting guild interpreted as horrendous as well, so why should they hold back in this situation. No rules is what war is all about. And, last one, Fucking genius. Hahaha, Clay’s laugh rung rather empty, I never even heard of this till 5 minutes ago from MSN’s “Jerks of the Web.” Absolutely brilliant, pure genius! I’ve heard of some pathetic World of Warcraft players, but to think of a virtual funeral!? Serenity, you bring the balance in this world. Nicely done!

Clay moved the computer to the center of the table: Laredo pulled her chair up next to Clay, leaning her forearm on his shoulder / I behind them / Charlie standing beside. A logo of White text emerged on a black screen, Greyson leaned forward and maximized the video across the screen. Illidan – US Central. The first cord of “Yesterday” begins. where the real pvp is at. And as Paul McCartney begins singing the word Why? Appears. Because here, it gets personal. This is followed by The Beatles’ song sung over various quotes spitting outrage and maledictions. After about two minutes, the following quotes appear highlighted: On Tuesday of February 28^th Illidan lost not only a good mage, but a good person. For those who knew her, Fayejin was one of the nicest people you could ever meet. On Tuesday she suffered from a stroke and passed away later that night.

And below:  I’m making this post basically to inform everyone that might have knew her. Also tomorrow, at 5:30 server time March, 4^th. We will have an in-game memorial for her so that her friends can pay their respects. We will have it at the Frostfire Hot Springs in Winterspring because she loved to fish in the game ( she liked the sound of the water, it was calming for her ) and she loved snow.

If you would like to come pay your respects please do   Thanks everyone.

And then: We’re planning some cool stuff and we’re going to make a video of it to show her family .  So I would appreciate it if nobody comes to mess things up.

Then a scene of avatars covered in armor and cloaks and glowing weapons appears running through a forest to The Misfits’ “Where Eagles Dare”. This cuts to a lovely violet, velveteen snowscape littered with characters standing around / the 7^th movement of Mozart’s “Requiem”/”Lacrimosa” playing . The scenes alternate, bears begin to chase the guild running through the woods / “I ain’t no goddamn son of a bitch!” being yelled in the background while the character amongst the snow and pines assembles in a line of somber minotaurs, trolls and elves. The forests become covered in snow as the guild nears. And again the serene snowy requiem where the main character approaches a wizard at the edge of the mirrored rippling of a body of water. He strikes numbers fly in the air the music immediately shifts to the high-paced pop beats of  “Skatman”, and chaos and battles emerge across the landscape and mourners die across the snow, disappearing. It gets boring.

EXCERPT FROM FORTHCOMING NOVEL, “BODY EMERGENT”, BOOK II, “TOWARDS MEDUSA”

Fiona, looking intently into Clay’s violet eyes (/ the one iris spilled amoebic across the lens), was thinking about his seizures.

It had been about six months since she had come and moved into Greyson’s third floor with Brutus the chameleon / had stared in wonder at the three rooms which amounted to an incredibly dense zoological garden. Fiona was an odd sparrowish girl with skin the color of espresso foam, a recovering bayou seer of sorts / direct descendent of the creole Voodoo Queens of New Orleans, the 1st and 2nd Marie Laveaus of the 19th century.

She had left some few years back quite literally following her dreams to New York which had not worked out so well. She had found a job at a flower shop that had opened up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which had turned into weekly or bi-weekly drives to Philadelphia, where the stock was imported to and where the orchids the African Violets the Staghorn Ferns the pots of acid loam with their fluttering lips of venus Fly Traps the vining Bornean pitchers of Nepenthes the emerald pillows of Selaginella were all grown in the owner’s basement and that of the main storefront. In those drives between the two cities on the amphetamine tract of the Jersey Turnpike Fiona began to depart the van, scented so heavily as it naturally was: she at first swam idly the radio barely on through her childhood, the broken cobbles in front of her apartment door growing up in New Orleans where she and the other children had played and recreated in miniature the cliff dwellings of the Anasazi, with bubble gum dust and toothpicks tiny figurines sequestered from little shops lit by barely more than what light issues from an open door, boxes of bird skulls tiny bottles sandwich bags of strange powders little wooden turtles with wiggling heads from Mexico and the pewter figurines that made up the denizens of that street, impassible by either bicycle or car, where at night she and some few other children heard thimble-scope scrapings the faintest high-pitch jingling of a tiny town bell and other sounds, the occasional onslaught of a gargantuan feline that reminded her of a childhood antiquity when men fought dinosaurs—until they had moved out of the city and into the swamplands and bayouscape of Louisiana.

And in some sense, she had transplanted those cliff dwellings from her early childhood and the Anasazi woke and hunted and gathered and whispered and poured forth carrying in parade beach balls and christmas lights, the dreams of presage of her mother and grandmother, cooking with her father, her mother’s dream and the subsequent death in icy northern waters of her father at such times as those drives back and forth between Brooklyn and Philadelphia.

Until she began to play the tapes Mr. Oftdingham left strewn across the floor of the passenger side…which was, frankly, a good thing for her / a reengaging of sorts. For Fiona, who could spend hours sifting through dreams alone, who had grown up listening to blues played on porches swamp pop concerts thrown together on the deck of the restaurant overlooking the black water of a bayou where her parents worked and where everyone showed up in their best (non-Sunday) dress sleeves rolled up hands red from the mountains of spiced crawfish dancing even the kids tipsy the turtles below snapping up the shells and corn cobs, these tapes opened up new rooms, music that was forever saturated with the smell of roses and orchids and hyacinths and gardenias and magnolias of freesias lilies of the valley quietly chrysanthemums and her favorite perfume of the peony.

The first tape was propitiously familiar but also set the haunting tone that driving listening to them all contained: R.L. Burnsides first field recordings over a bottle of whiskey at his house after he’d been heard singing in the cane brake. She would rewind and play over again “Going Down South”. The next tape was The Walkmen’s cover album of the John Lennon cover album, “Pussy Cats” written in sharpie on scotch tape. She loved that one; went through a swarm of moods listening to the Cure’s “Disintegration”; David Bowie’s “Heroes”, which she liked but lost among a thicket of lilies one afternoon; a mixtape of synthpop she was indifferent to except for the two Telex songs, “Sigmund Freud’s Party” and “Eurovision” which reminded her that she knew her Creole French; bounced up and down, glancing with a suspicious eye now and then at the flowers behind her, to a mix consisting solely of different bootlegs of The Fall’s “Totally Wired”; listened with penitent fervor to the first seven albums of Tom Waits; fell in love with a tape that had a set of blue fingerprints in acrylic and a taped on tiny slip of paper in typewriter letters “Havana Chimera Party” where a gravely chanteuse sung over a steady rhythm of drum and accordion and bass enameled bubbled and cut through with beautiful synthetic sounds that seemed to originate on mars or the dark side of the moon. She liked to listen to Havana Chimera Party back to back on the same tape with a recording of Brian Eno’s “Another Green World” with a single track partially recorded over, “Becalmed”, with a recording of Jim Jones preaching Utopia or Dystopia to his congregation in Guyana as they drank their Cyanide. When she got back to Brooklyn after listening to the edited “Becalmed” for the first time she took out her sketchbook and began to draw and in the weeks that followed bought supplies and began to paint and to draw again.

A few months later, in Philadelphia, Mr. Oftdingham, strained by the expenses of his breeding projects, informed her that he was closing his NY storefront and offered her full time work in Philadelphia and a room above the store. With nothing keeping her in New York she accepted and they opened a bottle of champagne  and he showed her a strain he had been working on, Beautiful, he said, but trash nonetheless, of a rose a milky coffee color almost that of her skin edged in a near-blue violet, a color hard to register. she leaned over to smell the flower and felt, barely, his fingers sliding into her spongy hair, and pulled away at which point her nose smashed into his chin and she cried out in pain and looked at him, both of them stepping back, and his face was peeled back on itself in a pained awkward expression and she felt blood running down her lip and reflexively her tongue flicked out and she saw Mr. Oftdingham’s face twist into an erotic battleground between a keening desire and the contorting effort of restraint. Look up at the ceiling, Mr. Oftdingham said as he picked up the rose from the table, I assume you can be trusted to maintain the utmost secrecy? he asked. With her head tilted up at the ceiling, looking down her nose at the rose in his hand and wiping the blood from her lip she replied, Of course, and he crushed the rose in his hand, apologized in a wave of the fist and a muttering and filled her glass.

As the cherry trees blossomed throughout the city that Spring, she met clay, a regular, who had come in for some spike moss a Wandering Jew bought on an indifferent whim and a batch of rare Myrmecodia ant plants Mr. Oftdingham had ordered for him, whose first words were to tell her she looked remarkably like Bjork, who she had not yet listened to but would later relish while lying with Clay in bed. A week later they went on a date and a week after that she spent a Sunday on the roof with Laredo and Clay and Greyson and, much to her surprise, Mr. Oftdingham, whom they simply called Henry.

But back to their living room, 5 in the morning, Fiona looking intently into Clay’s eyes, how did I end up in New York? He already knew how she had come to find herself in Philadelphia and had garnered intimations of her maimed powers. And she went on to tell him about foreshadowing:

-C.P.-

EXCERPT FROM FORTHCOMING NOVEL, “BODY EMERGENT”, BOOK II, “TOWARDS MEDUSA”

I woke up feeling strange one morning and it took a while at first to make sense of it.  I was lying on my side with strands of hair turning things an amber color.

I always look into the terrarium against the wall to find Brutus in there and just to wake up.  Well, this morning he must have been mad about something, or it’s too cold,

because his skin’s a kettle-black color and he stands out stark

against the various vines and leaves.  He’s looking at me with one of those goggling eyes and it reminds me of this big old lizard I found

when I was a junior in high-school, four years after my father died

and my mother first told me about Foreshadowing.

It runs in all the women of our family.

My mom and my grandmother call it Foreshadowing

but—more accurately—you might call it prophecy,

certainly something more than omen.

My mother, for her part, saw my father die in her sleep the night before he was dead.

She was swimming (as though she were a fish) under an expanse of ice.

She told me the water was murky and the color of cough drops.

Other fish swam around her, slow and heavy as though half-frozen themselves.

So there she was in this half-asleep hibernal world of cough drop green water

when she felt a shadow above her and all that ice collapsed, shattered

into shards that splashed and crashed through the water.

Then, there was my father

scrambling, kicking and scared in the water All Alone,

sheets of ice falling apart in his hands.

She woke up to him sinking down into deeper indigo waters.

My father had been fishing up in Canada with his brother for the past week

and we had heard little from him.  Sure enough, my uncle called

the next day, after dinner, to tell her my dad had just drowned.

He told her how he had tried to save him: “I tried to save him, Petra,” he lied,

“but he couldn’t hold a grip.”

You see, he didn’t know my mother could foreshadow,

he didn’t know that she had already been aware of the fact

that my father had died alone and scared.

When my mother told me all of this a while later I spat on the floor

and she didn’t hit me on the back of the head because she knew.

We didn’t talk to my uncle after that.

Before last night, I had only foreshadowed one small occasion.

This was when I was still in high school, living with my mother.  Down in Georgia,

they have these little lizards (6 inches as the  biggest one) all over the place—green anoles.  They, like the more popular Chameleon (Brutus), can change colors.

Well, I had this dream that I saw one sleeping on the unfurled frond of the bird’s nest fern that hung on our back porch.  So what, right?

Well, there are two colors that hem in the spectrum of skin shades they can assume: leaf-green and a cryptic live oak brown.

But this anole, This Big Sir, was the kind of light, dusty blue

that reminds you of those little Christmas berries where the blue rubs off in your hands—

a delicate blue that broke the vegetal spectrum of all the other anoles I have ever seen.

All of that was still a dream.  On a real night some weeks later,

an auspicious moon-full night,                 I couldn’t fall asleep

on account of the rain pricking noisily at several aluminum sheets outside my window.

So, I went out to the porch with a mug of milk, without so much as a wink of expectation.

You know those mid-day showers when the sun’s still bright

and its still warm and yellow out? Well, that’s how this was but

all that soft-falling rain was moonlit and you could see clear across the lawn sparkling

in an almost grey scale the way the snow Up Here will under a clear sun.

Sitting down on the lazy chair, I at first just watched it all

dropping down on the lawn and listened to it settle in the leaves of grass.  I listened

to the ping-ping-ping of it striking those corrugated metal sheets.

Then, I had this strange sense of yet-unspecified nostalgia,

but really that first cerulean blue premonition—My First Foreshadow.

I got up then, feeling like things were starting to stick together

and looked around for something I hadn’t quite remembered yet.  First, it was that blue, then the fern started to stick, transpose itself onto the still-hazy remembering.

That’s when I found him lying there,

soaking up all that humidity precipitating out of the soil, up off the grass.

He was like some long velveteen crocodile made to climb strange trees.

He was a giant and   both of my thumbs together   would just be the size of his skull.

His eyelids were soft and wrinkled, almost human.

When I picked him off that hanging fern, he trembled, sloughing off sleep,

before   going loose in my hand   and it was all I could do to keep him

wrapped up in my fingers.  He was wild.  That was the one thing that didn’t fit—

my one inaccuracy.

I had dreamt him docile, almost meditative.

He was twisting his neck around, his dewlap unfurling from his neck like a sail,

all flush-veined and violent red.  That’s when he bit me on my thumb,

his eye staring at me prehistoric.

Now I’d been bitten by anoles before, and it’s usually kind of funny

because they’re so serious and so ferocious and all they leave is a little saliva and a pink jawline mark that disappears after a few minutes.   But This Big Sir,

when he glommed onto my thumb it fucking hurt and he wouldn’t let go.

I jumped back, swinging my hand around like a flail,

this huge lizard hanging from my thumb like some missmade appendage.

So, I was twirling around, knocking over my mug of milk, with this monster

clamped soundly onto my hand until he finally flew off into the lawn

with a mouthful of the metallic taste of my blood.        The rain pounding

on the metal sheets pushed itself into my hand.

My mother came out,

having heard the raucous and the spilt mug and asked me what was going on:

“What the hell is going on out here, Fiona?  God Damn.”

I told her what had happened,      My Foreshadow,

and she stepped close and hugged me for half a minute.

Then, she walked out barefoot onto the lawn,

wearing this gossamer night-gown.  She walked over to those sheets of metal and lifted them up leaning against the side of the house.

It was just this: the light sound of the lightest rain gently drifting around the house

and my mother walking, holding the sides of her night-gown up from the grass,

across the lawn, her shoulders and the tops of her breasts showing opaque

through the rain-wet fabric and her toes stuck with bits of grass.

The purling at the bottom of the gown had turned a dark purple from the dripping grass

and stands out in memory.      She left a trail of watery footprints

and broken blades of grass on the painted grey floorboards.

The bite was there in the morning.  It didn’t fade the following afternoon.

Within a week, the mark had turned dark and wet.

My mother insisted and I followed her course,

sat beside her in silence as we drove to the doctor’s office, my old pediatrician.

A nurse opened a pinched-skin-pink door and called my name.

Hearing her little voice chime “Fiona Tires” reminded me, reminds me,

of those little bells you ring at a counter.   Inside the office, the doctor checked my hand out and asked if I wanted a breast exam: “no thank you, please.”  (goddamnasshole.)

Well, we’re going to have to take blood tests.  So, I was sitting in some hallway,

watching a tiny Filipino woman with heavy eye shadow like a queen of Egypt.

She was sorting little cups of urine,

pressing labels onto the plastic and stabbing the yellow lids with a needle.

I couldn’t stop wondering if they were warm and where were they going.

Then Owen walked up to me with another needle and an alcohol swab.

“Fiona?”  He was handsome so I smiled at him in his chalky green outfit.

“Yes, hi.”  I looked down at my hand, thinking of the needle, and back at him.

“Are you going to put that in me?”

“I’m afraid so,” he said, “my name is Owen.” He put his hand out to shake mine, then had to switch because that hand was all sick on my side.  We both thought that was funny.  “And I just need a little sample to make sure you don’t have anything in your blood.” “How’d you do that to yourself anyways?”

“I was bitten by an anole.”

“An anole?”  And there was an awkward moment somehow.   So I told him

what an anole was and we laughed about it.  He started rubbing my arm

with that swab while I explained to him about That Old Big Sir I was just talking about.  Just when I was getting to the violent part,      he Jabbed that needle in and he winced.

So that’s how I met Owen.

We ended up talking, my mother serene in the waiting room, and trading numbers.

I got a call from him a week later: “Hey, it’s Owen.  Remember,

the needle, the bite from that lizard?”

“Oh,” I said, remembering, “How are you?  Is this about my finger?”

“I mean,” he was mumbling a bit and I remember being endeared to that,

“I think you’re finger will be fine, Neosporin, band-aids, that sort of stuff.  But—“

“So I don’t need to come in then?”  I don’t know why I was playing around

like I was and I got to wishing there wasn’t any confusion about why he was calling.

“Oh no,” he paused for a second, “But what I was calling about.

Mainly, what I was calling about was to see if maybe you would

maybe want to get some dinner, Fiona?”  It took me a moment to reply.

“That would be lovely.  Hold on,” I pressed the phone to my chest, “Mom?”

“Yea.” From another corner of the house she yelled back.

“Can I take the car at some point this week, doctor.”

“Of course.”

“Owen.”

“Yea, Fiona.”

“So what are we going to do?” I was smiling at my hands

and trying to even my fingernails out with my thumb.  The paint was flaking off from them and left my thumbnail dirty underneath with crumbs of wine-red fingernail polish.

I dated Owen for two years after that

and by the time he was ready to try to find a real hospital to work at we were In Love

so I moved to New York with him. 

For a while, it was really something — the two of us.

We moved into a little studio apartment in the West Fifties

and it was Our Space.   This was something particular for me, because my

home was saturated with all the memories of our family, I wasn’t essential to it.

And then, it was the two of us and I was in the real world,

living in a giant city and surrounded by all of these different things speeding by.

And all of this spurred by that first foreshadow.

Owen worked at the hospital and I found a little flower shop that was just right for me.

We walked through central park together on Saturdays.

On Sundays we would lie in bed together, moving our hands over one another.

We’d get up by two or three and go out and do the greatest things.

One time, we got all dressed up Fancy Pants and went Downtown.

We took our Southern drawls and lifted them up a bit.

I let my voice ring higher, aristocratic, and we carried ourselves with all the decadence

of young Southern couple groomed in the memory of a fading tradition.

So it was easy, dressed up as we were, all composed, to waltz in

to the various galleries and be taken seriously.

I shaved Owen, slowly and deliberately (I’d always wanted to shave a man’s face),

and lightly slapped him with aftershave the way his father had when he was seven,

in front of the bathroom mirror.  I parted his hair with a comb,

but it fell across his forehead in rich brown streaks by the time we were down there.

We were whispering to each other at the door, trying to keep straight faces.

I squeezed his hand to replace a laugh and a man in a pressed suit and torn shirt came up and asked us if he could answer any questions.

“Darling, we simply must have this.”  It was so hard not to laugh,

or at least smile, and it makes me smile now.

I hadn’t looked at the gentleman who had approached us yet.

“Yes,” Owen said in a voice formal, full of propriety, “I believe we are interested

in that Warhol print.”  He said, strait-faced, pointing across the room.

“Of course, of course.”  The man responded, wringing his hands indiscreetly.

“It is a lovely work isn’t it?”

“Quite.”  I said, affecting some measure of indifference now.

We took a business card—of course next Wednesday would work for us—and walked out.  Once past the gallery windows, we burst out laughing and running

and fled through the throngs of painted, pasted up hair and ogling tourists.

He was grabbing my arm and his eyes were almost too blue and somewhere in my ribcage I felt something hot and quick.

Someone might have cried from it.

I hadn’t thought about that in a while, before today.

Then a year ago, Owen told me he had been sleeping with

one of the nurses from the hospital and I said how cliché and moved out.

That’s when I got Brutus and finally really settled down in this city.

But to be honest, it’s really been the two of us since then

and I think maybe I am not very good at meeting people.

You always know the difference between a Foreshadow and a dream

when you wake up.   You feel something leaving in the slightest salty aftertaste—

some strange, potentially astral vapor lifting off your skin.

And, you can feel your bones and believe in ghosts.

You would think that you might have goosebumps but it’s nothing so sinister as that.  So,

I noticed that it was a Foreshadow that was the source of this strange waking up experience.  I started to remember the details: I was at a friend’s party in midtown,

a friend of Owen’s, at some yearly event she hosts.

Some of the furniture was different,

I didn’t exactly remember how but knew it would all fit when I got there.            The funny thing about Foreshadows is that there is no necessity for fear;

it’s obsolete when there is such a certainty about things.

This makes sense if you think about it: if it’s a Foreshadow, it is something that will occur, and if you remember it before, you’re going into it with that certainty

so you don’t need to worry,

so any way you felt in the dream stage necessarily has to be just how you feel

when it actually comes to you.   And, it all felt right somehow.  Okay.

So I was quite calm, affable in my interactions with various acquaintances.        After a certain point, and we are down in the basement,

people playing cards, I see boots coming down the stairs.

I knew them to be Owen’s and I walked through the people, excusing myself

out of a conversation.  Somehow, everything was on its way back to how it had been

and we were going to be good together.  And he smiled at me when he saw me

sneaking around another group of people to get to him.

It was all going to go back to how it had been, somehow we were going to be Right again, and this was all going to happen tonight.

I thought to call him, and decided against it, that wasn’t how it was and was going to be.

I called my mom instead and started telling her what was going on,

and I was worried that I might be fooling myself,

putting that salty taste on my tongue through sheer force of imagination.

“Who   are you?” My mother said, sighing into the phone,

as I explained the foreshadow, slightly fearful.

“I’m your Daughter.” I think (and I think know) that’s the right answer.

“Before everything,” I heard her, “We have that special part in Us.

You’re Great grandmother had it, your Grandmother had it, I have it, and You have it.”

