The
general malaise that was brought forth by the clocks changing gave us all tiny
reasons to favor cosmetic changes to our personalities over the more subtle and
endearing ones we’d been endeavoring to attempt. It was cupcake weather, at
last, in the swell meandering of photo-snapped pride, and we took the
brightness of evening to be a reoccurring misstep in the fortunes of broomed
acquiescence to the cooed and tufted chokeholds of other springs gone. It mattered
to us whether the harnesses of justice would outweigh other modes of sipping
Big-Gulp bravado from those who controlled the volume level of the speakers.
Tapping, along with rhinestone-studded tan-tans and pagode celebratory
gestures, came back into style. Nobody knew where this sudden clash of musical
forgiveness came from, or even if it came at all from anywhere; because perhaps
it had always just been there, lying just below our tonal radar, like a song
you sing while you brush your teeth, shave, mop the bathtub, put on pants, do
the dishes or take out the trash: something that sings beyond the worst and
best you’ve been through. Noticing things was becoming a bit more noticeable in
the realms of our conscious efforts to notice and be noticed as much as the
morning bells would allow.
In
the kinder rendering of it; in the shabby one-foot-behind-the-other regard of
casual action; the polished abysmal horror of spitting sunflower seeds to any
kind of rhythm or the cadenced spot-on hum of microwaves destroying the
nutrient content of our song; we made secret levels that took the pulse of
put-off, diesel-spouting dreams. We made hardwired networks of ability to
understand and take orders and please others and dress mannequins in a coded
color scheme that, we almost had time to hope, would thrust the nature of élan
and slurped gumption into a powerful hold on regret and moldy ways of thinking.
How were the disposals of disaster set on regurgitate so late in the game? Not
a piped word of it around these plain and dreary places of night. More coldness
was in store; we prepped and steeled our toes for the worst.
A
small, clean place opened up between the threaded mistakes of messy beige
clouds. The hushed air was an antipode to our ransacked and harried lives. We
began to believe in stillness again; in the silence of our occasions. The sky’s
opening brought with it the phrase: “Sellers Beware Armed Buyers.” Some of us
threw our handguns into distant fungus-lush wells that were well into their
desuetude. Most of us remained choppy with reservations about watches that
could also be used as poison-dart blowguns. A man with 27 fingers on his left
hand and 4 on his right, and no thumbs, made up a new salute for us to use as
we passed each other on the road. It was a simple yet esoteric way for us to
show our support-- for what, we knew not.
A
lover of Emmental cheese and clarified butter is among us. He wears suit
jackets, bowties, and dress shirts along with pajama bottoms. He rifles grape
tomatoes at pigeons and senior citizens. I cannot say more for a time.
Well,
there are swindlers of mud here now too. It is absurd to be less cautious than
I’ve been, but for some alluvial reason I am approaching dawn’s latest inklings
of dark on bamboo stilts; and as the mornings tend to cast shimmerings of
blatant and now-lost degrees of change for less washed-out pampering than they
used to, I find myself hobbling more over the pocked shore, perhaps attempting
to regain the sensation of the last dream I was able to remember having, years
ago now, in the tumbled-over files of my head’s to-do-and-not-to-do list. You
see, I had a dream that all of our trees were dogs; that unraveled spools of
runny color overlapped yak-blood skies and the arid scratch of a bare ocean
floor; and the scariest blimp around smiled at a sparrow in midair. I had a
dream. I had a dream, you see, that we were all happy campers in rags upon the
plinth of wound time’s troubles, and we sojourned with faithless harmers on sidewalk-colored plains in search of the dreams we’d lost, or thought perhaps
belonged to a movie or a dirty magazine. I screamed, “Do not socle me, you
bastards!” It had no effect on anything, in the dream. I had this dream, you
see, and it didn’t matter to me at the time, so I left its modes and operations
behind. I let it fester and mold and grow heavy with dust. I made myself a
grave out of the soldered remains of what it used to mean to me, that dream,
edgeless with no center. I once had this dream, and it made me crazy to have
it, and now not to have it is worse by far.
