the wrong side of a one-way street

Verna just hasn’t been the same since that magician hypnotized her at the Marfan Syndrome fundraiser in July. She sees red chairs when she should be seeing pink ones. She sees white chairs too, but that’s with her eyes closed. I would qualify this, but the presenting of specific facts makes for only more of a conundrum, and this, after all, is what I’m, these days at least, trying to, in a sense, preclude. Not that I want to befuddle anyone or be accused of obfuscating matters for my own personal satisfaction. There are bows to be tied around this thing, and, from what I can gather, one to two ways or a few others will do to shed a slice of light on it.

I sent my regards to the Laundromat. They came back bleached and tumble-dried. I hardly recognized them. The way they were folded made me feel almost super, but not quite.

For some time now I have felt like a car with its turn signal left on, and the car keeps going straight and not turning. Also, I have realized of late that I’ve come to prefer looking forward to things rather than having those things I’m looking forward to actually happen. This doesn’t please Verna in the slightest. But that’s decent of her, for she senses my gut instincts better than I do, and she prefers being bored to being pleased or excited by something. Somehow, we manage.

In the mornings it’s come to liverwurst pancakes smothered in horseradish. We have pickles on the side instead of toast. Sometimes I spread butter on the pickles just to remind my senses of what it was like to have things the way they were before. The clock, pensive and deliberate in its ticking (not to mention its tocking), pats our dreams on the back while they’re still melting away from us. Verna cranes her neck to catch a glimpse of the mailman through the front door’s rose-tinted glass. I pluck my nose hair and set it gingerly on the morning paper, which I, very noticeably, do not read at all. We sometimes grab each other’s earlobes to see how cold they are. This is done while seated.

The garage door opens and closes on its own. There is no pattern to it. We hardly know when it will occur, but when it does, well, let’s just say that it’s almost a magnanimous occurrence. Around these parts, well, that’s special. I want to leave the thing unplugged and roll the door up manually when we need to drive the car somewhere, but Verna is staunchly opposed to this. She has come to hate unplugging of any kind. She tells me the moon has changed its color, that it is now Isabelline when previously it had in various phases of its cycle been old lace, expired half-and-half, seashell, pale magnolia, whipped-cream-on-dusty-curtains, ghost white, tapioca, cereal-soaked milk, cotton, cow udder, and shiny silver dollar. I am afraid of unjustly upsetting her. The vacuum’s been plugged in for weeks.

The hypnotist-- a swarthy, barrel-chested man with a squarish head of thick, chestnut hair who reminded me of an odd-toed ungulate-- warned us that Verna may suffer from some relapse effects, and that things like being hypnotized for the first time can tend to linger in one’s psyche long after the deed is done. We were aware of some small chances we were taking, but the benefits seemed to far outweigh any pernicious side-effects that would result, like her not being able to tell the difference between crocodile soup and alligator stew. What we were not expecting was for her to start using initialisms like FYI in her sentences, or for the act of showering to become inconsequential. I try not to hate her a little more all the time, but it is becoming difficult.

Verna has taken to leaving me notes on scraps of butcher paper around the house. She uses crayons. Her favorites seem to be Raw Umber and Atomic Tangerine. The notes say things like, “I love you dearly. Stay away from me constantly.” “Bring flowers to the lawnmower.” “You are awake.” “There’s a picture of us arm-in-arm on Catalina taken fifteen years ago. I used to know where it was. Now I remember that day better. It was hot. Your hair was sandy.” “Board the car on the left. I will not be waiting.” “I keep walking towards you. Keep walking the other way, my love.” “Quarrelling is for sissies and assholes. Miss me so I won’t have to keep missing you.” “Go to bed.” Sometimes she draws stick-figure pictures to go along with them. I collect them in my sock drawer, under my socks.