She was saying.  “Just because you’ve gone off and left doesn’t mean its not still There.”

“I know.”  And she’s right about this.  “I know mom.”

It’s kind of tiring but I need to have this conversation.  “I know, mom,” and I pause,

saying something, “Mom, I know it, it’s always at the center.            Don’t worry.

It makes me…”      I heard a smile on the other side of the phone.

Something that might ease away distances.

“Just because I’m gone, doesn’t mean I don’t know

what it means to be from you and your mother et cetera.

I just wanted to make sure of things.      I’m going to that party tonight.

We’re going to see each other tonight,          Owen and I.”

It has been cold outside and I am bleary-eyed from the wind.

The dark lacquer walls, the warm light, make it comfortable.  The waiter asks

and I have a glass of house wine, not needing another glass.  Wait, what else?

“Well,” he begins describing, “  we have several new” but the phone is ringing.

“That’s fine, thanks.”  And I open the phone.  “Yes?”

“It’s me” your mother.

“Hey.” I sit down sighing into the chair.

“So what happened?”  There is an earlier sigh in her voice.  I don’t know.

“I went.  I don’t know; it was someone else.  Someone else in the boots.

He left.           It wasn’t all there.  I left, came here,” I explain, look around again,

“I’m in a bar.”

“What do you mean?  Are you sure you didn’t see it wrong when you woke up?”

“Mom.  Hey,” I’m saying again, “it was a Foreshadow, it was just wrong.”

My throat hurts.  “What was there, mom?      What is all this stuff I remember.”

“Honey,” she is saying, “Honey, you have to go back and think, you have to—“

There is an echo in the phone and I am hearing two voices.

There is my mother talking    and    this crackling whisper of my mother under her.  It is hard to hear her and this other, unintelligible echo raises and waxes above her.

But I’m talking to her.

I can’t make out what I’m saying,   and it could be anything in the world for all I know.

It becomes this roar  and underneath some watery sweet sound I don’t understand.

And I am still talking to her.

I drop the phone, or it falls from my hand, I can’t be sure,

and can’t be sure if I was doing it to stop the noises in my head.

It just begins to frighten me that   “I”    was talking,

that I am remote from that “I”,          and afraid for myself.

I am getting up from the table.

It is now that I start to feel that strange, almost lucid stretching of foreshadow.

Things begin to stick, things from inside and outside my head.

I understand that the man in the farthest corner, the one staring at his table,

has come here through the strangest events.

I would tell you, but it’s too much now, and the noise, and my own unintelligible voice

are still humming away at a quieter volume.  I can hear the room,

but even my own breathing seems foreign—someone sighs from my lips.

That man: I remember that our eyes will meet and they meet and I have a sure sense

that he’s looking for someone without knowing yet whom.

I will kiss him to hurt someone, but I don’t know quite whom, haven’t had the chance

to sort it all out.

He will glance up,       lips spread across the rim of the glass,

and glances up,              lips spread across the rim of his glass.

I hear me thinking about pulling his lip with my teeth.

It becomes more than that though.  I feel another Foreshadow step into me.

My tongue is saltier, and I will walk through these China Town streets

with the bartender across the room.  And she will play me a song she has written

in a small studio and she will play it on a coffee-stained piano and we will cry together about something inevitable in her own life.              She will touch my collarbone

and wait with fingers there         and her eyes sad and scared.

And another shock of salt           tied to the image of the man whom I mistook for Owen, approaching me from down the sidewalk, obscured by a mist that is just now beginning

to settle in the streets.

I know all of these to be real, each one having already pushed me to where I am now,

but will I not be torn in these disparate directions?

Now, it is too late, and shock after shock fills my mouth with brine.

I am in a state of Waking Foreshadow,     and it is all collapsing upon me

and I am afraid I might get lost in all of this, disappear.

I see myself stand up before myself,     that cracking echo percolating through the room.  There are more of them, and they are thinking, but again, the noise is too much to hear.

I see myself     (my mouth tasting of so much salt) stepping towards this

bartender with sad bluesy eyes.

Five other futures of me run out of the bar before scattering through the streets

to places I am myself too scattered to see entirely.

One of me runs to go fast and another one slips in the ice,

caught at the arm by an old drifter she is already expecting to share coffee with.

Tears have stained lines down his dirty cheeks and I wonder if it’s the wind or what?

The Echo and its Roar bound and rebound off the walls and back to me.

The man brooding on his beer across the room is stepping towards me.

Talking to me, but he hasn’t gotten up yet and I can’t make out what is really there

from what will be there.  I suppose I am talking to myself right now if that’s the case.

But now, I have a rearing multiplicity inside me, each defined by their own knowing

and I don’t know what has distinguished each of us from the others.

Now, I am actually getting up to go, but I am not sure where.

The sum of my parts seems to have pooled itself into action.

My own voice seems small and meek in all of this.

Outside it is misty in the streets and the rain is light, not unpleasant,

and I have forgotten to pay for my glass of wine.

I feel as though I am a watching in my own movements,

and I see myself     stopping at a door to knock, across the street, trailing strange vapors.

I almost gag from the taste.  And I am so whelmed.

Now, I am going down that street I just saw.

The fog is falling down so that it holds and enfolds me

and I am in succored isolation from it.

I don’t know how many blocks it is, but I have just seen myself

feeding an old dirty man soup and coffee in a passed-by yellow-lit deli.

She was just smiling back there.

The man from the stairs, the one I had thought was Owen; he is coming up in the fog.

I can see a cigarette pulling from a hood and his arm is a darker bar across the fog.

It’s as he’s closer now that I can see the shape of him.

Loose pants and a hollow, unshaven face.

A face I have never seen before.

The salt feels like it has built up into actual grains and as I swallow,

my throat gives, my stomach gives.

Stomach empties and I try to throw Them all up, Really Concentrate…

To Consecrate…

I can feel a hand on my shoulder now and someone is asking me

in a quiet voice if I am okay.  I try some response and look down

at a table running with vicious liquids.

The bartender pulls me out from the booth and takes me over to the kitchen.

She’s talking to me, quietly, and washing my face over with a cool rag.

“Oh,” I’m trying to catch up, “I’m okay really, I just got a little lost,

I don’t know this neighborhood too well.”  And after a pause, “I’m so sorry for the mess.”  She tells me         its nothing at all   Really       and we walk out to the bar.

A last, lingering customer is lighting, now smoking a cigarette

and talking to an older woman sweeping the floor.  We smoke a cigarette

and as I push it into the ashtray there is A Look.

It is like something, like there might be a long, strange night, but I’m not sure.

I smile, and that feels Natural, and I ease out from my stool

with a push away from the dark wood of the bar.

“Goodnight Fiona.”

“Yea.”  Moments of shuffling.

“Do you need a couch to crash on, it’s raining hard out there?”

It is raining hard and it seems to make sense.

Outside the wind has wound down to a light push and it’s really raining.

It hits the streets, slides down in streams towards the curb.

It’s a shower and it pours down and we run to get out of it.

I’m running behind her, the bartender, and it’s soaking my shirt through.

It seems like the rain has quickened its pace and it’s all falling close together.

Through all the roar of it, I can just hear it hitting the tin rooftops

like bee-bees pouring out from between your fingers.

She’s yelling something,                        or laughing,

but it all comes together                       in this mad chorus of rain

and rain popping on the roofs            and her voice ahead of me.

It’s falling down cold and slanted,    but I am running and I am feeling

like I did         that first blue evening,  when the rain’s pin-pricking kept me up for all of it.

-G.C.-

EXCERPT FROM FORTHCOMING NOVEL, “BODY EMERGENT”, BOOK TWO, “TOWARDS MEDUSA”

It was nearly six in the morning, the sky through the window panes an indigo echo chamber erupting diffuse into the crepuscular violet variegated with an urban orange glow. Clay asked her if she wanted to  go up to the roof for a cigarette, and that he wanted to show her something. He rumaged around, muttering and knocking things over in the bedroom until he reappeared with a bunch of laminated pieces of paper. Clay rolled up a splif with a Newport and some herb and grabbed a sweater from the closet for Fiona and they headed silently, swimming in a fog of blemished nostalgia, conceit, and weariness. Fiona walked to the edge and watched two African women chatting at the trolley stop below, Clay approached and put his arms around her and they walked together to the table.

“I want to show you something. After what you told me I can only show it to you. He flapped the pages listlessly in his hands, “I wrote this about twelve years ago. However, I don’t remember writing it, and I never have; I wrote it in a hospital after suffering an episode. In fact, it’s very difficult for me to remember much before that time. My memories, the bouts of nostalgia common to everyone are for me all alien and threatening, as Greyson would say, they are, regardless of how fond their shape, malign inversions of memory. In any event, it’s easier for you to just read this”, and Clay kissed her on the corner of her lips and lit the spif.

My brother first came to inhabit my head the day he died. That was four days ago and people have found my composure in the matter unnerving. I am sitting here at his memorial service and it is my own private irony that Mason has been sleeping through his own funeral; this—his bodily internment.

We were born, thirteen minutes apart, into the morning of a Sunday. We were perfect replications of one another, each a copy of the other. In the beginning, there had been a third but he disappeared into the walls of our mother’s womb while yet little more than a faint, red beat.

As children, we were indistinguishable from one another: we harbored no differences. On our eleventh birthday we received a pair of knives from our father and sharpened a length of pine from the woods behind our house. Out in that cloistered forest, it was accidentally driven into my left eye, leaving the iris a violet amoeboid shape. That was Our First Distinction.

When we returned from the hospital that night, our parents put me in the guest room to avoid infection, frightening us with a story of another boy and an old man removing a patch from over his eye each night, placing it on the bedside table.

Falling asleep that first night back, I could hear a pacing movement out in the hallway, back and forth in the dark. I was half asleep when I saw his body curled up by the door, his blond curls stood out white in the dark hall. I fell asleep like that.

In the morning I asked Mason about that and he started looking the way he did when we shared a secret. He told me the same story, how I’d slept there curled up like a Good Animal at our bedroom door; how he didn’t move.

We were quiet as our mother made us breakfast, looked at one another over cereal. I remember the sounds of my mother’s hands in the sink, the clinking of our spoons upon the bowls, the clinking of her rings against a plate. As I remember these things, I can hear Mason roll over half-sleep behind some fold of my mind; there is a sigh. In his dreaming, I can feel occasional echoes of sensations. The smell of pine…sap sticking to fingers.

and the smell of sap sticks to things, sapling fingers of pine define the edge. God cause you know that past the edge there is the same walk in pine needles and the quality of shadow is the same. Same moment where we put our hands in our pockets, still behind the stream, and recognize the warm pommels in our hand. Sharing glance. Fingers sappy and sticking to warm pommel.

There is primarily the smell of pine and sap sticking between my fingers as i take the likely left foot step where my foot is half in shadow under the burnished leaves of a sumac. i take this step, anticipating the sensation of stepping under the burnished leaves of a sumac but, knowing it, there is only the fact that i have stepped.

It is always like this here and there is our path through taller pines and the floor is soft needles. Sometimes it seems like a few steps into that moment but I have dreamt hours of walking, waiting to think to slip my hand into my pocket. Sometimes the trees seem to repeat themselves. Sometimes i feel like we are looking at each other for so long in that moment when the warm pommel of the knife is felt sticking to the fingers, Clay’s eyes still looking like my own

Mason and I had always known about the knives. Our father had shown them to us when we first began to ask for stories at night. The pommels were the yellowed ivory of some kind of bone; on each, a pair of horses frozen in the gesture of a leap were carved in with fine red lines. The thought of them inevitably came up every Christmas and every birthday, so when my father placed them in our hands, our fingers shook. There was so much ceremony in it. They were only buck knives, but they had seemed so handsome and powerful that morning. He slid the knife-blades out together, moved our hands over the steel and bone. They were smoother than the rough texture of his palms. He taught us how to unlock the blades.

We spent the first weeks of that summer out in the fields and the woods. Behind our house, we had fifteen acres of pine and hickory trees. Somewhere in there, past a stream, we had found a path leading to a clearing in the woods we claimed as our own. Past the stream, the ground was damp and green under the shadows of thicker trees. In that quiet glade, Our Clearing, we opened our knives, thumbed our imperfect reflection on the blades.

I remember we threw them into the trunks of pine trees until the tips of the blades were gummy with sap, and the trees trickled thin, translucent lineations that reflected the modest light of the clearing back to us. Mason pulled a branch down from one of the slimmer pines until the wood bowed down and the green of its truer skin showed and split away from the main. I repeated the act upon another branch.

We dragged them into the middle of the clearing, stood there with our knives together. The grass was long and bent over itself in yellows enlaced with green. Mason and I lay one of them out and with our knives nicked at the several switches growing from the main until we had a single, rough length of wood. Those pine switches lay like fans across the grass.

I stood it up on end and Mason held the base steady. Mason held the base steady. I had one hand on it. It stood up to my chin. I drew the knife up and against it in slow successions. Slim curlings of wood circled the base, one stuck out from between two toes. Here it gets confused. At one point, the knife swung too high, glancing past my ear, and we both agreed to turn the blade down on it.

I drew the knife down upon the edge. I had one hand on it. The tip approached a point. Mason held the base steady. The knife came down. A slivered curling of wood pealed off. Something shifted. The knife slid down, the sharpened tip was driven up.

of all, of all of them. This one. This is the one that could like do me in.

It’s my hands are there and my cheeks are trying to blow something right out. My fingers slide down the keys. And i’m blowing something out and it’s sounding into something. Blowing long like that. Sometimes longer than this one though. That’s all i can really pay attention to in this one is that sax in front of me, the imperfect reflection coming back at you like sideways off the curved brass.

No turning around, with what’s those things showing from behind in that bronze distortion of me blowing the cheeks out like that. But seeing the lighting shift on the sax in front of me it’s always obvious, how could there not be all of them and their cigarettes smoking the place and in that general hum rumbling.

i got this feeling between where i’m thinking and my lips when i’m here and i can feel myself going after something, something like i might almost heard before.

i’m blowing it out and its moving through these corners and stops and i can feel like there is something around some corner, like if i keep chasing it i might start playing it– and i think i can hear Clay back there in the audience–hold that bass…steady…curling…–It’s lost under the rolls of the crowd shifting in seats. And that sound i was almost maybe catching to starts going out and my fingers press down and the sounds are all mismatched and it seems like i’ve forgotten to play and that sound is just my memory of another dream like this one, where i have to wake up and am that much further from what I’m trying to play to.

worst of it all is that the crowd doesn’t even know that i’m chasing my own Questing Beast. Maybe Clay. Maybe Clay talking from the crowd in a voice like a chant—slide down…tip the drive up.

I can hear Mason murmur sounds through my mental space like the high, wavering notes of his saxophone. I can feel him shiver for a moment. I myself shake under these felt reverberations.

We were beautiful as children and we looked like none of our relations: our eyes were too wide and held in them those stark, purpled centers; we lacked our father’s small, thick frame; our mother’s broad nose and hollow cheek-bones. Our uncle called us The Changelings for the disparity.

We were both quiet at that age, and private. Other children did not know our games and parents found us unsettling or, perhaps, merely strange, quixotic curiosities. It can be hard to qualify all of the various uneasy reactions.

But always, more than anything, it was the eyes—the particular violet intensity of them. It’d always been hard for people to maintain eye-contact with us; anyone who caught our shared glances from the corner of their vision and then the fixed attention of our gaze.

As my eye all healed up, people began to treat us differently. They seemed to be trying to read things into it, when they registered the broken iris, the purpled azure contents spilled out across the white of my eye, it seemed as though they saw in the anomaly of it some gesture of the uncanny and, when I was older, something of a quiet, secret confidence, in the exchange.

It became one of our games. I would peer, not just back at them, but right into their own stare and Mason would begin to giggle and we would break from the game. It is something that makes me smile still and I can hear some crooning noise of Mason’s sound from somewhere in my interior.

We shrugged off the difference they tried to mark between us. Our parents made no mention of this changed treatment towards their sons, or their own small changes. And with the two of us always close and talking low to one another, the effect was our further withdrawal into our own private company. Eventually, we came to spend most of every day in or around that clearing, cloistered by the pines. In the uncanopied center, we drove that sharpened stick through the grass and into the dirt. I almost feel again the act of holding the wood tight, pressing my weight down, the earth giving way to the sharp point.

never remember that that was just before and in this dream i am always just in that dodging of the knife swinging down slowly.

Each time i am here again the stranged moment stretches out. My hand begins loosened. i begin in the memory of having just registered a loss of control, not sure if it is mine or his or what. Clay reels back, still holding the wood tight with one hand he doesn’t make any sound in particular and just goes and bends down into the ground. He’s gone limp and i have to pull him over my back. Passing through and into the trees, i hear a cough from behind us.

i can only just watch my foot twist under an outgrowing hickory root and feel Clay’s weight on my back succeed over my efforts, and we are both sprawled there and he is asking where we are and i am fixed in my position under him. There is no pain in the twisting of ligaments as i fall down, the act is too redundant. The clearing still feels close behind me and i have the sense, every time, of having left someone behind—unsure of whether we are being pursued or in the act of abandoning and my shoulder is wet with something i can’t ever make out between blood and tears. In another dream someone has whispered their name into my ear and into Clay’s ear, and we have always forgotten.

Occasionally, we would find the traces of someone else’s presence in our closed haven: vague, circling trails in the grass from where small feet had pressed the blades flat against each other. At other times, we could hear quiet movements back in the shadows of the pine trees. The presence drove us, one evening, to curl up in the center of that clearing, and wait for morning, listening to a quiet pacing around our perimeter. Mason seemed to read danger in that sound of footsteps moving through the brush.

Waking up, cold and wet with dew and the forest finally still and quiet, we stumbled through the shadowed morning dampness of the woods. A week later and we were both sent off to music lessons every day, separated for four hours of every day.

for every day, four hours. For every day, four hours of lessons separated.

For weeks, four hours of blowing hard on those green cheeks. Afterwards, a quiet standstill in our terms of gaze. Wanting to know what his fingers had pressed upon, pressed into ivory and ebony keys. A means i felt i knew, sore cheeks but something just starting anyway. Blowing into that horn trying to visualize maybe just see those keys smashing in my own warped reflection on the brassy curve of the sax’s lip. So there are those keys showing in the sax and i don’t know what i’m doing but i’m hitting some notes. And it seemed, after some time, that we weren’t losing anything for it. After some time, we played together in front

The eye had gotten it started in a way, people shying away from eye contact, but really it was the music that set the first distinctions into motion. It wasn’t really anything… those people. I was just the stranger twin to them. But when we started doing things with those instruments, Good Things, there was Clay and there was Mason and whatever we may have been the two of us, there was just something we couldn’t say. By the time we were thinking about going off to college, I was composing and Mason was improvising. He was more than that though. There was something in his playing, some action you couldn’t quite put out there.

From somewhere behind, there is his exhale and a fleeting recollection of sitting in front of a piano on a stage, the two of us playing together.

But someone is stepping up to the podium now—here in this white-walled Episcopalian church—and the funereal audience is shifting in their pews. Someone I have never met is standing in front of the podium. My parents are sitting in the front row and my mother stoops over, shakes across her shoulders. I am having trouble keeping with his words and my mother continues to weep. Her shoulders continue to shake, my father places his arm around her shoulder. The man I have never met walks down from the stage and my father brings her up and into the aisle and people begin to search for their bags and coats from under the pews.

Mason mews quietly from inside.

* * *

I lay in bed upstairs for a while, in that old guest bedroom, until the last sounds of the reception came to a close. The memory of the sound and the shadowed passage of whatever that was that bandaged night from our childhood began to loop over and over in the empty room like the sounds from a radio tower invading an amp that’s been left on, and it was an effect that was doubled…that is, I could hear it replicated, muted from Mason within me. An old alarm clock by the bed flashed a green 12:00 in rhythm to the sound of that shuffling presence that had frightened the two of us so much that night and I lifted myself up.

When I make it to the bottom of the steps, I see the girl sitting at our couch with her face intermittently lit a pale blue, a white-yellow, a flashing of red from the television that dimly sounded in front of her. She is still as gorgeous as I remembered her being.

I had heard of Cynthia from Mason back when he had been playing regularly. I met her once at a bar Mason was playing at perhaps five, six years ago. I was in an unfamiliar city and had not seen my twin brother in months, had heard a few words. We sat together and you could see her eyes go wet watching him up there, and my eyes were wet. I wanted to get up there and play something with him, almost did before convincing myself my fingers had grown too stiff. The piano looked like it might have been out of tune.

I remember more than anything the way she spoke to me. It seemed as though she trying to find something about him from me. She never mentioned the obvious—the replica of this man she was tearing over and the one clear difference of our eyes. I valued that from her, and the way she sought out particular phrasings from me, tried to catch me mirroring him. But I was not a jazz musician, I wasn’t even a musician anymore, and she knew things about him I did not. I remember there was a flicker of jealousy towards her for qualities I was incapable of imagining.

Thinking of these things, how I so wholly stole him away from her that night, and seeing her here now, I think I am rousing him from his dormancy. As I walk to the kitchen and pour two glasses of water, I can hear, from the television, the voice of a woman describing how a lottery winner’s grandchild has just been found dead. And also, I can hear him stirring in alto-rumblings.

I sit down next to her against the light of the television as a commercial floods over the screen. There is no sense of what the product is, only this strange self-depricatory reference that’s supposed to indicate something reliable. She takes the extra glass from my hand, smells of whiskey. She asks me how I am holding up with all of this, where was I the whole time tonight.

I tell her I was with my brother and her face screams quietly in itself. She looks away from me.

She is telling me how much he spoke of me; how much the same and how he felt himself a dragged imitation; how she should catch me at a piano sometime. In this opposition she is describing, I feel a sense of shared quality, more on his side of the fence, how I’d always felt that way—the confused imitation, always only almost for the immediacy of ourselves as same in our childhood; later, in the distance of space, time shared, for the inability to apprehend difference, to conceive of it, the inability to evaluate ones own form, the underlying faith in a common form for which we are.

