Saturday, June 16, 2012

it’s always last call somewhere in the world



            Gosh to all darns. I’m up for giving-- consequentially, that is. But these circles are not concentric. Not by a longer shot than a Harlem moon. Bo rigged it. Turned up the AC on us. The thicker-skinned among us had been mewling on about it. Insults were hurled to no effect, motley and crude. “Wave! Wave!” That was the taunt we were all touting. It did some bad. It did little good. A few parallel troopers handcuffed Bo to the microwave. He raved and almost ranted too. It was a squeaker. The lord was lifted up and then set back down in a China cabinet. Faking it. Faking it. More of that lunkheaded jacaranda-staring one-foot-to-the-other sway. “Get back up!” A scream to match the facts. It all got solved with a pool-ball slick answer. A slightly stirred shot of porcupine sweat went down hard and cruel. I opened my fist and swore off punching for good.
            A compass swung out its leg in an attempt at circumscription. The doctor of pi played havoc-- especially with the now sweat-drenched Bo. You’d get out too, while you could. Trust me. The doctor had his own number. Bo mumbled and maundered. “Tighter lips,” I told him. “Keep it to somebody else.”
            “Trumble!” That wasn’t a word. Somebody had yelled it. Perhaps nobody noticed.
            The price of nickels kept getting higher. A slot grew thin in the porkpie hat vending machine so as one couldn’t slip even their dreams through. Operations put the heart of things to mum. I talked and talked as a crane lifted a silver box up high towards treacherous roofs. I told the crane operator, “Your circumstances are boring.”
            We are thatched. We are curved through eternities of arc looking for corners. It’s been 11 hours and here we find ourselves in the same situation, meddling with the same logic, pressing PAUSE and REWIND at the same time. “Send all the spellcheckers to hell,” orders Bo. But being chained gives him a few measly ounces of authority. We’d do well to find a middle here, ellipse-wise. No coincidences left in the foci’s tank, you see, and we’re all getting a bit too eccentric for our own conic sections. I might send out a chord soon, just to see if it’s worth it to dream for a secant, or to maybe, in the long run, create a sector just for me. Proportions can go to hell, if only just for a moment, as far as I’m concerned.
            “Grave digger!” That’s Bo rattling his cuffs. “You might make tangents elope, but you’ll never, never find a circumcircle to match the polygons of my imagination.” I ignore him along with everybody else. He falls asleep, constantly irrational as always.
            Always just a little bit to say, in the glide, in the swig, in the hereafter lug of it. Behemoth tracings of the inner limits slip like graceful runnels between the colewort sweep and ribcage-envy of us. I spend time in the shade of grander notions than the sagitta-bound ones most of us dabble in, or at least I’d like others to think so. Perhaps it is just a Cassini oval to dwell content with, and even Bo knows we’re doubters first and applauders later. Oh gosh to the darnedest, when the company we keep starts to keep us it’s better to scrape sharply at the surface without questioning the mechanics of the innards. I’ll buy my own excavating tools from here on out, or in. You can’t break glass with a piece of paper. It’s a tricky stunt, and if it’s pulled off once then it’s gone for good.
             The fall is cheap this time around. I don’t remember what it’s like to go around. Or if I’m not in a hurry. Or if I’m rushed to the pound of drums. Or, well, this darn gets me gushing all the time, by gosh. Bo knows. We hound the operations that’ll make us tall. We shed lead like hopeful pencils. Born to be newer than this gosh, this darn, this waiting that’s to everybody else’s avail. Too many strategies for being nifty go unclaimed. I try the slick new measurements on. I swallow a tiny key that would’ve now saved somebody if it could. Not this now though. It’s some other now that sleeps beyond memory. Plus-- or minus-- I cannot go around undoing every short or long division that’s been done for us, to us, or against us. Shoot. It does less than oodles of good, and less than that too. A slit carved into a tangent of wind, we are only strange enough to be traced alive, blurred in the outlines of an unknown radius-- like this, like that, and, gosh darn, like everything else too.