I stand in our bedroom on the four-poster where Verna will no longer lie with me. I pull the shades. I turn off all the lights. I grab a fire extinguisher from the closet, hold it up above my head with both hands, run in place, and pretend that I’m running for my life. Verna knocks on the door and asks if I am in need of a spatula. I don’t respond. In the contest to see who can be the kindest we are both losing. I can hear her breathing. She says, “I will light myself on fire but only if you promise to extinguish the flames before my fingernails melt.” I keep running. The sound of pelicans snoring and skateboard wheels rattling over the street are all that I attempt to listen to, and after a while I don’t hear Verna breathing anymore. This is as it should be.

On weekday evenings I often catch Verna whispering to the carpet, down on all fours like somebody weeding a garden. She’s minding her own business; that’s fine and dandy with me; but it’s just the boysenberry jam slopped through her hair that makes me feel like an oven that’s been left on low heat overnight with a jar of mayonnaise inside. I snoop, slyly painting myself up against the wall, and try to overhear her esoteric mumbling. It’s no use. What she is saying is incomprehensible and for the carpet’s ears only. Her lips are so close to the Berber that I sometimes wonder if they might sneak a kiss or two. Her backside wiggles back and forth. Her back arches. The toes of her bare feet dig into the loop pile, crunching and cracking, clenching and releasing, finding definition in the thick, coarse, curls. I make a wish on the tines of an old dream’s silverware. Nobody takes me home.

There are criminals in our neighborhood. They break into dollhouses and loot wig factories. They run from the cops while hurling jelly doughnuts at them. Verna says the criminals have her respect, as they are loud but not obnoxious, and they hardly make unnecessary motions. Sitting idle becomes them. They attack guard dogs and chuck spare change at traffic. The criminals don’t worry about mealtime; they don’t make a salary; nobody’s ever accused them of naming names; and there is more common decency among them than in The United Nations. Verna wishes they would ride horses and rob banks. I figure there’s a heart-shaped gesture in there somewhere. As it stands, until further notice, plodding through the purgatory of life as we’ll never know it, we leave the doors unlocked. Timing is beyond either of our capacities.

“Tell me again what singing you started to tell me about a day without gum or coffee.”

She sings it.

“I don’t have any more responses left in me.”

“Worth living!” She is shouting now. “Is it? Is it worth living a day? Without? Without gum or coffee? Gum or coffee! A day without gum or coffee is not really a day at all!” It’s not singing. But it’s close.

“I know you.”

“Used to.”

“Know who?”

“You.”

“Me?”

“What? Who?”

“Nothing. Nobody.”

This was a conversation we had while we were lying on the grass in the backyard one afternoon while a blimp was hovering overhead. I remember how the sky looked. It was fringed with lace. It was herringbone clouds. It was splotch of sun, orange and blurry. It was smashed violet Jujubes and a clutter of grape skins. It was humped and worn-out. I wanted to shoot the blimp from the sky with a bow and arrow. I held Verna’s small hand as I thought about this. She didn’t hold mine back.

If I knew now what that hypnotist at the Marfan fundraiser knew then, well, I’d at least know what to expect next, and last for that matter. Verna has acquired a heavy German accent, and keeps ending her always incomplete sentences with, “…while I’m still alive and kicking.” It’s, fortunately, something that I, under the circumstances, presently, have come to understand.

Late at night, while the crickets crepitate each to each from the wall’s dead spots and I tumble 180s under the sheets, I think back to those times when Verna still didn’t utter collapsible syllables, when she’d offer to teach me parakeet hymns and would tie my shoes to a loaf of bread. Those are the times I’ll keep, not these ones of the lost-cartilage failures of understanding.

Peace quiets the airy loot of our place-specific sense of loss. I will the oilbirds of what we’ve got to the dust-gray clouds, and somehow the someday of what I used to only know in bits and pieces into the mouths of spoonbills.