Mason is trying to warn me of something, but the shaping of words seems to have become unfamiliar in his deep slumber spread across the filaments of my mind. He is trying to say a name to me, whispering from within. His or mine, I don’t know but there is a heart beating skittish and fast.

We have been talking for some length of time, she has been talking, and I have been unable to register but small fragments. “He always claimed there was this thing that he was chasing after, trying to catch and something hanging behind him in its own chase. He told me once, he was lost on something or other so he talked a little, more to get the fear out from his system. He said he wasn’t sure sometimes if maybe one was just the reflection of the other. He said there was a name. He tried to say it was just some kind of disembodied tonal phantom, but that’s shit. He would have nights where he couldn’t be alone. Not about sex or anything…his eyes would water in mid-sentence.” And her eyes are watering and I can tell that Mason is cowering somewhere behind me, closer.

People might think you’re making contact when you’re up there playing your whole breath, finding your heart in your lungs and jetting it out, but if that was really the case, then you’d be able to stop and stopping wouldn’t be such a failure. Like an arrow after a target that’s always just ahead and never has to stop like the arrow. You might think, Cynthia might have said, Well, at least you don’t lose that target forever when your arrow slides into the grass and at least the flight of that projectile is something to moon over. But, if that were only peace… to always feel that thing that you can’t get to is always out there in the periphery…to always want to chase it, like Charlie Parker chasin’ his own Bird… and to always know that you can’t ever touch it and you can’t ever rid yourself of it… because it’s not like it didn’t come from you…to see something beautiful and bleary in the one mirror you can never touch and double fingers against.

I don’t know any terms to put this in but—I don’t know how, but I can feel Mason trying… to have arms around me. From inside.

I am not aware of the decision, but I have just asked her to watch a home video of us as children. And her eyes are watering as they were when we watched Mason blow his heart out that night. And there is a heart rate’s racing and he’s shouting sounds at me—did you do that?—and she’s laced her fingers through my hand, her palm is moist or mine is, the feeling seems familiar. She has taken the State I am in like half of me were dead. She is crying and maybe thinking she is sharing something with me.

And then I am witnessing my left foot stepping towards the television, sliding a tape into the VCR and falling back into the couch. She has composed herself to some extent, a last finger fixing hair behind her ears.

In television, we two brothers come into focus and we are hammering in the last stakes into a tent. I have begun talking, but I am not talking. Mason is trying to whisper a name into my ear if he could just think of it right. It is then that I can first perceive this other intentionality in the shadows of my mind. He is talking to her, she wants to know about piano, how ‘I’ played it. I cannot understand the words of His response.

On the television screen, at least, there are the two of us there, talking to each other in lowered voices. Mason is loosening his shoes, unzipping the door. This girl and I are still talking and my brother is shaking somewhere behind my eye. I try to concentrate upon the video. It was more than compatibility. We aren’t talking, and our parents filming respect that. There is just the background conversation bleeding in here and there. Cynthia is smiling when she is not being spoken to.

In the television, the two of us are pushing our shoes under the tent and there is a cut on Mason’s finger, a small spot of blood.

I reach out to see how deep it is and feel it to be only the red mud from the dirt around there. Mason laughs at me and then I am laughing with him. As we crawl into the tent, zip up, the noise seems to settle down. We lie down. We curl up against one another, close our eyes. I curl up against my brother, close my eyes. From outside the tent somewhere, I can hear a girl asking a boy if he’d play something on the piano, it’s just over there? Mason shifts his back, readjusts. I hear someone familiar tell a girl He doesn’t know any songs to play. Mason’s breathing falls into intervals of regularity and I put my arms around him as I loosen myself to sleep.

As the sun begins to rise over the Schuylkill and the air begins to warm, Fiona finishes the last laminated page with such a sincere pain, a pain of the organs, as though her innards wear a poisoned glove, of empathy that she feels nearly sick, she looks up, having just then fallen in love, to see Clay weeping silently, for whom, in so many of his hours, the world is a miasma of filtered sighs, the sounds of bodies rolling in their sleep.

-D.G.-

EXCERPT FROM FORTHCOMING ‘NOVEL’ “IN THESE DARK TIMES IT’S NICE TO KNOW SOMEONE CARES™”

CHAPTER 4

 

The doctor Wolchek loved looked like his sister.  He told her this one time, briefly, when she was leaning over her clipboard like she always did, biting her lip in a mild pout such that her breath could only escape in a convexical manner, condensing into the imprint of reverse smile on the inside of her scuba mask.  Wolchek once counted how many times she did this in one day, putting little notches on a  juniper bush at the perimeter of the Free Recreation Zone, which was also conveniently situated adjacent to her inspection window, but in an area of shade, low and unnoticed. 

On her rounds a certain violet aftereffect trailed about her person, crowned her in light halonic, made the paltry grey dome of the CoContainmentCenter sparkle with the HD flatness of digital transmission. 

The fact that she looked like his sister made his feelings all the more guilt-ridden and tenuous.  The fact that he once blurted this out to her, out of nowhere, coming up behind her and tapping her on the shoulder probably too hard and leaning in close and whispering ‘you look like my sister’ in a quasi-lecherous hiss also made the whole situation even more complex at a second-order level by creating a sense of revulsion and disgust at feeling such excitement that she looked like his sister, in turn prompting an exponentially spiraled ascension of ever higher nth-levels of guilt and loathing at the prospect that he was betraying his sister’s memory and singularity by becoming obsessed with someone who looked like exactly like her. 

He had not heard from his sister for several months after the Demographic Collapse, and had had to wait to redeem his personal days longer than usual due to the mad liquidation scramble and the need for all Arcturus personnel to be Powering Through the Trying Time Together.  His drive down US R 15 was sobering— abandoned vehicles burnt, deformed, crushed as in some cubist nightmare, an eerie silence for most of the trip, gas stations toll booths towns all deserted save packs of semi-feral dogs and giant rodents.   He had to go through two major checkpoints at Boise and SLC, which delayed him almost six hours in the fifteen hour trip from Medical Lake, WA. 

When Wolchek arrived at her subdivision around dawn the next day their cars were there but nothing else.  A For Sale sign lay in the yard.  The windows were smashed and the door boarded up.  A bright orange notice was stuck on a window: “This House Quarantined by Zerox ‘n Stuff : DON’T FORGET TO CHECK OUT OUR EXCITING SUMMER SAVINGS AT YOUR LOCAL CONSUMER COMPOUND!”

Wolchek then went to the Spring Valley CDC, which was also boarded up with a similar notice.  He then drove to the police station, and the desk officer explained to him between long yawns that quarantine procedures were no longer under their jurisdiction and that he should call the Zerox ‘n Stuff’s customer service line, which Wolchek did, waiting several hours as a 25 minute loop of Zerox ‘n Stuff’s commercials played, usually familial discussions about the D.C. and how it has effected all their lives and how it’s so comforting to know that at least some things still last, that at least there are some things that still remain as tangible reminders of life before, that at least one can still go down to their local Consumer Compound and buy quality office products at Never Seen Before Prices.  These commercials would then end with an ingenuous ‘we’re all gonna get through this together’ one-liner delivered by a young, presumably nubile yet maternal actress whose voice cooed ‘In these Dark Times it’s Nice to Know Someone Cares’ as a synthetic harp droned in the background. 

Finally a bored greeting interrupted the loop.

‘Zerox ‘n Stuff: In these Dark Times it’s nice to know someone cares’ this is Lisa.  Your reference number please.’

 ‘I don’t have a reference number,’ Wolchek replied. 

The woman sighed in an explicitly aggressive manner. ‘I can’t help you without a reference number.’

‘Reference number for what?’

 ‘Exactly sir—how can I know what you need without the reference number, which refers to the exact specific complaint you’ve filed?’

 ‘But I have filed no complaint,’ Wolchek said, ‘and I could just tell you what I want, which is that I just want to find out where—’

‘Sir if you have not or plan not to file a complaint then this is not my department, and so not my job, which is complaints, to handle them, and let me tell you there are a lot of them so I don’t need pranksters like you clogging up the lines pretending to not know your reference number when the Reference Number Ordinance has been in effect 2 months now. And don’t now go trying to bother our subsidiary franchise Zerox My Stuff Now! Express over in Bullhead City, am I clear? Because I’m calling them right now. ’ 

And with that the line went dead.

Wolchek was now close to nervous collapse due to lack of sleep and creeping despair, but he steadied himself after some projectile vomiting out his car window and drove to the Blue Diamond Consumer Compound where the Zerox ‘n Stuff Command Post was located and waited an hour in the customer service line of said command post until he eventually discovered that he needed to fill out a Quarantine Location Form or form QL 2FJ’’2547! in order to obtain a reference number’s information and location.  It was lucky that he knew his sister’s social security and driver’s license numbers as well as all her physical information and medical history, including the string of UTI’s she had been afflicted with her Sophomore Year.  It had been so bad that Wolchek once heard her whimpering all night as she tried to pee, tiptoeing to the bathroom over and over again but as soon as she sat down on the toilet becoming unable and feeling instead only the tingling uvular burn of phantom evacuation.  Wolchek surmised she must finally have just peed her underwear in frustration as there was the unmistakable maple-syrupy odor of fresh urine on the pair she had been wearing that night when Wolchek inspected her laundry the next day.  

So he filled out the form and then waited another hour in the CS line only to be asked once arriving at the desk if he had made two copies of form QL 2FJ’’2547!.  

‘You didn’t tell me to do that when I was here the first time.’ Wolchek said flatly.

‘That’s because I didn’t think I needed to tell someone something that is being explicitly said on the form I gave them.  Look—’

In the lower left corner was a little smiling Zebra with square shades holding a form QL 2FJ’’2547!. Underneath was the italicized epitaph Zerox Zebra Says, and a cartoonish speech bubble where Z.Z. is requesting in a pseudo-Elizabethan iamb of an English major turned bush-league Copy Ed. that the customer COPY ME TWICE FOR SEVICE CONSICE! AND DON’T FORGET TO BUY ZEROX ‘n STUFF PRODUCTS BEFORE YOU TAKE LEAVE! 

The fact that there was a cartoon corporate mascot on a Missing Persons form was vulgar enough, but having the character try to be so stupidly clever about the whole thing was utterly unconscionable in Wolchek’s opinion.  He bit a sizable flap of flesh from his thumb’s ravaged cuticle and walked like a stunned animal away from the CS desk.  Soon he had arrived at the Xerox Machine Sales department but none of the machines were on and when he asked an employee to turn on a machine the employee brusquely told him he would turn it on after he bought it and what did he think this was the ‘Free Store or Some Shit,’ which Wolchek thought was an unnecessarily brittle and also unwitty response.  Wolchek then tried to offer him a hundred bucks, but the employee just laughed and told him that unless they were Zebra Bucks he had no use for them.  Finally Wolchek realized he could just fill-out another form at the cost of another hour waiting in line to get it, and then waiting yet another hour after filling it out to submit it again, and this, by this point, seemed still the simplest route.

But when he arrived at the desk for the final time the woman too asked him for a reference number.  Wolchek replied that he thought this was what was supposed to get him the reference number, as per their first conversation four hours before, but the CSR countered that she would never have said such a thing because one can never obtain a Ref. # through request, rather they are divested upon all those of the Greater Las Vegas Metropolitan Area and besides when examining this form it’s like so obvious Wolchek is not Lois, and hence not female, which means he is attempting via fraud to try to get her whereabouts and status when only Lois Wolchek, using her reference number, can be serviced, i.e. obtain and/or be informed of her whereabouts and status, at which point Wolchek’s eyes began to involuntarily twitch and he spoke in slow trebled intonations like a man on the verge of pituitary shutdown

‘But what is the point of the Quarantined Person Location Form if only the Quarantined Person can be given that information? Don’t they already know their location and status?’

To which the CSR rolled her eyes and responded, ‘But what if they don’t? You of course know the progression of the disease ravages people’s thinking capacities.  We perform a service whereby they call here and give their reference number and then we can tell them things like where and who they are.  It’s that simple.  We cannot just give out such personal information to anyone off the street, especially not con-artists like yourself who are like so obviously trying to use stolen information in an attempt to steal a place at one of our ten J.D.Power and Associates Rated Z’nS Wellness Centers but have like, failed because our reference numbers are tattooed on their bodies so you could only know it if you were that person or maybe if you were in their proximity when they were naked.  But anyway, if you had like, seen them naked, then you would have already have been there and so would have had no need to be conning me here to try to get there.’

She then smiled with deep satisfaction and blew a large pink bubble.  Slowly and lasciviously she tongued it, her smile now grotesquely distorted by the opaque sphere of sugary plastic, before finally and suddenly sucking it back in as if to display some remarkable suction capacity.   

‘Still,’ she said, now with an air predatory sweetness, ‘I can help you, Sir—I can help you get an amazing deal we’re now offering if you sign up for our SuprValu Club.’

What happens after this Wolchek remembers only vaguely; fast cuts and blurred allusions to trying to gnaw/pound his way through the Customer Services’ plexiglass divider and then lying prostrate on the linoleum floor and gargling as Security Personnel dressed in striped uniforms and Zebra Mohawked helmets and boots shaped like hooves just whaled on him.  He was detained for the next six days, confined to a room with bright halogen heat lamps and forcibly awoken every few hours to drink salt water as they interrogated him and accused him fraud and spying for their detested Southwestern rival Zerox Ultimate Plus Instant Inc. The only reason he was released was due to a coincidental miracle: an old NW Polytech friend, who worked as an executive in a Data Management firm that Zerox n’ Stuff outsourced their medical records to for systems engineering and IT consultation, interceded on Wolchek’s behalf after he happened to be touring the new detention facility and seen Wolchek huddled in a corner of the cafeteria sucking residual OCP nutrient paste from between his fingers.  

And as Wolchek drove back up 15, through the vast expanse of basalt dust and barite extrusions, he thought a number of times of simply letting go of the wheel, letting it follow its own course over the highway ramparts and tumble down into the cavernous salty hell of the desert below.   Quick and vivid flashes of turkey vultures plucking out his eyes and tongue as his skin became hard yet chewy like beef jerky scrolled across the imaginary screen of his brain, as did clips of Lois laughing uncontrollably, perhaps one of the 22%-ers  who need to be confined and given diuretic enemas in order to minimize their coprophiliac tendencies and sobbing at her loss of dignity but unable to control herself and crying out for Wolchek to hold her (and pointedly not her husband, whom she at least at last felt free of he imagined, what with his manipulative grasp disguised by his easy-going and seemingly amiable ‘nature’), and Wolchek would get these spasms and shrill violent shocks when these scenes flashed through his head and he would hit the steering wheel over and over again as he drove for the last time in his life through the giant land mass geologists referred to as the Basin and Range Province, which would soon devolve into a no man’s land nightmare of lawless bandits and mad apocalyptic cults after the collapse of Zerox n’ Stuff and its affiliates because consumerist oriented companies could not manage actual resources and they were in one of the most naturally resourceless areas of the country yet were still so preoccupied with brand image they had not thought at all about material production and things like water and energy supplies nor could they afford to outsource such problems trying to sell luxury products to a population that was experiencing mass death madness and societal collapse. And so not even a year after the Great Government Fire Sale one could already observe that areas controlled by the Energy, Security, Agri-Bio- and IT tech industries and the like were all relatively organized whereas those having been taken over by Service Industry Corporations were in a state of utter anarchy.

After the Boise Checkpoint Wolchek pulled over in an abandoned HoJo and fell asleep in the back of his car, filled with terror at the spastic, random flickering of a lone operative streetlamp, but also, and worse, behind the lamps’ epileptic illumination he was paralyzed by the sinking dread that something irrevocable had happened, something that seemed to be crushing him as if from space— some sort of great force acting at a distance that Wolchek did not understand but in that moment he finally understood that he had no understanding, and this incipient conceptual awareness of the utter irrevocability of what was occurring combined with his own facultative limitations to create a metaphysical entity and empirical presence—a harbinger for the simple yet unbelievable fact that this was all actually happening, that it had been happening, and that it would keep happening until it had consumed them all.

moon as eye in birdhead cloud with exorbitant star

                                                          

an excerpt

One evening, after several early morning hours spent encoiled with a girl Greyson had picked up at a bar somewhere within the tacky college aura of the university that was gradually spreading like a squelching algal tide, an area he favored when he went out alone with the intention of removing someone’s’ clothing, the newly met fawning ivory babe lying on his bed had begun to bleed upon the sheets—a small deep amber disk that appeared on the faint yellow bedspread when she got up to go to the bathroom—and Greyson, who had stood up behind her, gazing at the flex and tremor of her cream legs, before glancing at the spot of menstrual blood there on the sheets, eyes slowly blinking, mind verily blank, thinking suddenly of his wants (a cigarette, the autumn air, to curl in the window frame…) before crawling to the head of his bed to the bay window, set himself in the frame and lit a smoke, cracked the window open and thought about how the “public” display there of the most private kind of blood would ease his obligations to call or not to call or to lead her to such conjectures one way or another and he fell, his cheek now pressed against the cold glass, into sinking ruminations around the idea that it was cowardice and not contempt that drove him to regale in such inevitabilities and these flagellations drove him, as they often had, to think, mournfully, just how much he loved his mother, the very thought of whom in such terms could afford a brief, if illusory, emancipation from the disdain he felt towards himself and the fuzzy set of His Kind—Ah, how ungainly he sometimes felt inside his own head!—and what he felt was the lightness of a body sinking in a slow, topsy-turvy descent in water down into the claustrophobic physics of the deep trenches where he preferred to close his eyes, to be warm, but where invariably he could only gasp in what amounted to the vain effort of climbing out of his own throat, so when he heard the sound of the bathroom door creak open and the uneasy silhouette of a sophomore in economics with hair struck yellow with the street light coming in through the trees outside, a nipple momentarily silver, whose hands came to her mouth when her eyes glanced at the darkening spot on the bed, Greyson had a look of incredible sadness on his face.

Greyson snubbed out his cigarette in a small convex bronze disk resting upon a heterogeneous collection of the Alexandria Quartet in the window well, flung his legs across the bed and, in a bound, neatly erected himself before her. He put his arm around her and, as though leading a child from the scene of a broken toy or a lost junior league game, walked her to the bed and sat the both of them down…such that the two and the darkening stain lay in a row. He gave her the courtesy of sitting in the middle. The filtered street light lay dappled across her body and Greyson looked down at their legs, his hands clasped over the black thicket of his own pubic hair, glanced right to gaze blankly and the grey-blond strip of her own, Look, it’s fine. It’s really not a big deal. And she looked up at him, eyes shining and pooling with tears, N, it’s not! Her voice, though tenuous was nearly indignant, it’s not okay…it’s not, it’s not, she repeated, falling in to a muttering. Listen, Greyson said, locking his knees together but, to his slight arousal, in an almost angry voice that rose and rose, It is disgusting, I’ve ruined your, your very nice sheets, and God knows what else.

Stop, Greyson said, beginning, just beginning, to lose interest. Right, so my sheets have seen better days or rather nights, but it’s not a big deal, I mean, I happen to know for a fact that in addition, and he stood up while talking and pulled his briefs on, to menstruating, you know, bleeding out these dissembled remains, and he glanced down at the bed, of what could easily have been a baby, and grabbed his pants up from the floor and paused, prevented by the virtues of a steady supply of manufactured hormones, that you’re also given to shitting on a regular basis and pissing at a steady rate throughout the day. Shit, everyone shits, pisses, bleeds, skin sheds in invisible clouds, the vomit flies, by now he’s dressed and the look of duress on her face was divorced from the shame of a moment before (a kind of tacit generosity it is only fair to acknowledge an intention towards, if only half-lucid, on his part), It is not a big deal, hell if we got along real swell like it’d all come out anyways, and you’re no less a, a, beautiful sweet girl and we both already knew that the human body is no esoteric machine silently excreting only steam or something, and he thought, though refrained from speaking, we are no industrial witch’s kitchen nor does the skin bag contain a philosopher’s stone. I am going to go to the gas station and buy you some tampons if that’s alright. And she nodded, one could say frightened though not for any threat, an inchoate, self-ambiguating uneasiness. He waited for just a moment; took her hand; it brushed his lips; he let it fall down and he turned and walked out, buttoning up a pressed blue shirt as he went.

The trees beyond the window creaking, the filtered light through the interarborations  moving like a mixed tide upon the bed, she looked about the room, took the blanket tangled at the corner of the bed around her shoulders and listened to Greyson’s footfall down the steps, quieter and quieter, whereafter the creak of the front door sounded his absence.

Out on the street, Greyson buttoned up his long coat, glanced at his building, saw Eva’s and Clay’s silhouettes illuminated in the soapy glass of their bathroom window. He headed towards the gas station and a yong boy’s voice sounded behind him, ‘Scuse me mister? A small paranoid warning ran through his nerves, he turned around and ten feet behind him were two young black kids, perhaps twelve or thirteen, Yea, he looked around to see if there wasn’t anyone else around, a block ahead of him he saw a trio of hipster girls stumbling across the street, what’s up? he said, putting a cigarette in his mouth, without necessarily wanting one. Two more boys seemed to have corporealized directly behind the first two and he noticed two more across the street, one of whom was clearly shaping up to grow into a massive porcine brute of a man, ‘Scuse me, sir, amid barely suppressed giggling, d’you know where Baltimore is? And Gresyon, who was perhaps fifty feet from the avenue began to walk faster and the kids were right behind him and he told them it was just ahead and he wasn’t sure how many there were and he left the sidewalk for the street and heard the young brute say, Fuck this, and the first young fists fell upon the back of his head and they swarmed him and he pushed the two who were suddenly in front of him forward and they’re just kids was supplanted by pain and animosity and his mind was unable to consider the option of responding in kind with Tooth & Nail and he broke into a sprint until he had thinned the ranks to two and was below a street light and stopped dead in his tracks and the boys stumbled to a halt in front of him and they, jokingly, in singsong where’s the money, bro, where’s the money bro and he lowered his shouldered and, shouted at them that he didn’t have any fucking money and to get the fuck out of here, and they scampered off into the night, late for bedtime as they surely were. He walked to Baltimore to the Triple A, seething and warmed a bit when he saw the beautiful ebony and ivory smile break across the face of the young Dinka man who worked throughout the nighs there and whom had once traded music via flashdrive with Greyson, who (perhaps hypocritically) blushed as he bought the tampons from Gerald, whose eye brows rose across his flawless skin whether at the quivering of the face or the tampons Gresyon didn’t trey to sort out, and they shook hands as always and bid one another goodnight.