Still,
there are evenings like these, still, twice or so in a while. Like when an
ex-community-chest soldier with vitiligo and half a nose swung by for a
post-lunch snack. He made little noise at first, but after imbibing a
reasonable amount of dolphin milk he made a proclamation:
“Me?
I’m just hanging like drapes, like wallpaper, you know? In between? Well, I’ll
go strutting abnormally around in a dignified scramble for some lucent destiny
to come my way. Let me tell you, I double space my love letters while the TV
plays Cheers reruns; I Xerox the sky for blue-toned survival skills; I gimmick
the hacks into revealing their true empathy for all that’s bad, sad, or
defeated. Me? I’m fast to heal and slow to show fault, in or around the most
berserk abracadabra you could think of. I’m chasing breaded alligator-tongue
nuggets with sea-anemone gin. I’m passing pith helmets around outside of
church. Don’t go getting a feeling that you’re worse off than the shacklers of
fancy mice-- who are not meaner than most, really. Sleep in your chains, boys.
Go ahead. It is a wispy correlation made of splattered bug guts and microphone
tops. Bless me. My ambition’s inhibition is nothing to sneeze at. I’m chilling
like lettuce. I’m toasting like bread. I’m oranged with tangerined luck. I’m
Shenandoahed by a filthy drop step to bellow like Paul Robeson, ‘Going home,
going home.’ But I’m going anywhere but. I’m parturient with bad faith and
gypsy courage; sleepless with haunting expressions of less-charming curiosity,
here or there if it’s not apparently blessed in the start, you know? I go days
without stubbing a toe or smashing an insect, sometimes. Sometimes? My
footsteps are the only music in the world. And I always mean maybe-- to the
scattering crows, to the Hot-Toddied and the Brandy-Alexandered, to the fors
and the ors, the againsts and the eithers, to the paddling rest-savvy few in
the world’s cupola’s catbird seat. Don’t charge me with being edacious or
unremarkable in my monumental behavior. I ain’t nobody’s savior. Take it to me,
from the corners of a center-less place, the shift from low to lower gets more
radio stations than you’d think. Swagger forward with it all; it’s better than
staggering. Some things like lost hair: once they go they don’t ever come
back.”
So
much we don’t know about the lives of others: a plethora of minutiae; an ever
rolling bolus of radiating facts and specious datum; the distant murmuring of
odd thoughts and decent habits and full-sail chiming of memories not yet made.
We are rife with mistaken identifiers, cobbled-together jumped-to conclusions,
mislabeled character traits and exploits and ruinous posterized emotion. If
this carpet could sing, if this shower could play the banjo about it-- we all
get to know each other by bits and pieces, spontaneously and in the constant
flaw of bob-and-weave jabs at it. A lighter touch to what we don’t get to know
in the shouldering of spilled shadows, grilled sentiments smoked to a wave
goodbye. A man who once lost his love to the sea now stands on the shore and
cackles at the seagulls, chewing sand-dollar bits and mud. There is no way to
tell each other apart, except mistake by gruesome mistake.
I
rest my head on shark bones in the eddies of gullied and copper light that the
afternoons bring. A man who sells postcards with pictures of other postcards on
the front is buying all of my possessions. I no longer need them, and I am
useless without them, too. That is my sum, my bad-natured sock in the jaw to
whomever this might concern. There will be a dwindling, a etiolation of my
internal resources as the ruffle and scrunch of me bays limitful on the banks
of sunlight-crinkled water spots. Just promise me this, will you? Cascade my
name into the ruts and cracks and chasms of this place, throw what remains into
the gutter and stomp it out until it dusts the moonlight from your favorite
dreams. A man in a white linen suit is throwing paralyzed crickets at emperor
gum moths for sport. I don’t have time to tell you anything. Not a thing at
all.
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