They called me yesterday. It was last night. I was not too eager to get their call. Their calls are often replete with bored delicacy. Nothing makes the reception of such calls a pleasure. Could Linnaeus stand still long enough in the posturing of spherical redundancy to entice coatis from their fast scratching claws? They don’t ask questions like this, but sometimes, in the rare weather of ___, I ask them to myself. This is in forays towards the being of midst, which is where one does not pickup when strange phone callers buzz through the line. Albeit with many people to say hi to, like my taste buds I am straightforward in my preferences towards solitude, as are my dozing claims at half a percent lower than previously noted in the ___ records.
They called me. It was late last night. Trees were sweeping up moonlight with their leaves. A masterful umpiring of low-balled biddies was called for. They told me to stand still without money. Cackling, enshrined, held over, basking in the light of microwaves, tormented with, “Yes sirs!” and feeling as if I were mentally portaging hefty pirogues over speed-bumped terrain, the highlights of now seemed ___ and wealthier than phone calls. I held the receiver to my mouth. Words deceived me. Biting my lip would do no good, but meantimes added up to worthier causes like ___ in clam broth, or busier wents of now. Show me a tulip sprouting from mud and I’ll spell matchsticks.
They phoned. The line was not busy. This was both fortunate and sad. I now contemplate strategies of mobility while hurtling tortoise shells. Using what’s holy to see both sides of dark is not passing the time the way it used to. Polished, catnapping, end over beginning, spoiled, the voice was gaining on me. There was no way to avoid it. Phone calls come and phone calls go. I stack magazines, ___ ____, and ululate.
Forwarding all calls. Yes? Sure. Be here. This is where now is. No place is not around. Get back and move on. Horsing around and gluing placards to whiter walls than this, jogging, putting golf clubs in the trunks of cars, or just removing scotch tape from the telephone receiver’s mouthpiece. We guard our personal moments with spontaneous gifts of eye-closing, and therein the phone’s ringing lies. Name something. Then take that name away. Is that thing still the same thing afterwards? Piano. Gyrfalcon. Hackamore. Takin. Water pistol. Sheng. Toilet. Tacitus. Categorizing life’s multitudes to take advantage of their weakness, loyalty, pity --the phlox, the gravel, the slurry of what makes them a thing-- so as one can judge and, eventually, one hopes, be saved by them.
___ called last night. It was blank, the space that was left: an absence, a changeless fortitude, a despicable frivolity. Upset? ___ did not lump or categorize. A brand-name fear paddled through wakes of what I couldn’t name; it was too expensive to die for. Nothing was scarier than this blankness. Something close to gabbling, except without sound. I am _____. This is what it means to be called by them. The dictates of language push themselves coolly up the jerry-rigged ladder of comprehension. Can we be stable in this shape? Will it hold? Suspiciousness creaks through the front door, crazing the skin of tongue-and-groove honesty. It smells like root beer.
They rang. I laughed and cried. I was given treenails for my effort. Compensation for ___ is never just. Furnaced with the heat of voices speeding through wires, faking conversations with myself, chapped with effort, and then we give each ___ high fives in the wilderness of our lives. Scents like petrichor and sap seep and drift through hungry tides, in the lines, in the curl of the cradled receiver, and also ____ will be gone before hunting season is through.
In the mornings I get these phone calls from this guy in Florida somewhere and he’s always going on about promotional buttons, pods, typecasting, a thirty spot during the Super Bowl, and other such ___ matters and so on and so on. I want to defend freedom. We all should defend freedom. I wake up in the morning and I think, “How am I going to defend freedom today?” This is about the time when these phone calls come. This guy is up bright and early. He’s a crack-of-dawner. He’s up with the trash trucks and the street sweepers and the guys chucking newspapers. He’s got coffee boiling in his veins. He tells me about once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, financial independence for the rest of my life, __, buttering bread on both sides, the coloring of state birds, the tiny red bumps on women’s legs after shaving, the odor of opportunity, and the how the bottoms of clouds dream pinkly at sunset. The phone rings. I pick it up so it will stop.
They called to inform me, last night this was, that I was delinquent in my payments to them. I was not aware of having any __ payments to make, especially not to them. Some reservations stopped me mid-huff, and I held my breath for what seemed an extremely normal amount of time. Moments? Richly textured. The noisy grunts and gurglings of traffic jams. Attenuated willpower. Trickle of clogged drains. The for-now occupied space that coincides with your body. I do not call ___. They call me. Receiving voicemails can be much more flattering than answering the phone. My lesson in temperance.
Blankness is taking up my space for me. I fidget, coiling the double-helix ringed phone cord around my arm, stamping my bare feet on the cold kitchen tiles, pinkying snot-dust from my nostrils, and cursing softly under my breath as their voices champion the forces of freedom that, according to their most intense lucubration on the subject, I should be rooting for and supporting with my spending money. They call. They speak in the curt, strained ___ of a carefully plucked patois. I try to hear things in their ____ spaces. “Listen to the drywall,” I say to myself as they spew on about referential currents with regard to the quarks and ___ and gluons and leptons of medium-level finances. “There are momentous atoms within its structure. It cannot reach you by means of a telephone. Get yourself a scanning tunneling microscope. Blankness and emptiness will be most of what you observe. Anyway, have a conversation with god while you’re at it. Baryons and mesons. Lost loves. Secular interpretations of the Holy Trinity and their effects on the daily lives of Pacific Sea Nettles. Hang up the phone.”
____ is trying to help ___ where ___ concerning____ usually ____ __ ___ as is but still ____ selling fast. Don’t hesitate. It’s ____ important ____. A ____ yes ____ when you ____ ___ are _ ____ in ____ love. ____ ____ ______ ___! See?
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