Greyson walked swiftly in long lycanthropic steps back to his place, picking up his fallen cigarette halfway there, stopped at the front door, heaved a great sigh, texed Clay to see if he wanted to smoke a bowl on the roof, and, at length, opened the door and ascended the stairs. Greyson went strait to the roof, walked over to the edge to stare down at the empty street where he had just been assaulted. Opened the box of tampons, turned one over listlessly in his hands, opened the wrapper and began to pull at the cotton. By the time Clay came out in his pajamas a few minutes later, Greyson held but shreds of cotton in his hands and neither those twenty minutes together nor after did he mention the attack, and she was asleep when he returned to his bedroom and he moved nearly weightlessly to lie some inches beside her, where he watched forms coagulate upon the ceiling in the crepuscular hour before dawn and, awash in an undirected pity, he pulled her close, heard by her breath that she was awake, and swiftly fell asleep to dream of passing through frenetic crowds of aqueous, burningly cold bodies.

everflight

i’m getting used to getting used to –

never getting uesd to –

everflight –

butterflying stomach — stomach, lead the way!

o never getting to get used to –

o never getting used to never getting used to –

everinvasion of getting

getting into

(& getting)

used to’s to’ing –

too too too too too too too too

too too too too too too too too too too too too

too tootoo tootoo tootootoo too too too used to.

ELEGY FOR ANALOG T.V. [12:45 p.m.: 6/12/09]

Never again will I hear the crackling of a crossed signal, cutting a weather girl in half with a bolt of static and then resurrecting her in calcium-crisp color. From the Ionoscope and the Image Dissector a great lineage had been born, come to end, like them all, I know.  The ghosts that once populated its cathode screen now simply black-outs or disintegrative pixels, the movement across channels no longer instantaneous; the spastic suction of the vacuum becomes a slow, padded glide, as if across linoleum.  I sat in my underwear, drinking a can of Schlitz, scanning for signs of life after 12:30 E.S.T.  They’d been dropping like flies all morning.  I thought about the 70’s kodochromatic with its mustard gas aura, I thought about how I will never see that fuzzy holograph of flesh so well replicated again.  It mattered not all those who had deserted me before; that I deserved.  But this, this phantom friend whose body had been as real as mine—hard really to believe it was The End.  I was lighting a cigarette, my eyes closed, and I heard it, I didn’t see it. I heard the explosion, and then saw only the entropic madness of the lost signal, screeching at me in some horrible death rattle.  I clutched Prof.Higgins, my Honduran Iguana, and screamed too. We are overrun by endless divisions of binary integers.  We are lost to the crystalline flatness of their empty political slogans.  We now search for the epiphenomena, the second skin that hangs over analogue world, in vain.  Only its essential features have been preserved and algorithmically condensed; the excess is banished to a spectral limbo between bandwidths.  Channel 3 has a message, it says: “Goodbye!”  It’s on for two minutes after 12:30, and then it too explodes and disappears into the static maw.  I scan the channels one last time.  Finally in the 60s I discover the Spanish Channel is still broadcasting.  It is a telenovela, with the soft, waxen hue of a video-tape; that perfection of the analogue image.  They are in a hospital.  A woman is crying about her baby. Several people surround her; one of them is dressed like Zorro.  I am not sure if the baby is hers and they are trying to steal it from her or if it’s the other way around.  My iguana wriggles from my grasps and runs away.  I crawl toward the television.  I touch the screen. My hand is bleeding from rubbing Prof.Higgins too hard.  The woman fakes left around Zorro, and looks back one last time. She tosses the baby to him and then jumps out the window.

MISS PIGGY P.2

        It took him an hour to walk home.  It was a warm, foggy night, yet the sky was strangely clear, with a small flock of purple clouds moving westward.  As Milo fumbled his keys outside the arboretum gate he detected some peripheral movement.  He spun around, key readied to gouge out the assailant’s eyes.  But there was no one behind him, only the HV/AC van which he had first noticed in the last week or so.  He stared at it for long time but could see nothing through its tinted windows. Finally he turned back around and pretended to fumble with his keys again.  Milo then did a quick double take and looked back at the van. The periscope had changed position. 

For some reason he became filled with rage, an intense absolutely guttural ferocity which sent him catapulting toward the van screaming about privacy rights.  The periscope suddenly retracted into the hood and the van reversed at about 6,000rpms, disappearing down the block.  Milo spent the next few days attempting to catch the van by surprise, but it never returned.

A week later, he was readying himself for work when he gave his telescope a quick glance, as Venus was rising in the evening sky.  Leaning out his back window to position the telescope, he noticed a bright reflective light catch its lens.  Next to the carriage house Milo spied someone wearing what looked like a biohazard suit, with a silver oval helmet and a dark rectangular strip for vision; almost like a Russian cosmonaut.   The person was about two hundred yards away, rolling a barrel very slowly into the bamboo thicket attached to the back of the property.  Mr.Gesto’s truck was nowhere to be seen, and Milo did not have a phone. The cosmonaut soon vanished with the disintegration of light.

 The next day his pills disappeared and Milo found the coaxial cable. He began to grow desperate, thinking he was suffering a nervous collapse.  Though the television supposition was beginning to sound more plausible, Milo was still undecided.  His behavior, such as the whole shitting in a bucket thing, seemed to suggest some mental imbalance, but the coaxial cable was no product of his imagination, so it was really a toss-up.  Milo spent days tearing his apartment inside out, looking in every crevice and cranny imaginable, but there was no other sign of surveillance. To be safe, he started planning elaborate booby-traps to protect him while he was at work, and he even covered his walls in felt after reading on Wikipedia that infra-red couldn’t penetrate it.

Then he talked to Mr.Gesto and received confirmation that was someone indeed watching the house.  In fact, he saw the cosmonaut again that same evening.  Milo was in such a rush to catch him that he tripped over his bucket and slid right into a sharp corner of his desk, suffering a bad blow to his groin that made him double over onto the floor.  And as he rolled about in his own filth, writhing in agony, he was now absolutely certain, more than anything he had ever been certain about, that someone, somewhere, was watching him, and that was all that mattered in matter anymore.

Milo then became consumed by a lingering, gangrenous dread that multiplied in surface-area and stench by the day.  It got to the point where he would spend hours, eyes glazed, watching only Gems-TV.  It was hypnotic and deliriously punishing, an endless stream of 18K tanzanite rings, Pink tourmaline lockets, pairs of mystic topaz googly-eye earrings. The prices would drop so dramatically; he would try and predict how low they would go, as the steady pulse of a Casio keyboard yawned in the background and a woman with a thick Chicago accent flailed her arms and squeezed her mouth into the pouty O of a sex doll at each reduction.  And he would also sob, recalling his research for Mabel’s ring, whenever they showed a 2ct. VVS1 G with an ideal cut.   

For Milo could no longer articulate, put thoughts together, remember what he had learnt or done; it was all a haze, an electric cloud that hounded him as he paced in amplifying feedback loops of panic and nausea, ideating various suicide scenarios but still plagued by the horror that he could not escape, neither in life nor in death, whatever this monstrous thing was, this thing that should not be here but could not not be here. And as the days wore on, and he simply masturbated and drank and wrote nothing, he became resigned to this end.

Yet suicide itself is a tricky thing.  He didn’t want to jump, too much splatter and intestines and he most certainly didn’t like the idea of his intestines being exposed.  A gun also displeased him, as it involved the splattering of brains, another thing he didn’t want just hanging out all over the place. And if he did it in the apartment, he would decompose before someone found him. It’s the ultimate humiliation, death, what a pathetic stinking mass of putrescence one becomes, for all the world to see; to be dressed up like some puppet and displayed, without any power or say in the matter; it was horrifying, disgusting, and Milo could not stand it. He wanted to throw himself to sharks or die of exposure on some Antarctic tundra where he would never be found.

And so he found himself doing Clov’s two step shuffle in and out of the fall-out shelter, lying on his couch and wallowing in regret, watching a sapphire charm bracelet w/18k white gold band spin in a halo of cathode rays.  He would conjure cinematic visions of a white wrap-around porch, upon which a young child sits, watching Milo split logs as he tosses a stick to their husky named Searchlight.  A shock of golden trees recedes into the electrocardiographic zigzag of a mountain range, put in relief by the halcyon sky of autumn at dusk, the whole image like a giant replica of Charlie Brown’s t-shirt.  And he would carry the logs into their kitchen and start a fire on the old stovepipe.  Mabel would put the baby to sleep and join him, Milo wrapping his arms around her waist as they knead dough, their hands interlocking and moving in a viscous cadence, in some Reynolds Number of amorous locomotion, and it would be like that scene in Ghost, except without the whole inter-dimensional sex thing. 

Milo had been with Mabel over four years. He had just come back to the city after the last of a long a streak of institutionalizations.  Having been first sent to a rehab at the impressionable age of eighteen probably did him more harm than good, after a fellow patient, recounting his abuse history during an art therapy workshop, explained how one synthesized Killer B.  Killer B was a delicately proportioned mixture of Buprenorphine, Bumblebee Stingers, Baking Soda, and Benzphetamine (an anti-obesity drug which causes intense hallucinations).   It was in some ways a seasonal drug, due to the need for bumblebees, whose juices would be extracted with a syringe and then heated to 550f with about 1000mg equal parts buprenorphine and benzphetamine, before finally adding the 2400mg of baking soda in four-hour increments over four days; ‘fermentation’ as the lingo went.  It was then smoked in its gel form, best in a glass rose stem as one would crack-cocaine.

Milo soon left the rehab with some fellow patients and lived in a squat house with a group of ‘friends’ who raised the bees and attempted to breed more potent hybrids with their South American cousins.  Conversations in junkie circles became increasingly oriented toward the proper breeding and keeping of bumblebees, the taxonomic differences between bumblebees, recollecting various times when you were doing Killer B with bumblebees nearby, etc. All this Killer B business of course attracted the attention of various government agencies, worried about everything from crime spikes to some ecological disaster from a new invasive species.  Soon enough it was the hippest drug of choice in rehab, as the alpha pack of these institutions was decided by degrees of suffering and degradation.  Not long after came the memoirs and celebrity sponsors until finally some Johnny-come-lately called Dirty Brown, a concoction it seems of dung beetle pincers and black tar heroin, usurped its throne and installed itself as the chic affliction of the late Aughts.

Mabel helped him break this regressive cycle. They met in the throes of their twenty-something indecision and malaise.  Soon enough they became each other’s anesthetic to false expectations of conquering the world. She was a beautiful and fiery woman, not to be fucked with, raven hair and eyes which could only be described as planetary blue. The first few years were that sort of dueling musical chairs of who was going to screw who first until they realized that neither of them had given much thought to the matter in a long time and they were actually getting on rather well.  They moved to the country to go school, and led a quiet little life as hermits, curled on each other’s laps reading fireside, the cat asleep on the rug, soft rain a percussive staccato on the skylights above. 

But Milo’s doctoral thesis idea fell apart during the first year of his program after someone pointed out that it had already been the subject of a 2005 documentary called the Century of the Self.  It was like, literally the same story arc, subject matter, and theoretical constructions. He began to grow bitter, as Mabel finished her degree and he, having quit, did nothing; years starting to whittle away as he drove about the neighboring fields in their lawn mower, loaded with bourbon and shooting haphazardly at buzzards with a rusty 36 gauge.  He turned antisocial and inward, wanting only the solitude of his quiet struggles, the little vicious homunculi that swarmed about his mind.    

He began visiting a prostitute who allowed him to enact his predilections at $100+/hr.  Milo had an erotic fixation involving the transmogrification of people into base and disgusting animals.  The ideal vessel of its expression had been a Miss Piggy puppet he had had since a mere tot.  By middle school he was masturbating himself with the puppet, imagining he had captured and transformed his seventh grade crush Becky into his muppet sex slave.  Eventually it crystallized into a fantasy of a digestively-capable puppet, a large pig puppet, alive enough to evacuate all those nasty intestinal rudiments which had become so embarrassing since the invention of plumbing.  Yet he had no desire to enact such grotesqueries with his lovers, as their willingness to participate would negate the whole point anyway. Milo also believed himself uniquely afflicted by this fantasy and felt, with some melodramatic fatalism, that telling anyone would just lead to disaster.  At least the anonymity of the prostitute allowed him some medium of release; though she was willing, it was a cold, paid, pseudo-willingness.

But then there would be the point that came afterward, the slackening and the deflation and warped reentrance of the world resolving into a jaundiced strip of light upon an empty mask.  And this other creature, now repulsive, laughing at his sad sniveling little sack of meat, his hand trembling and still clenched about the withered member, tiny opaque drops of the germinal stew hardening, this stew of shit and blood from whence he once had recombinated and in a violent contortion emerged—here they were, ebbing to and fro in a random walk of memories, a flock of vultures circling in the pale rakish light of a winter afternoon.

Milo then would go home to Mabel, and lay with her on the couch, and feel not a flinch of remorse for his actions; only the empty drain of that comes after such indulgences, the amnesia and  compartmentalization and cotton-mouthed aftertaste of how terribly foolish and absurd the whole thing was.

 

On the day Milo died he had tried to phone out from work, but only had one quarter and didn’t hang up in time to for the answering machine cut-off.  He needed to use payphones because he stopped paying his phone bill. A green charity had been withdrawing from a bank account he had forgotten to close and by the end of the fiscal year Milo owed nearly five hundred dollars in compounded overdraft fees, which he could ill afford on his $60 per diem salary.  He had only signed up for the charity out of guilt, accosted at a lonely red light by a chubby young woman wearing a particularly garish orange keffiyeh.  Now his penance had cost him tenfold and he was too paranoid to answer his phone.  He had already ceased returning the calls of various friends, relatives, former lovers, etc., so it was not as if he had use for the thing anymore.

Milo returned home, planning to masturbate in his closet and then get really high and watch some Gems TV.  But he could not find his Miss Piggy mask.  And it was always on his bed; always.

“You bastards!” He shrieked, shaking his fist in a Hitlerian manner and ranting for a while about contemporary society’s voyeuristic sickness.  Finally Milo swallowed a few Percocets and lay down on his bed, wondering what they had done with the mask.  And then it came to him.  He would kill himself—today. It was an absolute necessity, and no appeal to reason could persuade the bloodthirsty tribunal of his mind. He would spite the bastards, and they would ensure his body was found before it rotted.

And as he lay there in bed, regarding the raw afternoon sunlight refract through a murky Gatorade bottle that contained his piss, he felt OK.  Mabel, his parents, the many fragments of his life reduced to photos in an old shoebox which he could no longer find the courage to open—all these things became so very trivial. Not superficial, rather the most profound and beautiful triviality he could imagine, like the absurd possibility of him lying there, on something one called a bed, the detritus of stellar fusions and organic excretions alike, regarding the sublime wonder that was his own urine.

It was all played out now—a pantomime of a farce of a tragedy, as his memory directed a repetitious future, oscillating between crystallography and catalysis.  The smell of spring, its adrenal fever mixing with the sickly sweet scent of Killer B, down in the overgrown wastelands by the refineries, the warm breeze and the feeling of invincibility and destiny, the wheels in the sky, gears pushing a celestial machine, those panoramas wherein the camera is located bird’s eye, spinning,  and joins together all life’s indiscernible, subterranean events into an ideal congruence, a contraction of the world to a singular node of long soft hair, of burnt bumblebees, of freshly cut grass and honey suckle…               

 

Milo researched how to tie a noose on Wikipedia, but was delayed at Home Depot buying the rope and missed the sunset in the process.  He decided to do it during the threshold point of dawn, in the embryonic glow of the still buried sun.  He ate a great deal of pills and sat in a chair sipping scotch, listening to various nostalgic songs and growing indifferent to the whole affair. 

At around 5 a.m. he stood up and ambled over to his telescope, repositioning it at the window facing the street.  Through the bare, arthritic limbs of the trees he saw a fuzzy white blob which soon resolved into the HV/AC van.  They had returned. It was time.

Milo picked up his desk chair and slung the rope over his shoulder.  He then realized he had given no thought as to how he would hang himself—there were no overhead light fixtures or rafters in his apartment.  Milo then remembered that he bought an iron gym pull-up bar a while back.  The contraption was still in the box, so he sat down and drunkenly began to fumble with various bolts and levers, becoming increasingly frantic as dawn’s approach grew imminent.             

Suddenly, he heard the most horrendous, guttural shriek imaginable, an absolutely inhuman banshee-like squeal.  Two more screams followed in quick succession, and then nothing.  Milo peered out his back window and saw the faint glimmer a reflective suit vanishing behind the carriage house.  And through his foggy and impaired state the brilliant light of epiphany shone—this was it—this was the climax, this was what the evil bastards had been setting up from the start—the great test of his character, come down to this moment—or was it? Was it? Of course, it had to be, what else?

            Milo grabbed his biggest steak knife and sprinted down the stairs and across the lawn, his robe flying open like a cape, his hair wild, brandishing the knife high above his head and hollering as he kicked open the door.  But inside it was empty; just an abandoned dusty room.  There was an awful stench, like vinegar and sulphur, which made it so difficult to breathe Milo had to cover his mouth with his shirt.  And then he detected a thin sliver of light in the far corner—a door leading to the basement.

Milo gagged as he descended the stairs, and upon arrival vomited. Animal masks and barrels of some noxious acidic liquid lined the walls.  In the middle of the room was a large, rectangular pit filled with the same yellow-green liquid.  Inside, half-submerged, was what appeared to be the body of a young woman.  Her skin was almost entirely scalded off, and it took him a long time to realize that strapped upon her slumped head was his Miss Piggy mask.  Milo recoiled— it was all so disturbingly real—the scene was the exact incarnation of his fantasy…

 

For years Milo had never even given a thought to Mabel’s locked chest, until that one restless night he opened it, while she was away, in some sudden compulsion that came from without.   He soon found himself sifting through a giant stack of letters and journals and photographs, full of past lovers, cities he had never been to, people he would never meet.  His own name rarely showed up, and only in the most innocuous of ways: “Milo dropped me off at work,” “Milo away for the weekend,” etc. 

 And then, buried at the bottom, he found it. An entry that looked like it had been written left-handed as if for a therapeutic exercise.  It was a long, anxious account of her fixation on dressing rooms, specifically her urge to get-off in them, and preferably with cameras.  She would lay the article of clothing down, straddle the bench, and then bring herself to climax.  It was the only way it worked, and she was becoming more obsessed with time, going in between classes, finding excuses to go shopping five, six times a week. She eventually caught the eye of a security guard leaving a dressing room, and he gave her a knowing look that made her go right back in and do it again.  Now she always went to Bloomingdales to put on a show for him.

The blow to his ego was incomparable.  It was like he had been living with a total stranger who regarded him as the same.  And it was in that moment of greatest distance from her, of greatest unrecognition, that he suddenly loved her more than anything he had ever loved, and he knew her like he knew himself.  The next day he paced about for hours, in anticipation of what he would say, and when she finally came home he just laid it all out there—the prostitute visits and miss piggy and his many doubts and sins and how he was going through the same thing as her, and that it was OK, and never would they feel closer and love more unconditionally now that all veils had fallen away. 

But Mabel had just stared at him for a long time, quietly crying. 

“You’ve ruined it,” she finally said, shaking her head.  “We were fine. I didn’t want to know that.  Why would I want to know that?  And why would I want to tell you that?

“Because,” Milo said, rushing up and grabbing her by the shoulders.   “Because, we’ve spent our entire lives, entire fucking lives carrying all this bullshit around and thinking no one would ever understand and blah blah, but here we are!  Don’t you see?” Milo pleaded, lifting up her chin and looking hard into her eyes. 

Mabel turned away. 

“I finally did it,” he continued. “For the first time I was really honest with someone.  For so long I thought I would never be able to tell anyone about anything I’ve done, that I would always live fucking over everyone and—”   

“I don’t I want to be honest!” Mabel screamed. “Don’t you understand?  Love is not about honesty— it’s a fucking lie, that’s the point! It makes you indifferent about the actual truth of the matter!” 

Mabel bowed her head and drew in a deep breath.

“I needed my secrets.  They were mine, and only mine, you asshole.”

And then sitting down she whispered,

“I…I can’t even look at you. I can’t even look at myself…”

“I don’t understand,” Milo mumbled, as a nauseous feeling of irreparability suddenly washed over him…

.  

 

Milo took a hesitant step toward the pit, waving his hands haphazardly in front of him, his eyes burning and steam obscuring his vision.

Suddenly, he heard the door open.

“Oh Thank God,” Milo exhaled, and running back toward the stairs and fixing his hair.

But no camera crew, no R.T.V. host, no close relatives or old lovers greeted him from the top. There, in the cosmonaut suit, stood Mr.Gesto.

Milo stumbled backward and fell, and for a long time neither of them moved; they just stared at each other, without even blinking. Finally Mr.Gesto took a slow and deliberate step.

 

And Milo remembered a long time ago, when in the haze of a manic binge he had come to in the wastelands by the refinery, and the air was perfect, a mixture of fresh dough and kerosene.  A thousand points of light converged and diverged in parabolas of storage tanks, synthetic constellations in a safety orange sky.  And the sky was darkening, or maybe brightening, with one bloody gash low on the horizon. Where he had come from Milo did not know, nor did he know where he would go next. He was alone, in an uncharted estuary of time, and he had lost all sense of coordinate, or even the sense of what ‘coordinate’ was.

And Milo could not tell if it was going to be dark for a long time to come, or if the sun was struggling to emerge from that infinitesimal fracture in the sky.

a poem by Gerhard Falkner

“Library”

Of you I posses
ten volumes of your voice
the jubilee edition of your body
the so-called Leipzig edition of 1998
a few exquisite bindings
of your skin
with barbed bracelet circling the spine
beyond that, prolific meaningful glances
and a personal drama
that’s been playing for years
Moreover I own
annotations, reviews and hermeneutics
on laughter, tears and excesses
en masse
Finally still a couple of poems
that, after having exploded in my heart
showered down on our small disorderly home
like the ashes of Gomorrah
so that finally
after years of agony
to end in the dust bin

trans. Silvia Cernea

MISS PIGGY (PART 1)

             — IN MEMORIAM, D.F.W.

The day Milo decided he was in a television show was also the day he died.  It was unfortunate the two had to coincide so cruelly, given his long, almost sisyphean pre-occupation with achieving some semblance of recognition or fame.

The conclusion had emerged over course of several weeks, as bizarre little lapses kept accumulating. His missing bottle of Klonopin, for instance—he initially surmised its disappearance was due to the benzoid tendency to hide important possessions inside ovens or between mattresses and then not remember doing so later. But as the search became prolonged and increasingly frantic it came to him. This, he realized, would, from the perspective of a TV audience, be quite the farce—what with the crawling about on all fours and combing the carpet for one that might have perhaps dropped long ago and issuing guttural sobs that could only be described as the gargled squeal of a dying animal, yes—that’s what comedy’s all about.

His suspicions were further justified by the discovery of a tiny hole in the ceiling of his bathroom, just wide enough for a pill bottle, but instead of the pills he pulled out a coaxial cable for what looked like one of those little snake cameras. After this discovery he became unable to go to the bathroom in his bathroom, opting for a bucket by the bed which he would once a day empty into the toilet.  He would do so under the cover of his comforter so that no one could even see his shit let alone watch him do it.  Five days and a lingering odor later he realized that if they were in fact filming his bathroom they were probably filming the rest of his apartment and hence his shitting in a bucket had just aggravated the whole bathroom thing and blew it up into an actual quirk they would want to put on the show. 

There had been a reality show which involved a carefully orchestrated collusion of all those dear to the subject, in which everything, from spouses’ implied infidelities, occupational termination, faking the death of a close relative, etc., would push said subject to the brink of nervous collapse before finally revealing the joke and sending them to convalesce all-inclusive on some pearly white cay. But Milo had thought the show was put on hiatus after that murder-suicide in season three.  Perhaps they had re-tooled the premise to be more subtle, surreal, insidious; the slow attrition of possessions, the strange cosmonaut with the oil drum that appears in the smoky shroud of twilight, the HV/AC Van with the periscope always parked near the entrance of the arboretum.

And then his own landlord, Mr.Gesto, confirmed his suspicions when he asked Milo in rare moment of face to face if he had noticed a van parked by the entrance frequently, or anyone poking about the property.  Milo told him about the periscope van but refrained from mentioning the cosmonaut.  Mr.Gesto nodded, looking back toward the street and grimacing. Then he just grunted and walked on, as he was juggling several boxes of trash bags and what looked like a portable torch.

Now one could have easily dismissed Milo’s claims, if only on the grounds that he had withdrawn so far into his own head he could no longer distinguish extensive terms and their relations as anything but the effective product of his own existence, an existence that was of course irresistibly star-kissed and destined for great recognition.  And though he was of somewhat abnormal intelligence, it was nothing prodigal—the sort of intelligence which can recognize and rejoice in the genius of prodigality but only in so far as it acknowledges its own failure to achieve likewise.  Neither was his charisma—which surely lent him a certain electric charm in eloquence and gesticulation—of any sort of Ciceronian quality.  His appeal was mostly due to a dark handsomeness in his hair and eyes which off-set his more puckish and puerile cheeks and jowl. Milo feared his face would become less endearing and creepier with age, like one of those progeriatric children always glad-handed by talk-show hosts. He would hyperventilate and pace about and imagine time slackening and extending in a broken straight line beyond him as his face congealed into a leathery mask and became swollen and putrescent before finally emptying of meat.  This anxiety contributed to the inability to see a dentist even after he cracked his back molar biting into a corn muffin of all things. It was now definitely decayed and hollowed out and probably contributing to his halitosis and gum bleeding and was most likely infecting his jaw and the more he avoided the problem the more time he of course spent fretting over it to the point where he now had recurring nightmares of his teeth falling out or becoming soft marshmallowish knobs that reduced his phonemic inventory to shrill vowel phonations and Xhosan clucking.   

Milo had moved back to his home city after he broke up with Mabel, finding a cheap place on the top floor of a Victorian slated for rehabilitation.  It was a fairly extensive property on a small arboretum within the city, quite the ideal arrangement; he was completely isolated, yet only ten minutes away from the subway.  

He worked in the inventory department for large book chain.  One of his main tasks involved the ‘redemption’ of unsold copies of mass-market paperbacks.  Every month he collected, following a designated corporate list, a thousand or so books whose covers he would rip off and send to the publisher for a percentile refund. The books themselves were then boxed and thrown into a dumpster. Milo once requested to take home the unused copies, but his manager launched into a lengthy explanation concerning the ‘tricky grey area’ that was the publisher’s legal protection of books meant to be discarded. The absurdity of the whole process soon created a justification for Milo to return late at night and crawl, commando style, through the little swatch of shrubbery lining the back of the parking lot in order to save a few boxes from oblivion.  Soon he was collecting books he wanted and marking them in special boxes for later dumpster retrieval, and it got to the point where he was throwing away hardbacks and giant etymological dictionaries and even once the complete gold-leafed edition of In Search of Lost Time. His growing excesses lead of course to a growing paranoia, and he surmised he would have to quit before the next annual store-inventory.

Milo also felt pangs of guilt, which he liked to whisk away with a diatribe about corporate greed or something.  But he wasn’t really fooling himself, and he felt bad, getting away with it, though he did nothing to stop doing it, just as he felt bad about spending most his time sleeping in a secret hide-out under the stairs and masturbating on the toilet whenever a certain part-time clerk was working.  Milo even signed up for the dreaded Sunday morning shift to spend more time near her. He would watch her from the little nook underneath the stairs.  This plan was eventually foiled by a whole clutch of spiders that descended upon him one morning, causing him to burst from the hide-out shrieking soprano and tearing at his hair.

He just could not bring himself to ask her out.  This was not due to lack of confidence, but rather to the embarrassment of dating someone whom the others had deemed unattractive during their conversations on the hotness quotient of co-workers.  And he understood; she could not have been more than five feet tall, pear shaped and especially bottom-heavy, almost double the proportion of her top half. And she had that granola priestess thing going, lots of shawls and beads, with frizzled curly hair like a mop, extremely pale complexion, almost translucent, very soft-spoken, all smiles, seemingly tolerant of everyone and everything.  She bore herself with that certain belief in one’s own spiritual depth; quite foreign to Milo’s sensibilities.  

  After Milo heard she had given her two week’s notice, he became desperate, attempting to orchestrate chance encounters in cafés, bars, and even at the park by the river where she sometimes went for a run. He once waited down there all evening, until he finally fell asleep on a bench and woke up sometime in the early morning.  And he sat by the water until well after dawn, lost in the current’s hypnotic and incessant gyrations, the water so black and oily he could not even see his own shadow. 

 

Milo finally asked the clerk out on her last day under the guise of farewell drink.  They met at one of those contrived dive bars churned out from the CBGB algorithm.  A constant loop of post-punk was playing way too loud and the well bourbon cost twelve bucks a double. It was overcrowded, with a lot bike couriers and urban farmers and snakeskin-booted hipsters. The dress was an eclectic pastiche of several bygone epochs and betrayed its disjunctive homogeneity. 

Milo shuddered and downed his drink in one gulp.  After a few more they began to open up, recounting their various life-lessons and trying times that made them who they are today and whatnot.  She told him about her conversion to Wicca after a bad relationship ended in restraining orders and mace, and her life goal of becoming an English teacher.  She had just passed the Praxis, which was why she was leaving the bookstore.  He told her about the break-up with Mabel, and his prolonged writer’s block that was driving him mad. 

“You know you should come to my poetry circle”, the clerk suggested. “It would be good for you to write something about Mabel.”

“Oh I have.  But I don’t really want to show it.”

“But that’s what I meant—you need to express yourself.  And with others.  I mean, I think if you shared something with the group, it’d be good for you.”

            “I don’t know,” Milo winced. “I think the last thing I need is a forum to jack-off about my own manufactured problems.”

            “No, they’re real,” she said softly. “But we have to look past these things. You know, focus on the positive.”

She reached out and touched his hand and looked directly at him, raising her eyebrows in a bambi-ish supplication for him to cheer up.

“It’s going to be OK.  You just gotta let it out.”

She squeezed his hand. It was warm and sweaty and somehow conveyed voluptuousness, and he felt a sudden surge of arousal and shame. 

“I don’t know,” he said, letting go of her hand and finishing his drink. “This whole celebration of ‘personal expression’ seems suspect to me… Working at the bookstore, seeing what gets sold, it’s the same confessional bulimia everywhere, all our sordid secret lives, like I care about some trust-funder Less than Zero that got himself all strung out, cry me a fucking river. As if, in the face of all the horror in the world, we have convinced ourselves that our problems of narcissistic discomfort and struggle for ‘personal fulfillment’ somehow outweigh our own spoiled grace of not having to starve. And this cottage industry of personal memoirs—like every writer was groomed at Iowa to write personal essays on what it meant to be a writer writing personal essays in all its profound and breathless wonder, like Hallmark pilfering an Emerson stanza and having fuzzy pink bear sing it—that shit, well, I just can’t stand that anymore, all this VALS methodology, aspirational branding, blah blah blah…It’s all Edward Bernay’s fucking fault…”  

“That’s terribly cynical,” she huffed. “We have to find our own voice to write; that’s what it’s all about. What would inspire you without that?” 

“I completely agree! Sure, being a child of the children of the sixties, I used to think myself special—just like everybody else. I too had dreamed of the some bohemia which would arise spontaneously around me and together we would somehow remain resilient against the boundary spanners and cool-hunters and all the other vampires lurking in the warehouses and bars of whatever neighborhood was prolo enough to be hip that year, but come on! What a marketing scam… Are you going to finish that?” Milo pointed at her drink.

“No…” she said, wrinkling her brow in a worrywart manner that seemed to be her calling card.  He took the glass and shook it, stirring the straw about absent-mindedly.

“Mojito.” Milo said, relishing the words in a slurred Spanish.  The clerk sighed.

“Uh huh…”

“So what was I saying?  Oh yes—I mean, as the years went by, and I kept fucking up my life, it seemed more and more like what I thought I was going to do one day, was rapidly closing in on me, everyday, until it seemed like that one day was almost gone, or maybe had already passed. And I used to tell myself I needed the filth and the solitude and the fucking up—suffering for the Capital A, the mad free-fall and then phoenix-like ascent into the immortal pantheon and whatnot. As if writing were an immaculate conception of great names, and not this ass-fuck, this chopping block for a lost history of the nameless failures—no one who has contemplated suicide would ever say that is why they did it, did because they were ‘too pure for the world’.  You do it because you think yourself a pathetic wretch, and you hate even more the narcissism of wallowing in your own pitiful shit that comes with believing oneself a weak, pathetic wretch, and you hate most of all the hyper-awareness combined the total paralytic inability to act that arises from thinking oneself too weak, too base, too vile for existence, while still acknowledging that this belief is itself the fucking apex of masturbatory solipsism!”

Milo was now shouting. He slammed his hand down on the table harder than he expected and knocked a candle off. In his panicked haste he grabbed the wrong end and burnt his palm.

“Fucking Son of Bitch!” Milo screamed, involuntarily flinging the candle at a Stooges poster. All of the sudden the room was silent, due either to survival concerns or the appearance of sacrilege. It does not take much to rattle hipsters; some people had already fled the building and covered it up like they were getting a smoke.

“I’m really sorry,” Milo whispered, ducking his head down and turning back to the clerk. “I…I didn’t mean to just go off like that…I’m not having the best of times right now.”

“It’s OK.  It was an accident,” the clerk said sullenly. 

A large bald man with hands like baseball mitts suddenly appeared and grabbed Milo by the shoulder.

“Okay, let’s go.” 

“Wait wait,” Milo stuttered, “it was a complete accident!”

The bouncer shrugged his shoulders.

“Sorry, the bartender flagged you. C’mon.”

“Are you fucking serious?” Milo whined, and then awkwardly stayed seated, scanning the room.  Everyone was holding their breath and glaring him. Finally he stood up.

“Well, you want to get out of here?” Milo asked the clerk.

“Yes,” She mumbled, jumping out of her seat and grabbing her pocketbook.

 

They mulled about outside, Milo shuffling his feet and sighing a lot, the clerk staring off and looking ready to go home.  

“Sometimes I think I have PHD,” Milo finally said.

“What’s that?” She asked distractedly.

“PHD? ‘Psychosomatic Histrionic Disorder’—It’s a psychological disorder caused by one’s own psychosomatic belief in having a psychological disorder, and the unshakable, constant anxiety with diagnosing said disorder, though nothing actually seems to fit the symptoms. See, something’s always awry—it’s not quite this or only partially that, and on and on ad infinitum. One would think that the awareness of this disease would lead to its being ontologically negated. Yet therein lies the catch, right? Because acknowledgement of having PHD means acknowledgement of having an actual psychological disease, but that’s exactly what PHD’s premise denies—having an actual psycho-neurological problem, and so you have a psychological disease even though it isn’t one.”
            “Did you make that up?”

“Uh…yeah. Of course.”

“You’re funny,” she said shaking her head. “And crazy…”

They both laughed, and a gentle homeostasis returned. The clerk, driving him mad with lust and disgust, touched his hand once more.

“It’s going to be OK; these anxieties fade with time.  You’re still so young, what-25?”

“I’m about to turn twenty-seven.” 

“Okay, twenty-seven.  Look, this is just a passing thing that one learns to deal with with age, like I have, in processing all sorts of feelings of inadequacy toward my sister.  I mean, she’s always undermining my achievements. Last thanksgiving, she laughed at my poem of gratitude to Demeter and the Harvest Moon, and in front of my whole family! I was so distraught I had to have several emergency sessions with my ashram.   

Milo was tempted to ask her why she had an ashram if she was Wiccan, but instead he looked into her eyes with all the earnest conviction of someone who will say anything for a fuck, and told her, hey, he would never laugh at her poem. In fact, nothing would soothe him more right now, he said, than to hear her own personal expression of the ineffable beauty of the universe and trees and nature and stuff.    

 

And so he found himself in her little eggshell condo, listening to a poem that seemed to be about an erotic encounter between herself and the ocean, sipping sake and biting his lip at the way her sweat pants hugged thick stout thighs, converging and then parting at the pelvis and drawing a creased V around her nascent cameltoe. 

When she finished her ocean poem he sprung up and proclaimed it a masterpiece, and that he was now full of passion because of it, and he grasped her hand and kissed it and thanked her, and then, leaning down and delicately whisking a frizzled tuft of her hair to the side, he gave her the Harlequin Heartthrob stare of burning desire.  But instead of the expected embrace she withdrew and shook her head.  He had too much baggage, and she was trying to learn to be alone, and take care of herself first and repair her credit and finally have the courage to get a listed address and visit Drake in prison to rub it in his stupid face. 

Milo stared at her dumbfounded for minute, and then leaned in even closer, whispered, it’s okay—he had wanted her since he first saw her, etc.  But she shook her head again and asked if he wanted to hear another poem. 

He threw up his arms in a grandiose declaration of chagrin, and then launched into a diatribe concerning mixed signals, such as the of touching hands and the inviting back to condos to listen to soft-core marine poetry and that she surely would never have a chance to be with someone as gorgeous as he. He was yelling now and realizing how drunk he was and already regretting his words but continuing to rant anyway, and then he tripped over her cat as he was heading to the door and knocked over that Klimt print which hangs in everyone’s foyer. And she just stared at him lying on the floor, shaking her head.

STOPSINE

There was a stop sign in the scrub desert outside my town.  I used to like to go there, because it was outside my town. But there was no road, and I never understood who put it there.  Maybe at some point in time there was a road (or rather two, which intersected at this stop sign), but only unincorporated badlands surrounded it. Nothing human for miles, save this stop sign. And a new one too—not one of those old blackwhite throwbacks which would lead you to conclude a road had been there, and just vanished in the corrosion of desert time. 

            How many stop signs actually exist in the world?  Are there as many stop signs as there are people?  Probably not.   Maybe, perhaps, in certain areas. It would be nice to think there was one stop sign for every person, even if there were more people than stop signs.  Their unequal quantities would somehow link one to one, along that inexhaustible diagonal that would never halt, and for every person there would be a stop sign.

            But what made the stop sign appear?  Where did it come from?  Some say Michigan 1915, but that can’t be right.  Stop signs carried the bubonic plague to Europe, most likely syphilis too. There is good evidence stop signs were behind that drama at marker 10 Appian Way, where a fateful shiv set in motion something which would crush us all.  Even at Mnajdra slight traces of aluminum were found in the altars, and some primitive retroreflective pigment that correlated with the stop sign’s astonishing ability to see at night.

Should we seek first the time of geology, when the stop sign was formed by sloppy magmic copulations, whose emissions extruded upward, thrusting toward the surface and into our dumbass primate hands?  What is it that made us give ourselves to the stop sign?  That made stop signs something that we listen to, that we obey so unconsciously we need not think about it.  It says STOP. When it says STOP, you stop, and if you don’t stop something bad will happen to you.   And it’s good that something bad will happen to you, because if you don’t stop you might do something bad to someone else, which is worse than something bad happening to you, most of the time.                                   

It was only recently that the stop sign came out of hiding. For this we must thank the vast empire-building of AASHO, whose great manifesto The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices ensured the standardization and streamlining of the stop sign, and thus its general assimilation into mainstream society.  Before then, a stop sign could be anything; it could even be nothing.  It was horrible; the stragglers prowling about the fields late at night, howling, tearing at their clothes. That was in the time we do not name, the time of the Crossing-Guard Syndicate. 

This answers nothing. 

When I think about stop signs, I think, how many species of stop sign exist?  Of course they have various languages, shapes, etc.  But the stop sign is always red.  This is due to an atavistic reflex, when we were all still eaten by the Spider Goddess and excreted through her menstruations. But exterior morphology is not important.  I was trying to cry all night.  What is important is the stop sign’s specification.  Some are tolerant, inclusive, ALL-WAY STOP.  Some are willing to try new things, like the 3-WAY STOP, which are surprisingly tricky to navigate, and you need a lot finesse not to be overwhelmed by their lopsided waltz. And some are prejudiced, telling you that though you must stop, OPPOSING TRAFFIC DOES NOT. 

Then there are those janus-faced bastards, who say if you are going straight you must stop, but if you’re taking a right hand turn, no—it’s OK, you don’t need to stop.  So when you approach them you hesitate, and you say, ‘what, well, OK, I guess I’m taking a right turn, but I just don’t feel comfortable with this,’ and then you slow down, in that horribly indecisive jerky manner, and it throws off the whole rhythm of your drive, everything is ruined by that RIGHT TURN DOES NOT STOP, and you feel like an electric shock of pavlovian revulsion because you didn’t stop.  Which is good.  If you cannot feel that, please contact your primary care physician immediately.   Because a RIGHT TURN DOES NOT STOP is not a stop sign. It’s a yield sign. The yield sign; the shadow of stop signs, its confidence man, or chimera.  A bizarro world stop sign, a world where we need only coast, there are no switching stations; drifting about, accelerating and decelerating without end, hesitation and frenzy, no digital friend here, always the fuzzy analog of the middle. 

If not for the stop sign, this would have been our world, just a ribosomal soup of horizontal yields, just cold stellar dust never dense enough to cohere, never able to take off vertically and vertebrately.  The stop sign would never have existed, if not for that primordial stop sign which made it possible, which of course doesn’t make any sense but what do you expect?  What is that you expected from me?  I could give you nothing.  I was talking to you about stop signs. That’s it. Stop trying to make this into something that it’s not. 

In Israel, to be clever, the stop sign is simply a hand, palm facing out, which is ironic due to its close resemblance with the Heil! salute.  Sometimes a traffic light pretends to be a stop sign, but this happens mostly in rural areas at night, and they’ve been stepping up police action on this problem.  On rare occasions we are treated to a feeling of communal warmth, after a light is broken and a homeostasis sets in amongst motorists, a slow exchange of turns, a great procession of cooperative agents, all playing the part of someone stopping at a stop sign that is not there.

Stop signs unattached to the ground unnerve me, especially those on school buses. They remind me of the guillotine, and how I don’t want to go back to that time, when a stop sign was a hatchet, when a hatchet was a law.  But the lowest stop signs are surely those in parking lots, because you always miss them, and they don’t make sense—they’re spaced every five meters apart, phantom brigades that plague you when no one is there, late at night, lying in the backseat of the Skylark, a fluorescent scythe of light drawing itself gently across your neck.  And you get so angry, because we don’t have faith in ourselves to stop for others, even in a parking lot.

We need those stop signs.  Especially at night, when the world is dead and you’re driving alone through an endless latticework of junctures, receding into some yawning Hadean contraction.  And you have no one to stop for. 

What happens then, when you have no one to stop for, and you’re waiting at that stop sign, like I did that night, a long time ago? 

Trying to feel something. For what I did to you there. That night.  Why I can’t.

I don’t understand.  What I did to you. 

I don’t really know what’s in there.        

           

 

                  

.        

           

 

 

.        

           

 

 

Laredo Priceless, S 44^th St. btw Baltimore and Chester

Laredo rung the door flipped open a hand mirror before her sometimesgoldsometimesgrey (her alwayscorneredeyes) gypsum eyes—pulled a tendril of auburn hair across the sculpted arches of her eyebrows—and pressed the yellowed intercom. Someone, a girl’s voice she didn’t recognize answered in a tentative crackled Hello?, and Laredo said her name and closed the mirror and opened the buzzing door. She walked up the thin stairwell holding the burnished cherry railing with fingers painted a verdant indigestible, yes, almost hallucinated red. Her eyes starring / languid feline passage at the peeling aquamarine wallpaper printed over and again in golden Jardin motif variations; passed the second floor without lingering and as she made way up to the third floor she heard music / rhythmous piano / Philip Glass / “Music Box”, where the door was ajar and she saw the familiar sight of Clay leaning over a verdantly jungled terrarium sprinkling flightless fruit flies out of a quart container upon a carpet of emerald moss where Laredo could see the tiny golden shapes of some of Clay’s terribilis dart frogs striking at their minute prey. Fiona was sitting on a worn ugly orange couch sketching in a pad. She looked up smiling. Well, hey there sweethearts, Laredo said in a raised voice over the music, leaning through the door frame. Clay turned around and capped the lid over the swarming flies. Yall comin up? She said. Mhm, said Clay, leaning down and putting the fly culture down with the dozen others below the rack of terrariums and aquariums.

She smiled turned and ascended the last flight to the roof top. She opened the door and stepped out onto the silver rooftop where Greyson sat with the unfamiliar faces of Charlie and Charlotte around the patio table drinking bloody maries. She said hello to Greyson and took briefly the hands of Charlie and Charlotte as she sat down. Greyson made her a drink and conversation gradually filtered in through the silence as Greyson explained how the three of them had been up late after walking home from Dalak and the two of them had slept over. Fiona and Clay came up and Greyson likewise prepared them drinks. Fiona began to break up some pot from a pill bottle and rolled two joints. One was passed around and Clay ran down and brought up a laptop and put on some a mix of Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring broken up by Velvet Underground bootlegs and The Castanets.

Laredo hadn’t shaved in a few days and kept rubbing the stubble growing out of her cheeks; stared absently at the red impression from her lips upon the joint she held / her arm cast out across the latticework flora of the iron patio table. She passed the joint off the Clay and responded (after some length) to whatever Greyson had just said a moment before.

My roommate plays this online video game they’re actually called MMORP that is massive multiplayer online roll playing game it’s called World of Warcraft WOW for short, the table smiled, and the guy literally spends most of his waking hours playing this damned game which by the way just about gives me the whole place to myself and during a break when he was microwaving some instant mac and cheese he told me this interesting story, this is just another example of what you had been talking about, she said, looking at Greyson, who nodded, how this husband and wife played together—Clay started wagging his finger like he wanted to say something, Laredo glanced at him before continuing—and she came down with cancer or something and passed away and her husband and their guild, they have these guilds people form and join, you know HordeNinjas or Excalibur et cetera et cetera, and they had a formal funeral service in-game. Everyone took off their armor and put down their wands and swords, allowed their magical wards to fade and like you know were actually saying their goodbyes to this woman who actually Had died mean forget about that she was a level seventy gnome warlock, that was besides the point this is real human loss, a funeral service on virtual ground. Now that’s something special. It may be weird or disconcerting but it’d be fair to say that this funeral rite was more different from all the others before it than any of them were from each other whether contrasting the internment of a pharaoh or the millionaire jettisoned into space or even the pits of genocide chewed into the earth of every land at some point by men. She took a breath and passed an empty glass over to Greyson, who began to mix her a drink. And so that’s crazy in its own right of course but the story has a fucked up turn. Clay leaned back in his seat. Because another guild, let’s say the Anthropophagiacs, appear all of the sudden spells firing axes swinging arrows flying and slaughter the whole solemn assembly. Now they’re not dead you know this except of course for our Gnome sorcerer i mean this isn’t first degree or anything but all there characters or avatars what have you are dead. And and so they all appear, she spreads slowly spreadeagled hands across the table, one by one maybe in some adjacent Elven town, and there is their friend, departed, this Gnomish digital body standing there vacant, the occasional animation passing through like a shiver, standing amongst them unmoving because of course somewhere in a room perhaps beside the widower she has left behind there is an empty seat a silent keyboard and the screen where her company stands before her gnomish body and all its attributes chatting away in outrage which is was of course not in some pseudoshakespeareanpseudotolkeintalk but in straightup video game slang English and they chat in outrage but most of them stare at the empty vessel that is never going to move again will only disappear when her husband closes the program or shuts the computer off in tears. And that is the moment when it sets in for them all and the really let go.

Chester bumps into a poet

CHESTER GUITIERREZ, SAN FRANCISCO, THE MISSION

Yea yea yea I met her on two occasions. Why let me think, the first time must have been in the early nineties. Yea that’s right ‘cause, now I remember, because it was the same day that Curt Cobain had done shot himself in the old brain case up’ere in his attic. I remember it clear ‘cause all the young street rats were all kinds of teary-eyed and snot-nosed over the death, you know but more than that the suicide, of that young man. Because you know the suicide of icons can’t but leave a kind of fascination on the part of their fans, specially such a depressing kind of star as that. In ay event, I could hardly stand the lot of ‘em, these kids dirty and hungry and drug-addled as they may all o’ been weren’t really homeless folks, more they were kids who were going through some stage or other, you know it wasn’t that they couldn’t cut it in the “real”, fingers hook quote marks in the fog, couldn’t hold down a job, no they were all, they are, all trying to find themselves or they got mommy or daddy issues had taken the drugs back home from the parties one too many times maxed out credit cards that kind of shit. But hell that’s besides the fact that I had a couple friends among them, still do to this day. Shit, I got friends just about everywhere there’s a park bench or overpass the occasional open hand.

Pardon me for taking a while to get to the place that you want me to but you got to understand a little history to make sense of it because real street folk, men and women who just plain don’t want that life, went through a hell of a time back in the Eighties. You had three things that really tore up what it was to live on the streets and the communities that came together across the country every night before pit fires or barrel fires or around the steam that rises here and there along the sidewalks. You had Reagan hardcore drugs and AIDS pretty much hittin’ us all of the once and none knew much what to do. First you had Reagan cutting funding for all the institutionalized crazies who didn’t have family or anyone else to support them, basically opened the floodgates and threw onto the streets the people least capable of fending for themselves. And then the heroin the crack the meth come raining down upon the all of us so hard I had friends who died I had friends who got themselves shot dead for nothing starved to death panhandling for another hit folks who literally could not speak the English Fucking Language no more. and then, with all these folks, obviously people sucking and fucking for a hit here half of whom think the goddamn moon were made of cheese, and then AIDS hits and a few years in people are sharing needles and screeching at passersby screaming cause some one gave them a sandwich and you can’t spend no sandwich to get yourself a rock or two. Anyways the old days were gone forever, there weren’t no more git togethers like there had been nobody singing about candy mountains or cops with wooden legs or even hippy anthems about peace and love LSD.

So that night I was working on a pint of vodka from my jacket all nostalgiac and whipped-up and I was particular sore about the sullen little droops and frankly didn’t want totalk much to anyone I knew until I ran into Febby. Now Febby is older than I am but she is one of Reagan’s cases and that woman, now you gotta picture her this waxy monster of a woman done up in sweatpants a flat ugly face with hardly no lips tiny, unnervingly tiny, little ears but these beautiful black eyes and this long dark luxurious black hair looked like she could have been native but she was so big and shiny it was hard to see. Anyway she had this nutty habit of just standing in front of buildings like she were cast in cement. Anyways I’d have the habit of pulling her back and setting her down with a cigarette. Well anyways I found her one evening, the one I’ve done mentioned already, standing and staring at some half-open shutters where a girl was moving around straitening a bunch of chairs. Well Goddamnit Febby pull it together. I gave her the old wave the hand in front of the eyes but she weren’t lookin’ at anything in front of her much less my hands so I pulled her back from both shoulders and she kind of slumps into my arms and I lower her down to the corner and take a seat. I put two cigarettes in my mouth and pass her one for which she gives me a great big childish grin like half a meringue pie. She likes to purse and pout her lips real quick like while she smokes, I take pulls from the vodka and chase it with long drags. I try to talk to her but it’s always the same. I talk, she says some bat shit crazy things and then I just end up talking to her without givin’ her much heed for speakin’ herself. I whiled away a good hour like that with Febby ‘cassionaly giving her another lit cigarette we split a cheese sandwich I had in my pack and I finished my vodka and got to talking about my boy, who was ‘bout five years old living somewhere in Massachusets, last I heard he was patching up body armor in Iraq. Sweet woman, Febby, but a damn idiot nonetheless. In any event by the time I was ready to get going she was snoring and drooling a little on her shoulder. I gave Febby a pat on the head and damnit but if I didn’t get drunk all at once lurching up and nearly stumbled back down onto the sidewalk. I grabbed for the nearest thing I could, what happened to be a door handle and next thing you know I was stumbling into that room, where suddenly the blinds had been raised and that room of chairs where that pretty girl had been doing her arranging was now full of a mess of people looking straight on at a woman standing at a microphone not six feet away. I managed to catch myself from falling by grabbing a hold o’ that woman standing in front of the microphone. Surprised the hell out of me but she caught me by the arm, stronger than I’d of expected, and kept my steady and I caught her eyes and saw the great big scar running across her face like she’d been sleeping on a drawn wire and couldn’t make heads or tails of what was going on in that dome of hers, or her face, behind those auburn eyes, you’d probably say Impassive. Well she let go and I traipsed past her, waived my hands in the air and announced to the frightened crowd I was A-Okay before falling into a terrible coughing fit. Then I heard her voice ringin’ loud and clear over me ‘and I have cut them all off

One by one, at pace with my own powers of regeneration and recuperation…” so moved to the rear and next to a counter of books and teacups and stayed quiet as a mouse listening to her read her poetry starring out like she was looking through the walls or past the whole stinking city. Though it wouldn’t have surprised me if they had, nobody came to grab me by the arm and give me the old Get The Fuck Outa Here whisper, though I coulda whooped any of ‘em anyways. I just stood there a bit drunk a bit enchanted I don’t know why happy as a clam and then everyone got to clapping at which point I made for the exit, pocketing a copy of her book as I left. That was the first time I ran into her, no kidding.

35

We’re not willing yet to let you go, but dirty glasses cast shadows like a dank cloud across
his lean and pink cheeks it’s for the best he says with lips like a fish and his hands, neat
and trimmed like a woman’s or lawyer’s if you take a little time off.  Maybe you go home.

Looking at your file I see while attending our university and here he makes eye contact to say
you more than attended but gave your fluids to the place.  Then he says why:  your mother
and several other relatives passed away.  Now the storm: it sounds as though your town the hurricane

did toss. The subject changes after mass pastoral apologies.  Many troubled students reference you so
it’s not that you don’t have friends among your classmates or administrators. Pictures of his happy
kids and fat happy wife grin from desk, wall, a homemade lampshade.  Each blank joyless

face insulating him.  We asked you to come in and talk to us, but you continued through and your grades
have dropped considerably. I tell him I didn’t want his help and that to make what happened there
mean something, to make Kimily go back, to turn as my old man shriveled even more I needed

redemption.  Effervescent office soft-chaired and pillowed per some course he must’ve took waits
for response.  Well, George, maybe you’d be better off back home. Then honest: You’re scholarship ran dry.

Poetica Hiaticus Soberum (A Sobering Hiatus from Poetry)

Used to wake waiting to hear her voice console
the dead a few years piled, to translate ghosts
to native tongues.  They come carrying trinkets
of what’s been lost & she their guide reminded

the landmarks of their lives.  Then we lost touch.
Dead in broken sentences fumble some remembered
moment but without her perfect ear for emphasis
their words fizz & whirr like static.  I’ve lied to you.

Last autumn we broke our deal, broke from singing
she allowed so casual, like a lover who steps nude
from the bathroom without giving one startled glance.
She left knowing my mind isn’t wise enough to learn

the brutal language of the dead.  She knows I love her.
Two years pass as silent punishment.  She doesn’t care.

Hey Kids, Check Out Lighthouse Glass!

More Pics!

or go to lighthouseglass.com

Owl Dale

Argus Encounters Venus

Book 2 now in Delta Dawn

hey folks, just letting you know that if you navigate to the delta dawn section on here you can read book 2 of Delta Dawn.  The new password is: portland.

Gene Mikrowaive

News coverage Coverage of the “Moutzoromata” (aka “Smear-fest”) in Galaxidi

I participated in this celebration for my second-time on this March, 10th, 2008. I am well acquainted with the village of Galaxidi because my mother’s summer home is there. The village has a population of only 1500 in the winter-time, and all the locals (”Galaxidiotis”) I know take this party very seriously. I highly recommend attending this centuries old celebration of the transition from carnival to Lent in our unspoiled traditional village of Galaxidi, Greece.

Also, for more on just me, Wally, check out my new personal blog at:

http://awallybridges.wordpress.com

Flowers in the Sky

“Flowers in the Sky”

“In the name of God the merciful the mercy giver, I have been allowed to write you a card and just letting you know I’m doing fine and in good health. Do not believe what is being said about me in the news it is untrue and I pray that we can have a reunion. Love your son Pucho.”
-Letter to mother from Ibrahim Padilla June 2002, after nearly
two of over three years of imposed silence
without criminal indictment, Detained as enemy
combatant on American soil, American citizen-

Another Dream, or nightmare,
And I am following her through the coughing streets
Where she is lost in the traffic and there are
Swarms of sick and yellow-skinned soldiers.

Something is trailing from the back of me
Some string stretching behind in a line I
Tried to follow, was lost, in another dream,
Where I was lost trying to find my way
Again through foreign places.

I see Her shoulder in the shoulder
Of an old man leaning in to a bus and I rush
To get to Her and there is some flashing sound
Coming from way back behind me, catching up.
I pray to God that I have not faltered.

I can feel a double pain in my back
And I can feel that there are wings coming out and it is
All I can do to stretch them open, fold them again
In the tight space of the bus.
I had imagined them beautiful,
White or the color of lighted door space, but seeing them
Cloaked about me, I can make out
The fine interweaving of threads sown together

Long, wove together fuses following in to a crack
In my spine, between sore shoulders.

There is a boy standing there, with the same shoulder
As that shaded woman and his eyes are wide and
His finger strikes towards some point behind me
And again is that crackling sound of fuse running short
And my wings spread taught, great masts of waving heat
And in that last moment I have the silver tongue
Of God between my shut lips and in that last moment
Before it’s all just white and white-gold,
There is a radiance in his eyes and something I can’t
Read for beauty or terror.

Brothers writing on pads

the sea

Music by Morcheeba, interpretive dance by Wally

A Tribute to my favorite “PH’s” Philadelphia and Pharoahe Monch

photobooth discoveries

Greyson’s Death-note

The Last Written Words of the Waynhim Family / Sneak Peek of Towards Medusa

The Cultural Anthropology of Germantown Friends School

The Origin of Student:

The Evolution from 9th Grade Neanderthal to 12th Grade Tribesman

The Upper School students constitute a large body Germantown Friends School civilization.  Yet, within this portion of the civilization there is much diversity. The Upper School Neanderthal can be broken down into four sub-cultures based on grade rank.  However, these sub-cultures (9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade) seem to only be inhabited by a set group of people for a period of one year.  After that time, which usually ends in mid-June, the students undertake what archaeologists refer to as the “great migration.”  During this period, all of the cultures seem to mysteriously vanish from the GFS civilization for a period of 3 months and upon their return, all seem to have evolved.  This is seen by the fact that those hominids who previously inhabited the 9th grade tribe, now hunt and gather as the 10th grade tribe, while the 11th grade tribe now assumes its position atop the ladder of hierarchy and sits around a sort of throne known to all as “the senior table.”  It is also important to note that the ninth grade tribe is now constituted by a younger group that has evolved out of the aggressive and war-like middle school culture. However, what seems most disturbing is the fact that, after the “great migration,” the previous members of the senior tribe have vanished all together!  Now that I have explained the theories of upper school evolution, I will go on to give a synopsis of the basic cultural attributes that define each upper school tribe.
The ninth grade tribe, also called the “freshmen,” is at the bottom of the upper school social hierarchy.  This may be explained by the fact that they are newest members of the upper school civilization and must thus, start at the bottom of the social ladder and learn how to climb up (note: this physical ladder has yet to be found in excavation but archaeologists are still looking).  The members of the 9th grade tribe seem to congregate at a building known as the “Student Technology Center.”  One can identify a ninth grader based on a few common physical characteristics: First of all, they are usually much smaller in height than a member of the senior tribe.  Secondly, they lack the possession of a TI-83 graphing calculator, a device that all 10th, 11th and 12th graders seem to always have with them.  Thirdly, they do not have car keys on their person, which also indicates that they do not drive. Last of all, they seem to dress in a more “trendy” unified fashion than seniors and juniors (who both clearly have great diversity from person to person in terms of clothing).
The tenth grade tribe, also known as the “sophomores”, are a unique culture because they are, according to one member of the freshman tribe, “caught in the middle.”  The sophomore tribe has evolved to a point where they find themselves “too cool” to hang out with the freshmen but “not cool enough” to hang out with the junior and senior tribes.  Thus, the 10th graders are the most isolated tribe in the upper school civilization.  They seem to spend most of their free time in the “Student Technology Center”, but they separate themselves from the freshmen tribe (except for a few sophomore males who occasionally leave their camp and go to the neighboring freshmen camp to flirt with freshmen girls).  The sophomore tribe generally inhabits the section of the student lounge where the couches are, while the freshmen tribe seems to congregate around the tables near the snack bar. The 10th grade tribe physically looks much like the freshmen tribe, only a little taller, and sophomore dress is much like that of the freshmen tribe. However, sophomores possess a TI-83 calculator, which separates them from freshmen.  In addition, at the end of the year, a small number of sophomores even possess car keys, indicating that some even drive.
The 11th grade tribe, also known as the “junior” tribe, is at the second highest level of the upper school social hierarchy.  The juniors clearly demonstrate characteristics that their underling tribes (9th and 10th graders) do not.  These characteristics would include, a high level of diversity in dress, identifiable facial hair on males, confidence to interact with seniors, and a high skill level at hacky-sack. One can clearly see these characteristics demonstrated by the tribe in their newfound place of habitat, a place called “the front steps.”  This location, as well as the “front hall” seems to be a place where the 11th and 12th grade civilizations congregate together.  This clearly demonstrates that the social skills of the junior tribe have evolved to a state where they can competently communicate with members of higher-ranking tribes (the senior and faculty tribes).  Members of the junior tribe may be identified based on a few physical attributes: First of all, they carry a TI-83 Calculator, so it is clear they are not freshmen.  Secondly, they are generally taller then most freshmen.  Thirdly, unlike the freshmen and sophomore tribes, the dress of the junior tribe is very diverse.  And lastly, many members of the junior tribe carry car keys.  However, it is important to note that physical attributes do not help in discerning between who is a member of the 11th grade tribe and who is a member of the 12th grade tribe.  However, characteristics separate the two tribes, which will become evident in the description of the senior tribe.
The 12th grade tribe, commonly known as the “seniors.”  Sit at the highest level of hierarchy in the upper school civilization.  The seniors are magnificent creatures and thus are honored by the entire school.  This is demonstrated by the fact that the seniors are the only tribe to have an exclusive place of congregation.  This place is called the “senior table,” and it is located in the public area of the front hall.  Thus, the senior table serves as a sort of throne room, where the members of the 12th grade tribe who sit at the senior table can be admired by all who pass through the front hall.  There is clearly a recognition by the entire upper school civilization for how much the senior civilization has evolved because the faculty tribe recognizes that the 12th grade is responsible enough to be congregate in a place of public.  This is a sign that members of the faculty tribe believe that the social skills of the seniors have evolved to a point where they (the seniors)  can publically assume their position as leaders.  The senior tribe serves as a model of what the other tribes (except the faculty tribe) will evolve into.  The members of the 12th grade tribe physically resemble the members of the 11th grade tribe.  However, in terms of privileges, the seniors are definitely set apart from the juniors.  The seniors are the only tribe that is able to go off campus to hunt and gather.  This means that the seniors do not have to rely on the STC snack bar or the cafeteria as their sole suppliers of nutrition.  Members of the senior tribe also spend much of their year preparing themselves for some other world, often referred to as “college” and (by the parents of the members of the senior tribe) “the real world.”  However, before the seniors leave, they give a gift to the school, and thus leave a legacy of their triumph behind, much like the great Pharaohs of Egypt created the pyramids so that they would be remembered forever.
There is clearly much diversity in the upper school civilization at GFS.  The four distinct tribes of freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors, account for one way of organizing this diversity.  Each tribe has its own characteristics and at the same time each member of a specific tribe will forget those characteristics during the “great migration” and evolve into a member of the next highest tribe.  Then the tribesmen will adopt the characteristics of the new tribe; this seems to be a never-ending cycle in Germantown Friends School civilization. What is also interesting and what I leave as my final point, is that even though there are four diverse tribes of upper school students, who look, talk and act differently, they still, for the most part, coexist in harmony.  Every person individually contributes to the overall culture of the Germantown Friends School civilization.

Smoke and Webcams

A Review of “Hannibal” by Thomas Harris

I know this book [HANNIBAL] is a few years old, and as thrillers go that is considered out-dated. However, as a fan of Steven King, Michael Crichton, Andy McNab and the like, I would place this book easily in my top five horror novels or thriller novels. Please consider this essay I wrote in 2000.

   The first thing I loved about this book was the setting. It opens in Florence, Italy, where Lector, after his daring esape in th previous book, is the curator of an important family’s Palazzo and living under the assumed alias of Dr. Fell. Florence has always been in my mind a “pretty city.” However, I never had any particular fascination with or desire to visit. Nevertheless, Harris describes Florence in such a detail and exactness that it becomes closer and closer to reality as the story progresses. He describes everything from architecture to food to society and hierarchical structure. Another aspect of the city’s description that I found fascinating was the Harris, through the eyes of Hannibal, examines the underbelly of the city. Incorporating all the lowlifes, corrupt officials and killers that live there. This provides excellent contrast to the romantic and spotless idealization of Florence. However, setting is not why this book influenced me.
Harris’ psychological probing into the inner minds of his characters, especially Hannibal, is what made the true impact of this book felt for me. What Harris does, and what I found so intriguing is that he explores not only the thoughts of characters, but also how and why these characters think the way they do. Hannibal is a very disturbing character in this book because he plays the role of both murderer and hero. The reader always has a desire to know what is going on in his head. Harris anticipates this and takes you on a tour inside Hannibal “the cannibal’s” mind. There the reader finds what lector calls his “memory palace,” a visualized palace where Lector stores his memories, where a picture of agent Clarice Starling hangs prominently, and where behind chamber doors, Lectors deepest secrets are stored away.
The idea of a memory palace was what influenced me. As I read, I would attempt to create my own “memory palace,” organizing my thoughts room by room as moving into a new house. I only created one room because probing ones own mind is very exhausting, however, what never ceases to amaze me is that, even after its creation, and there after lack of addition over the period of one year, it still is there, in my mind. This room is my office, a very bright and positive place, which is visually nothing like the dark and frightening palace of Hannibal (which makes perfect sense since I am not a psychotic killer and “the cannibal” is). When I open the door to my memory room and see the pictures of my family lining the walls, and the phrase that I always wanted to remember, “the quiet after the storm” engraved on my desk, then I cannot deny that this book has influenced me.

Freud Joke

“The Swining” Film Premiere Version 1.1

Me (Wally), Elan and Kaki did not win the Pig Iron Theater Company’s short-film contest. However, we had a rib-cracking good time making our submission. G.I. Joe would say that is half the battle right there…

Your thoughts?

New Born & Mirror

“RESINATE!” by the RESIN RAPPERS

• Who are these guys?
• Why do they sound so amazing?
• Where can I hear more of this amazingly innovative and cutting-edge rap group?

The Answer: Find all your Resin Rappers info on Howtodrawanowl, so keep checking in!

Wally and Peedi Crakk up in the spot

Linguistic Coins

 

            The idea of a binary opposition between content and expression emerged in the first decades of the 20^th century, following a periodic series of advances in comparative philology in first decades of the 20^th century.  In 1816, Franz Bopp published The Sanskrit Conjugation System, laying out a methodology modeled after logic and science and making unavoidable the discovery of Indo-European and the demand for comparative methodologies in philology. 

            Philologists gained exposure to Sanskrit with the double boon of not only gaining a language that was inordinately orderly and complicated, but also the conceptual break from the sibling relationships of Latin and Greek following the ‘discovery’ of the ancient link to India.  This was followed in the next decade with Jacob Grimm’s founding work, German Grammar.  Then in 1861, the German linguist August Schleicher published his Concise Comparative Grammar of the Indo-Germanic Language.  This was the first attempt at producing a unified comparative philology of Indo-European languages.  It also marked the first attempt at reconstructing Indo-European through a methodology of model building and modeling. 

            In 1978, in Berlin and at the age of twenty-one, Ferdinand de Saussure completed his own reconstructive modeling of Indo-European, Thesis on the Primitive Vowel System in Indo-European, where he developed a structuralist methodology more in line with scientific methodologies that allowed him to come up with the Laryngeal Theory and predict a class of extinct consonants that would only be affirmed after his death with the discovery and decipherment of Hittite. Towards the end of the century the platonic idealization of signification began to lose its seat as Charles Pierce first began to develop out of logic the ideas behind the yet unborn field of Semiotics and Structuralism. 

            In the last years of his life, between 1908 and 1911, Saussure lectured at The University of Geneva, where he broke from teaching solely on comparative philology and taught his famous Course in General Linguistics.  His own notes and those of his students and colleagues were compiled and published in 1916.  Centrally located within the general theory of linguistics that is formulated in these notes is the now-familiar idea that words are signs.  These signs are composed of a binary pairing of signifier and signified, expression and content.  Though it was likely less so at the time, this seems fairly self-evident.  However, he made the important, if problematic, characterization of the relationship between signifier and signified as fundamentally arbitrary.  What in the units of sound or text that comprise the word ‘horse’ is characterizable by any of the properties we ascribe to an actual horse?  With the formulization of semiotics, this nascent methodology, at least attempting to bring scientific rigor to a field of secondary properties, began extending to any class of signs.  

            That Saussure was able to reconstruct what are effectively unobservables is remarkable and the methodology exhibited reminds one of contemporary work in Physics.  A decade before Saussure developed his Laryngeal Theory, Dmitri Mendeleev’s Principles of Chemistry was published, in which he began formulating a methodology for the classification of elements according to their chemical properties.  In 1869 he published his periodic table of elements.  This was followed almost immediately by a nearly identical table developed Lothar Myers. 

            What was most impressive about Mendeleev’s periodic table as compared to that of Myers was that he was able to predict the a surprising degree of accuracy properties of germanium, gallium, and scandium before their discovery.  The parallel to Saussure’s achievement is strong and takes us back to methodology.  Saussure’s reconstruction of the vowel system was likewise periodic, broken up by categories according to variables such as aperture or the position of the tongue.  The system of classification he produced provided him with evidence for a class of entities (in his case sounds) that were not directly observable.

Another for the light farms

                         The Steel spends the owl,

<<a knife fight,

a fifty-seven fired

out from the corn-

rows—the sign

of a stranger>>

                                              swoons,    as it crashes,

                                            spends   its  last sigh,  swoons

                                         suddenly   so  sleepsick

                                     below the Moon,

                             eyes   shocked and liquid

                   down & down

             to the profligate stalks,

        a last nightflight gone electric

      feathers cataract, the stars turn

        psychedelic the eyes

                 prism the light farms

                      

response to light farms

With thankfulness, a scythe, a slavering maw
o mosquito mosquito mosquito, o mosquito
seen that lovers cover mouths before they kiss
to keep from swallowing more than ones pride
o desperado, o desperado—distill my beating,
distill my heart into a whiskey that you covet.
I am worth nothing until.
A thousand tears
go by, and I, ever the stranger strangle flocks
whose necks bloom with my laced fingers.
Carve lambs into boulder with smaller stone—
what sediments cake lips and sting eyelashes
that spring from pink like infants slimed new.
And the stars feed to the sun god knows what
so long as corn can be reaped at harvest time.
This raped earth, this industrious farm boy
they call Slim because each bone peek-a-boos
from under skin, because his vocab is thin,
because nicknames are all used up anyhow.
Don’t romanticize the profession, don’t gild
the fields turned brown after four fratricides.
Don’t take me alive, don’t take me for a liar.
I crack knuckles on ribs under truth’s white t—
I crack up when going gets less peachy, but
she finally kissed me, if only near the mouth,
and whatever mirror reminds me who I am
will remind me for another seven bad years.
Swoon, lake, a mere roar from the mooned eye—
knife fights, Boeing poet, and a three-sixty owl.

the light farms

<the light farms>

 

<<a mirror from the moons eye swoon, in nightflight : a boeing sevenfifty owl>>

 

day, night-gleaming, glimming, knowing little of what they offer,

what they are taken for, granted, as a sign to a stranger, a flaneur,

to an airly nocturnal hand they are as growing goldlit wheatfields,

as cornrows over the pate of the earth,

                                                       does corn know of its often harvest ?

god knows they store the sun to feed the stars

what their steel spends along the flint of the night :

                                                                        their theyre,

there-brinking, blinking eyelet 1ing 1s,

ever profligate stalks the prism-eyed see bloom the

                                                                        teary-

                                                                            rainy-

                                                                                    sleepslick-

                                                                                        & dewy-eyed see

branching everunto, for what that theyre worth,

the psychedelic, the desperate, the schizos & gurus too

see what hovers over a species radiant incityousnests—

                                                                               nightly,

with thankfulness, scythe, & slavering maw

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comments & edits greatly (appreciated)

>>—*heart*–>

Father Explains Prayer

I don’t know if there’s a god,
Poppa didn’t think so, Momma did–

but when a scaffold buckled
on a job in ‘86, I doubled

over in a heap that broke my back,
my arms, damn near my neck.

Close to death, back ruptured by the fall,
I prayed and I survived it all.

Check Out Townies!

Hey y’all. Here’s a blog comic featuring some of Gambier’s best. Pretty damn funny:

TOWNIES

<a href=”http://towniescomic.blogspot.com”><img src=”http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v414/deenis/ZGbanner.jpg”/></a>

Simulacrum

 

 

 

My brother first came to inhabit my head the day he died. That was four days ago and people have found my composure in the matter unnerving. I am sitting here at his memorial service and it is my own private irony that Mason has been sleeping through his own funeral; this—his bodily internment.

 

We were born, thirteen minutes apart, into the morning of a Sunday. We were perfect replications of one another, each a copy of the other. In the beginning, there had been a third but he disappeared into the walls of our mother’s womb while yet little more than a faint, red beat.

As children, we were indistinguishable from one another: we harbored no differences. On our eleventh birthday we received a pair of knives from our father and sharpened a length of pine from the woods behind our house. Out in that cloistered forest, it was accidentally driven into my left eye, leaving the iris a violet amoeboid shape. That was Our First Distinction.

When we returned from the hospital that night, our parents put me in the guest room to avoid infection, frightening us with a story of another boy and an old man removing a patch from over his eye each night, placing it on the bedside table.

Falling asleep that first night back, I could hear a pacing movement out in the hallway, back and forth in the dark. I was half asleep when I saw his body curled up by the door, his blond curls stood out white in the dark hall. I fell asleep like that.

In the morning I asked Mason about that and he started looking the way he did when we shared a secret. He told me the same story, how I’d slept there curled up like a Good Animal at our bedroom door; how he didn’t move.

We were quiet as our mother made us breakfast, looked at one another over cereal. I remember the sounds of my mother’s hands in the sink, the clinking of our spoons upon the bowls, the clinking of her rings against a plate. As I remember these things, I can hear Mason roll over half-sleep behind some fold of my mind; there is a sigh. In his dreaming, I can feel occasional echoes of sensations. The smell of pine…sap sticking to fingers.

 

and the smell of sap sticks to things, sapling fingers of pine define the edge. God cause you know that past the edge there is the same walk in pine needles and the quality of shadow is the same. Same moment where we put our hands in our pockets, still behind the stream, and recognize the warm pommels in our hand. Sharing glance. Fingers sappy and sticking to warm pommel.

There is primarily the smell of pine and sap sticking between my fingers as i take the likely left foot step where my foot is half in shadow under the burnished leaves of a sumac. i take this step, anticipating the sensation of stepping under the burnished leaves of a sumac but, knowing it, there is only the fact that i have stepped.

It is always like this here and there is our path through taller pines and the floor is soft needles. Sometimes it seems like a few steps into that moment but I have dreamt hours of walking, waiting to think to slip my hand into my pocket. Sometimes the trees seem to repeat themselves. Sometimes i feel like we are looking at each other for so long in that moment when the warm pommel of the knife is felt sticking to the fingers, Clay’s eyes still looking like my own

 

Mason and I had always known about the knives. Our father had shown them to us when we first began to ask for stories at night. The pommels were the yellowed ivory of some kind of bone; on each, a pair of horses frozen in the gesture of a leap were carved in with fine red lines. The thought of them inevitably came up every Christmas and every birthday, so when my father placed them in our hands, our fingers shook. There was so much ceremony in it. They were only buck knives, but they had seemed so handsome and powerful that morning. He slid the knife-blades out together, moved our hands over the steel and bone. They were smoother than the rough texture of his palms. He taught us how to unlock the blades.

We spent the first weeks of that summer out in the fields and the woods. Behind our house, we had fifteen acres of pine and hickory trees. Somewhere in there, past a stream, we had found a path leading to a clearing in the woods we claimed as our own. Past the stream, the ground was damp and green under the shadows of thicker trees. In that quiet glade, Our Clearing, we opened our knives, thumbed our imperfect reflection on the blades.

I remember we threw them into the trunks of pine trees until the tips of the blades were gummy with sap, and the trees trickled thin, translucent lineations that reflected the modest light of the clearing back to us. Mason pulled a branch down from one of the slimmer pines until the wood bowed down and the green of its truer skin showed and split away from the main. I repeated the act upon another branch.

We dragged them into the middle of the clearing, stood there with our knives together. The grass was long and bent over itself in yellows enlaced with green. Mason and I lay one of them out and with our knives nicked at the several switches growing from the main until we had a single, rough length of wood. Those pine switches lay like fans across the grass.

I stood it up on end and Mason held the base steady. Mason held the base steady. I had one hand on it. It stood up to my chin. I drew the knife up and against it in slow successions. Slim curlings of wood circled the base, one stuck out from between two toes. Here it gets confused. At one point, the knife swung too high, glancing past my ear, and we both agreed to turn the blade down on it.

 

I drew the knife down upon the edge. I had one hand on it. The tip approached a point. Mason held the base steady. The knife came down. A slivered curling of wood pealed off. Something shifted. The knife slid down, the sharpened tip was driven up.

 

of all, of all of them. This one. This is the one that could like do me in.

It’s my hands are there and my cheeks are trying to blow something right out. My fingers slide down the keys. And i’m blowing something out and it’s sounding into something. Blowing long like that. Sometimes longer than this one though. That’s all i can really pay attention to in this one is that sax in front of me, the imperfect reflection coming back at you like sideways off the curved brass.

No turning around, with what’s those things showing from behind in that bronze distortion of me blowing the cheeks out like that. But seeing the lighting shift on the sax in front of me it’s always obvious, how could there not be all of them and their cigarettes smoking the place and in that general hum rumbling.

i got this feeling between where i’m thinking and my lips when i’m here and i can feel myself going after something, something like i might almost heard before.

i’m blowing it out and its moving through these corners and stops and i can feel like there is something around some corner, like if i keep chasing it i might start playing it– and i think i can hear Clay back there in the audience–hold that bass…steady…curling…–It’s lost under the rolls of the crowd shifting in seats. And that sound i was almost maybe catching to starts going out and my fingers press down and the sounds are all mismatched and it seems like i’ve forgotten to play and that sound is just my memory of another dream like this one, where i have to wake up and am that much further from what I’m trying to play to.

worst of it all is that the crowd doesn’t even know that i’m chasing my own Questing Beast. Maybe Clay. Maybe Clay talking from the crowd in a voice like a chant—slide down…tip the drive up.

I can hear Mason murmur sounds through my mental space like the high, wavering notes of his saxophone. I can feel him shiver for a moment. I myself shake under these felt reverberations.

We were beautiful as children and we looked like none of our relations: our eyes were too wide and held in them those stark, purpled centers; we lacked our father’s small, thick frame; our mother’s broad nose and hollow cheek-bones. Our uncle called us The Changelings for the disparity.

We were both quiet at that age, and private. Other children did not know our games and parents found us unsettling or, perhaps, merely strange, quixotic curiosities. It can be hard to qualify all of the various uneasy reactions.

But always, more than anything, it was the eyes—the particular violet intensity of them. It’d always been hard for people to maintain eye-contact with us; anyone who caught our shared glances from the corner of their vision and then the fixed attention of our gaze.

As my eye all healed up, people began to treat us differently. They seemed to be trying to read things into it, when they registered the broken iris, the purpled azure contents spilled out across the white of my eye, it seemed as though they saw in the anomaly of it some gesture of the uncanny and, when I was older, something of a quiet, secret confidence, in the exchange.

It became one of our games. I would peer, not just back at them, but right into their own stare and Mason would begin to giggle and we would break from the game. It is something that makes me smile still and I can hear some crooning noise of Mason’s sound from somewhere in my interior.

We shrugged off the difference they tried to mark between us. Our parents made no mention of this changed treatment towards their sons, or their own small changes. And with the two of us always close and talking low to one another, the effect was our further withdrawal into our own private company. Eventually, we came to spend most of every day in or around that clearing, cloistered by the pines. In the uncanopied center, we drove that sharpened stick through the grass and into the dirt. I almost feel again the act of holding the wood tight, pressing my weight down, the earth giving way to the sharp point.

 

never remember that that was just before and in this dream i am always just in that dodging of the knife swinging down slowly.

Each time i am here again the stranged moment stretches out. My hand begins loosened. i begin in the memory of having just registered a loss of control, not sure if it is mine or his or what. Clay reels back, still holding the wood tight with one hand he doesn’t make any sound in particular and just goes and bends down into the ground. He’s gone limp and i have to pull him over my back. Passing through and into the trees, i hear a cough from behind us.

i can only just watch my foot twist under an outgrowing hickory root and feel Clay’s weight on my back succeed over my efforts, and we are both sprawled there and he is asking where we are and i am fixed in my position under him. There is no pain in the twisting of ligaments as i fall down, the act is too redundant. The clearing still feels close behind me and i have the sense, every time, of having left someone behind—unsure of whether we are being pursued or in the act of abandoning and my shoulder is wet with something i can’t ever make out between blood and tears. In another dream someone has whispered their name into my ear and into Clay’s ear, and we have always forgotten.

Occasionally, we would find the traces of someone else’s presence in our closed haven: vague, circling trails in the grass from where small feet had pressed the blades flat against each other. At other times, we could hear quiet movements back in the shadows of the pine trees. The presence drove us, one evening, to curl up in the center of that clearing, and wait for morning, listening to a quiet pacing around our perimeter. Mason seemed to read danger in that sound of footsteps moving through the brush.

Waking up, cold and wet with dew and the forest finally still and quiet, we stumbled through the shadowed morning dampness of the woods. A week later and we were both sent off to music lessons every day, separated for four hours of every day.

 

for every day, four hours. For every day, four hours of lessons separated.

For weeks, four hours of blowing hard on those green cheeks. Afterwards, a quiet standstill in our terms of gaze. Wanting to know what his fingers had pressed upon, pressed into ivory and ebony keys. A means i felt i knew, sore cheeks but something just starting anyway. Blowing into that horn trying to visualize maybe just see those keys smashing in my own warped reflection on the brassy curve of the sax’s lip. So there are those keys showing in the sax and i don’t know what i’m doing but i’m hitting some notes. And it seemed, after some time, that we weren’t losing anything for it. After some time, we played together in front

The eye had gotten it started in a way, people shying away from eye contact, but really it was the music that set the first distinctions into motion. It wasn’t really anything… those people. I was just the stranger twin to them. But when we started doing things with those instruments, Good Things, there was Clay and there was Mason and whatever we may have been the two of us, there was just something we couldn’t say. By the time we were thinking about going off to college, I was composing and Mason was improvising. He was more than that though. There was something in his playing, some action you couldn’t quite put out there.

From somewhere behind, there is his exhale and a fleeting recollection of sitting in front of a piano on a stage, the two of us playing together.

 

But someone is stepping up to the podium now—here in this white-walled Episcopalian church—and the funereal audience is shifting in their pews. Someone I have never met is standing in front of the podium. My parents are sitting in the front row and my mother stoops over, shakes across her shoulders. I am having trouble keeping with his words and my mother continues to weep. Her shoulders continue to shake, my father places his arm around her shoulder. The man I have never met walks down from the stage and my father brings her up and into the aisle and people begin to search for their bags and coats from under the pews.

Mason mews quietly from inside.

* * *

I lay in bed upstairs for a while, in that old guest bedroom, until the last sounds of the reception came to a close. The memory of the sound and the shadowed passage of whatever that was that bandaged night from our childhood began to loop over and over in the empty room like the sounds from a radio tower invading an amp that’s been left on, and it was an effect that was doubled…that is, I could hear it replicated, muted from Mason within me. An old alarm clock by the bed flashed a green 12:00 in rhythm to the sound of that shuffling presence that had frightened the two of us so much that night and I lifted myself up.

When I make it to the bottom of the steps, I see the girl sitting at our couch with her face intermittently lit a pale blue, a white-yellow, a flashing of red from the television that dimly sounded in front of her. She is still as gorgeous as I remembered her being.

I had heard of Cynthia from Mason back when he had been playing regularly. I met her once at a bar Mason was playing at perhaps five, six years ago. I was in an unfamiliar city and had not seen my twin brother in months, had heard a few words. We sat together and you could see her eyes go wet watching him up there, and my eyes were wet. I wanted to get up there and play something with him, almost did before convincing myself my fingers had grown too stiff. The piano looked like it might have been out of tune.

I remember more than anything the way she spoke to me. It seemed as though she trying to find something about him from me. She never mentioned the obvious—the replica of this man she was tearing over and the one clear difference of our eyes. I valued that from her, and the way she sought out particular phrasings from me, tried to catch me mirroring him. But I was not a jazz musician, I wasn’t even a musician anymore, and she knew things about him I did not. I remember there was a flicker of jealousy towards her for qualities I was incapable of imagining.

Thinking of these things, how I so wholly stole him away from her that night, and seeing her here now, I think I am rousing him from his dormancy. As I walk to the kitchen and pour two glasses of water, I can hear, from the television, the voice of a woman describing how a lottery winner’s grandchild has just been found dead. And also, I can hear him stirring in alto-rumblings.

I sit down next to her against the light of the television as a commercial floods over the screen. There is no sense of what the product is, only this strange self-depricatory reference that’s supposed to indicate something reliable. She takes the extra glass from my hand, smells of whiskey. She asks me how I am holding up with all of this, where was I the whole time tonight.

I tell her I was with my brother and her face screams quietly in itself. She looks away from me.

She is telling me how much he spoke of me; how much the same and how he felt himself a dragged imitation; how she should catch me at a piano sometime. In this opposition she is describing, I feel a sense of shared quality, more on his side of the fence, how I’d always felt that way—the confused imitation, always only almost for the immediacy of ourselves as same in our childhood; later, in the distance of space, time shared, for the inability to apprehend difference, to conceive of it, the inability to evaluate ones own form, the underlying faith in a common form for which we are.

Mason is trying to warn me of something, but the shaping of words seems to have become unfamiliar in his deep slumber spread across the filaments of my mind. He is trying to say a name to me, whispering from within. His or mine, I don’t know but there is a heart beating skittish and fast.

 

We have been talking for some length of time, she has been talking, and I have been unable to register but small fragments. “He always claimed there was this thing that he was chasing after, trying to catch and something hanging behind him in its own chase. He told me once, he was lost on something or other so he talked a little, more to get the fear out from his system. He said he wasn’t sure sometimes if maybe one was just the reflection of the other. He said there was a name. He tried to say it was just some kind of disembodied tonal phantom, but that’s shit. He would have nights where he couldn’t be alone. Not about sex or anything…his eyes would water in mid-sentence.” And her eyes are watering and I can tell that Mason is cowering somewhere behind me, closer.

People might think you’re making contact when you’re up there playing your whole breath, finding your heart in your lungs and jetting it out, but if that was really the case, then you’d be able to stop and stopping wouldn’t be such a failure. Like an arrow after a target that’s always just ahead and never has to stop like the arrow. You might think, Cynthia might have said, Well, at least you don’t lose that target forever when your arrow slides into the grass and at least the flight of that projectile is something to moon over. But, if that were only peace… to always feel that thing that you can’t get to is always out there in the periphery…to always want to chase it, like Charlie Parker chasin’ his own Bird… and to always know that you can’t ever touch it and you can’t ever rid yourself of it… because it’s not like it didn’t come from you…to see something beautiful and bleary in the one mirror you can never touch and double fingers against.

 

I don’t know any terms to put this in but—I don’t know how, but I can feel Mason trying… to have arms around me. From inside.

I am not aware of the decision, but I have just asked her to watch a home video of us as children. And her eyes are watering as they were when we watched Mason blow his heart out that night. And there is a heart rate’s racing and he’s shouting sounds at me—did you do that?—and she’s laced her fingers through my hand, her palm is moist or mine is, the feeling seems familiar. She has taken the State I am in like half of me were dead. She is crying and maybe thinking she is sharing something with me.

And then I am witnessing my left foot stepping towards the television, sliding a tape into the VCR and falling back into the couch. She has composed herself to some extent, a last finger fixing hair behind her ears.

In television, the two of us come into focus and we are hammering in the last stakes into a tent. I have begun talking, but I am not talking. Mason is trying to whisper a name into my ear if he could just think of it right. It is then that I can first perceive this other intentionality in the shadows of my mind. He is talking to her, she wants to know about piano, how ‘I’ played it. I cannot understand the words of His response.

On the television screen, at least, there are the two of us there, talking to each other in lowered voices. Mason is loosening his shoes, unzipping the door. This girl and I are still talking and my brother is shaking somewhere behind my eye. I try to concentrate upon the video. It was more than compatibility. We aren’t talking, and our parents filming respect that. There is just the background conversation bleeding in here and there. Cynthia is smiling when she is not being spoken to.

In the television, the two of us are pushing our shoes under the tent and there is a cut on Mason’s finger, a small spot of blood.

I reach out to see how deep it is and feel it to be only the red mud from the dirt around there. Mason laughs at me and then I am laughing with him. As we crawl into the tent, zip up, the noise seems to settle down. We lie down. We curl up against one another, close our eyes. I curl up against my brother, close my eyes. From outside the tent somewhere, I can hear a girl asking a boy if he’d play something on the piano, it’s just over there? Mason shifts his back, readjusts. I hear someone familiar tell a girl He doesn’t know any songs to play. Mason’s breathing falls into intervals of regularity and I put my arms around him as I loosen myself to sleep.

 

 

Separation: A Tale

Elise and I use to dance in our empty dining room before Colin was born. She was always such a great dancer. Her legs would dip and twist like flapping bed sheets on a clothesline. The dining room’s glistening hardwood floor illuminated her every move. She looked lighter than hair. I would put on old Patsy Cline records and we would dance until one of us let out a yawn. Those were the days when we still had tomorrows.

* * *

Brody T. Vicknair,
“The Body Dies But the Brains Lives,”
Louisiana Herald,
January 20, 2006.

 

Paul Herman responded to a battery of questions by the media this Tuesday, not unusual except that Mr. Herman, the syndicated radio host of “Heartland USA,” died three years previously from The Disorder. After tests had been performed to find a cure or cause, scientists noticed strange brain activity in Paul Herman. Through this, it was discovered that one side effect of The Disorder is a seeming immortality inside the brain. This Tuesday, when asked to describe the situation by an inflicted reporter, Herman’s device simply read “lonesome.” But Paul Herman is anything but alone. After the first reported case in 1983, over three million cases of The Disorder have swept over the United States and parts of Canada. When asked for a final word, Paul Herman said only, “See you next Wednesday.”

* * *

I had always felt uncomfortable in my skin, but when it began to fall off I grew concerned. It slipped off when I touched it; small strips dangled from the gossamer web of flesh and body fat it covered. Soon the decay spread.
My right ear hung down, scraping against the side of my neck. After a week, it snapped off as I was brushing my hair and fell with a muted smack against the bathroom sink. The next morning, I woke to find the left one stuck to my forehead.
Then my nose began to brown. It started when I scrunched it after smelling meat rotting in the back of the refrigerator. After that wince, my nose stayed bunched until it flaked off in a tissue.
Tonight, my brother Phineas calls me. From the hallway, I hear the telephone ringing in the kitchen. I try not to rush, knowing my toes are weak and could shake from me.
“Hey. Calling to wish you a happy birthday.” He paused. “Has it started?”
“What.”
“What else? I mean, Rose has already lost the skin under her feet and back. How far along is Elise?” I stare at my wife, a brain on a pillow by the sill.
“It’s the final stage.”
“Aren’t you,” Phin clears his throat, “scared?”
“You know what I’m afraid of,” I say, “That there’s a heaven. Some tranquil, beautiful place where everyone is happy and life is perfect. But you got to die to get there. But like they say, we never…” There’s a low loud groan on the other end of the line. It’s Rose.
With a quick click, Phin hangs up his phone. I follow.
When we were kids, I followed him too. One winter night, we walked down the street to Ms. Glimmer’s house to find our lost cat. But it wasn’t there. So we turned and turned until I didn’t know where we were anymore. Phin didn’t either. We started seeing people we didn’t recognize, houses we had never seen before. We found the cat hiding under a Buick in some old man’s overgrown yard. Later, we found out that the man was one of the first in our neighborhood to start decaying.
On the kitchen counter, a cupcake cools with an unlit candle jabbed past the pale blue icing and into the cake’s center. I light the candle and the white wick blackens, the flame dances until I press my lips and blow. Hot wax shudders and drips on the frosting.

* * *

From the doorframe of my bedroom, Colin’s whisper wakes me.
“Daddy.”
“Yes, son.”
“My rainbow night-light burned out can you fix it can you please read me a story.”
“Close your eyes and wait.” As his shadow on my bedroom wall falls away, I begin getting up. I roll my shoulder off the bed, my neck and head fighting their weight to rise. My lungs rumple like a plastic grocery bag when I breathe. With all the strength in my arms, I push up and out of my bed.
With small, calculated steps, I walk to his room where his sheet, pressed against his tiny body, rises and falls with each breath.
Colin’s eyes are closed as my falling shadow lets him know I’m here.
“It’s bad.” He knows.
“Yeah. Try not to look.”
“Okay.”
“What do you want me to read you?” Without turning over, he hands me a thin white book.
I open it, flakes of my skin falling in the folds of the pages as I turn to the beginning:

Once upon a time there was a breeze that didn’t have a home. It floated from meadow to meadow, but every time the homeless breeze found other breezes playing in the grass. The breeze was very sad and sulked to a nearby town knocking hats off people’s heads, to make itself feel better. One day, while sauntering to another town, the breeze came upon a small cottage. Inside, a retired logger was dying. His breaths were short and his chest puffed like a bullfrog. Slowly, his large gasps grew shorter and shorter until he panted like a thirsty dog. The breeze rushed through the cottage door and flew into the old logger’s chest. He jumped up high into the air with life and fell down to his bed where he slept for months. When he woke up, the logger’s old body was replaced with a young strong body with huge muscles. The man and the breeze lived together forever.

* * *

In the kitchen this morning, I am thinking about Elise. Months before she entered the final stage, she worked in her daisy garden, knees and palms covered in loose soil. On our last night together, I had to help her ease into bed, as she was nearing the final stage and had very little strength left in her. Elise’s skin tore like bleached cloth as I ran my fingers up her peeling thighs; ribbons of skin fell as I stroked her. She smelled like one of her withering daisies as she leaned up to kiss me. Layers of skin remained from her lips as she pulled away.
I whispered, “Oh Elise,” where her ears once were.
“Honey, I love you with all the pieces of my heart,” as her bones snapped like celery. She disintegrated.

I look at Elise. What’s left of her rests atop a pillow on the wide windowsill where she used to sit, knees pressed against her chest, and drink hot coffee, or tea. She usually wore her long white floral-print dress with its sleek trim along the neckline. The straps were thin and looked stretched as if they could have popped at any second. When she smiled, her lips drew out to where her eyes end into temples. From there, she decided what daisies were in bloom. Which flowers were going to die. Outside the window, the branches of our oak tree swing, leaves shake from it. The leaves fall on too-high grass and settle.

* * *

I wake, startled, and look for Elise. I remember she is at the kitchen window. I lift my shoulder and with diminishing strength, lift my neck and head. A thunderclap explodes, a thin sheet of lightning and I fall back. It rains hard. My bones are solid as eggshells.
As I come closer to the kitchen, the sound of falling rain swells. The window is open.
Elise is not on her pillow.
I run outside to her, to the rain. The drops are heavy and hit my skin hard enough to puncture deep past layers of skin and rotting muscle. There, in the mud, Elise lies, dirty and specked with grains of sand. Rivulets of rain roll off her brownish-pink lobe. I rush to her, parcels falling from me. I collapse to my knees and my legs break away. I press my disintegrating chest against Elise and she slips inside, past the crackling ribs and torn muscle.
At the final stage, I feel the chambers of my heart separate in the rain.
I stare up at the dark blue sky as cool rain falls on the fertile grass. The leaves on the oak collect water in pools, grow heavy and spill to the earth. The breeze slides against my eyelids like a kiss. I wrench my head back and scream for help, but the force snaps my spine and splits my throat in half. Always uncomfortable in my skin. The night is dark, the moon’s shine is muted, and the rain reflects it like diamonds.

* * *

My room is dark but it gets brighter and dark again because of the storm. I wish my night-light worked. I hear a noise and I go into the hall. Nothing. I look in Daddy’s room. Nothing. I walk to the kitchen, my loose tooth moving whenever I touch it with my tongue. It is going to fall out and the tooth fairy is going to bring me money. The wind is everywhere and it blows loose papers all over the house. I close an open window. I see something on the grass. The doorknob is high so I reach up and turn it until the door opens. I take off my sock because I do not want to get them wet and I push the screen door away. The thing on the grass is dark like mud. I don’t know what it is, but I touch it with my whole hand and push. I wipe my hand on my pant leg. I go back inside to get away from the rain and sit on the couch in the old dining room. I’m not allowed to play with the record player because it is old. I feel the tooth fall on my tongue as I lift and lower the arm of the record player. Who’s Patsy Cline? I push a red button and listen.

I fall to pieces
Each time I see you again….

“The Lovers” of Kenyon College

I contort in dark and light, pervert spine
as we pervert delusions of true love
fed to us and younger lovers line
by line.  Create with me the image of
the pains that come, the bending that we do
for an increment of other’s touch.  Reprise
the role of man who can remain a true
participant.  Deny the loss.  Your eyes,
the inch of skin your fingertips provide
that I can’t see, your cold skin unfelt.  Sent
from casts a pair that refuse to ever slide—
suppose with me that it’s enough to want.

Please think of me and stay in your formed place
if in some haunting memories you see my face.

*

Artists with agendas make women with your shape,
they capture, distill, snare your blown hair
just out of reach from me but never them.  Wear
your garments tight around your curves, nape
exposed to those not posing, not looking to escape
like me, my shadow out of view.  Not given eyes to stare
at me, who also cannot look.  I have form; the air
I sense, the leaves falling on my false drape.

I know you well enough to need to run away—
this is the promise of emotions turned
to statue, cold and calculated art.
I know you well enough to want to stay.
I am not a lover spurned,
I am a lover made without a heart.

The Hydra of MyBorneo

“The Hydra of myBorneo”

 

1.

       In    the Eaves & Ungained Foliage

of myBorneo    I am cocksure

with a  tumbling    speciation.

                        And You

                          must hereafter be

                                    known as She

                                   (perhaps one day She

                                    will just get her name back.)

 

(But no… this ecology

                        of heart or mind    is not quite   that  robust…

                                                                               for if, in fact,

                                                                           I am a Hydra,

          should I cut from myself            the enervating head,

as I surely have?)

 

A brilliant neon lizard—with a regrown tail of smooth oily scales

                                                                     the color of bruise—

 basking                                          in a beam of light   that has

   passed through              the gauntlet of umbra and canopy

       reminds me of  

                                  my body…

 

 

2.

 

   For the Hydral,

it is the shearing

  of the neck

                      that is the high point

                                     like the brief

                                       seizing climax of heroin:

            it’s the greatest magic trick in the world

of seething magicians:

                                                  a disappearing act

                                                of all the things she leaves behind…

            (and is that white elephant             we vanish from the attic

     gone?                                        or simply gone  

                                                                                   invisible?

 and what resolves            in the accidental

plume of dust,

what vague, telling outline?)

 

 

 So I count my addictions           and wonder

      does everyone have   this

                                                love/hate relationship

                                                                        with   love?

Nowadays I want from women

 

transparency,                but only partly. 

 

 

3.

 

         And I have cut them all off,

  one  by  one.

 

           At pace with my own powers

                of Regeneration & Recuperation.

           

                 The demands of an increased metabolism, naturally,

              required me to muster an appetite,

 

       which has always troubled me.

 And there was surgical precision

 

            most of the time, but in honesty

               there were   here and there the violent

 

                rippings of neck from my countless

      collarbones: fitful shows of strength for whom?

 

         And it might have gone on forever,

an infinite regress of wounding and regeneration

 

  were it not for the progress charted

                   in thin lines of scarification.

 

             And as for her, I am left with necklaces

of  turned and purple skin—

 

          marks of a double trespass—

          and an elephant graveyard:

 

                          a pile of loose and grey heads

                       severed at the shoulders;

 

                      fetid serial self-portraitures

                          in wilting stem & flower.

 

AlaSKa

Alaska

Men go blind. Eyelids curled like
sleeping beagles. Knives and wine

we put them down. Aloe on our wounds.
From the road the streetlight—our only light—
interrogates panes. Lets us move on.

Like the gal I nickname Eavie—
in adolescence easygoing, in
womanhood a night without its hunters—
the men who fail her feelingly.
She sits on my front porch flexing pink knees.

For the kisses we don’t share, the stars
I can no longer see—Pegasus, North; dippers
little & big, even those who don’t have
a tale; stars men didn’t once navigate—
they’re blinking like fireflies.

A Poem On the Eve of my Father’s Birthday (revised)

Note: the old draft of this poem can be found elsewhere on how to drawn an owl
–GDM

We never gorged on cake or candle smoke.  Never
did you unwrap a single gift.  Never wanted anything.

What you liked: fart jokes and beer.  Even when fishing,
your pole tickled water with you on the bank annoyed.

Fish swam suicidally toward you anyhow.  You who
never managed to let a good time linger.  You who raised

me right.  The times I’d rather been a bastard than your
son, I was to blame.  I know that now.  Now you’re gone.

One Mardi Gras after a shooting we went to Grande Cochile,
caught speckled trout three times over legal limits.  No boats

for miles.  Your finest moment. You felt fine the day you died.
Connived to return a faulty orange cord you bought on sale.

Undaunted you went back to grocery, bought a new extension
at the normal price.  You’d get your money back, and more.

After the appointment, when you died leaving the hospital
receipt in wallet and cord bagged on the passenger seat,

you never got your chance.  Now I have you wallet, the receipt,
both cords, and the van you drove after you sold your truck.

And when I wrote the poem about the time you caught
a human jaw instead of trout, no one in class believed me.

You grabbed it slimy from the line, set it drown.  Still
I smell it drying on the hot gray bow.  A warden came

like the reaper, snatch the bagged jaw and carried it away.
That’s where we spread you, where we caught the jaw.

How to Invent a Password, from the folks at UPenn

Inventing a password

Make up a sentence that’s meaningful to you. Then use the first letter of each word as a letter in your password; if you wish, add additional characters to make it more difficult to guess.

• Start with the phrase such as Orange elephants invade Alaska; film at eleven.
• Take the first letter of each word as your password: OeiAfae (This is an acceptable password; it follows the rules but is hard for someone to guess since it’s essentially a random string of characters.)
• To make the password even harder to guess, add punctuation, numbers, and other non-alphanumeric symbols: OeiA;f@11

Users should expect that the password selection rules will get still more strict over the course of time.

GREYSON PRESENT TIME INTO/FIGHT SCENE

The man had been following him for several blocks.  Greyson had watched him begin his track, break from a lean against a telephone pole and cross Spring Garden towards Greyson, through the kind of globed incandescent light that a slight, nocturnal rain will always refract and hem in across the city streets.  He had caught a glimpse of the man at that center point of the crosswalk: covered in the silk-screened bones and skulls of the vanquished; his skin was bone-white, almost roseate as the stop lights shifted to red; he was a huge hulking shape and Greyson was thinking of Grendel shrithing across a moonlit moor.

            Greyson pulled the black and silver fabric of his hoodie up over his head and crossed Spring Garden going north into Northern Liberties.  Alone, Greyson always walked fast and tonight it served the purpose of disclosing this hulking albino’s intentions.  He cut up 6^th street with a block and a half on the man, forcing The Albino into a half-trot.  Greyson started taking turns deeper into Northern Liberties, the moon broke itself out from the clouds and the smaller, unlit streets took on dimensions with rain-lit moon-silver effulgence.  Greyson looked over his shoulder, the man had closed in the distance to thirty feet. The heavy passage of the assailants footsteps were matched step for step by a mounting adrenal surge of cold sweat, strength and indignation on the part of Greyson, knuckles white around a bone, bladeless pommel engraved in red intricate carvings.  That quixotic mixture of fear and anger flushed his organs—his stomach, his throat, his cock, his knees and he stopped, turned and awaited the man…

            The Albino broke his stride—moment of hesitation—and slowly closed the half-block separating them.  With an adrenal urgency, Greyson sized him up at somewhere around 275, 6’6”, all that weight bound up in muscle.  “What do you need, brother.” Greyson said, rupturing the clean roles of pursuer and pursuant.  Greyson’s hand tightened around the length of bone in his pocket.  The Albino’s face furled with anger; his pink eyes went wide for a moment; he quickly closed that last distance and sent a sudden massive swing towards the left side of Greyson’s skull.  Greyson ducked, felt surge, put all of his mounting inertia into his left arm, driving it into the man’s throat.  He jumped to the side as The Albino drove his body forwards, his arms going into a flurry of blows.  Greyson kicked the man in his knee and the man stumbled onto his hands and knees, rasping and enraged in a cacophony of high-pitched guttural notes.  Greyson began kicking furiously into the man’s rib-cage before a massive hand shot out, swallowed his ankle and pulled Greyson down upon the pavement.  A chalk-white fist landed above Greyson’s eye, the same hand closed upon Greyson’s throat.  His right eye covered over with blood, his panting body consumed the last of its oxygen.  The Albino began a staggering rise, trying to climb over Greyson, his massive body heaving with animosity, hand still closed over throat, beginning now to really squeeze.  Greyson twisted and tried to scramble up, but The Albino, coughing in that alien high-pitched voice, gained hold over himself and smashed Greyson’s skull against the ground.  Greyson felt wetness in the back of his head, his brain in the seizure of a struck tuning fork.  Again he scrambled, pulled the man’s elbow down and brought his own elbow crashing into The Albino’s pale temple.  Fingers loosened around his neck, Greyson struck again and the body fell upon him in all its weight.  The sidewalk was a mixture of bodies and rain and blood of both men for some minutes.  The rain came down stronger, staining the cement wine-dark with watered down blood in the moonlight.  Greyson heard footsteps slapping through puddles and finally shrugged the dead-weight of The Albino from his body, rose up to his hands and knees, stood up shaking and wavering with the stuttering lambency of a candle suffering the passage of a draft. An old Black woman, her own skin a deep indigo in the shadow of a pink umbrella walked up to him, put his arm around her shoulder, “you all right, Honey?” Greyson pulled out a cigarette, offered her one and the staggered towards an apartment stoop.  In the rain sweeping through the city, under the umbrage of an awning and this woman’s pink umbrella, the two smoked silently for some minutes, Greyson staring at the inert weight of The Albino some twenty feet away, his head hanging over the curb.  The rain began to come down harder and harder and the two eventually got to talking, Sangoma asked him for another cigarette.  She wiped the blood from his face, spread some sort of stinging ointment over the wound and palmed the wound for some moments, meanwhile anointing his blood-wet skull.  They waited out the storm, talking all over the place, Greyson the whole time watching the inert form of The Albino.  Water began to collect into small streams along the sides of the road.  When his cigarettes had been exhausted and the rain had passed, Greyson stood up, stretching, feeling the bone locks of his shoulder pop.  It must have been four, five in the morning by then.  The walked together for a few blocks, passing the splayed out body, not stopping.  As she parted ways with him, she said, “heard of men drowning in an inch of water but never ‘fore tonight thought I’d see it pass,” and with that she embraced him and shuffled off down a side street singing some old time song.