I tell Verna that we’re going out tonight, and that she’d better wear that red dress, the one I used to like so well. Her mouth goes ovate. I tell her that I know a place where the dancing’s free. She scratches her ear and winks at me, clutching a baseball in her left hand, rolling it around a bit with her fingers in the palm, getting ready to be somebody. I stand there, leaning against the pantry door, pondering the difference between the there of here and here’s there that’s always there even when here’s not. Distance evades me. I am not moving towards or away from her. Verna, as always, is calling the shots; she turns the whisky of me into water. Tonight I drive the milk truck of my past into the cement wall of my future. Don’t ask for me at the door. I’ll be gone before the dew hits the flowers in the morning. Settling, like punching seven numbers into a phone, is out of the question.

predictable miracles

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?

snackless at midnight

On October 3, 1849, Poe was found on the streets of Baltimore delirious, "in great distress, and... in need of immediate assistance", according to the man who found him, Joseph W. Walker. He was taken to the Washington College Hospital, where he died on Sunday, October 7, 1849, at 5:00 in the morning. Poe was never coherent long enough to explain how he came to be in his dire condition, and, oddly, was wearing clothes that were not his own: a stained faded, old bombazine coat, pantaloons of a similar character, a pair of worn-out shoes run down at the heels, and an old straw hat. Poe is said to have repeatedly called out the name "Reynolds" on the night before his death, though it is unclear to whom he was referring.

i put my shirt on

right arm first

the only way i can

button it almost up

all thumbs and blood-crusted fingernails

deeper thoughts than what tie to wear

are jailed away

soundly for sounding absurd

all the thoughts i thought were priced to sell

as is

no refunds

tucked under a tag’s inhibitions

chased out to dry

playing for keeps

just a runnel’s spouting off

plumbago skies

higher than above

riskier than taking

over

what’s a good bet of what’s left

not half of plenty

times two

timing you

under the weather’s raft

left for alive

just a hole drilled through emptiness

just ten years to go

just ten years ago

rustling about in the hatpins and shiny things of eye-light

get this take-this-hand out of my mind

now

get by

there are lightning bugs in my better half

free enough to last until the dark goes out

words sipped from the lip of a dew-filled leaf

make might-have-beens go wrong

one-wayed and looked over

fumbling about in the rusted belt buckles and the wood umbrella stems

of my outside-in personality

dreaming of whatever else will do

when dreams do anything but

i was or am happy here

sun-faced

a hank of worry

tilled lay over

or soak if

last one in the water’s a hog

or me accosted

whammed out of existing

there or streaky or opting out

valentining or a dud

wind or bragged about

be octoberly in the crushed leaves

i could’ve cured your care

studies show

that sentences don’t always finish

starting out

lured into a supper of tears

nameless

beer-legs rubbered and gumming a plug

meal’s over while

stranded

insolvent to a wish’s secondhand suit

besting it and almost bet against

but for now just hell-bent

for something and nothing

more

and more of and more of

nothing never more

angels do the strangest things

a: I don’t know. We’d gone out a few times.

b: And then she springs this on you, and you’re like, “Okay. Sounds good.”?

a: Well. Kind of. I mean, I thought I’d give it a shot.

b: But a poetry reading? Shit. That’s a fucking red flag waving its ass off.

a: I know. I know. But it was at a bar so I figured I could at least get drunk. And maybe, well, maybe I just wanted to give her a chance. She was not what you’d call vapid or showy. There weren’t the telltale signals that’d like register in your noggin, “Abort all operations,” you know? She seemed ironical and jokey, playful even. Not out-of-touch or bubbled in her own fluffy makeshift reality. Not that overly serious, sense-of-humor-less type. Not from what I’d seen. Who knows? Maybe it’d be enjoyable.

b: Enjoyable? A poetry reading? Are you fucking kidding me?

a: I know. But anyway. The full moon’s plastered up above the buildings, yellow and big and hunting down the skyscrapers, almost close enough to kiss. Kind of a crisp and clean feeling night. I’m out busy-bodying around doing some bibulous solo work. It’s like somebody’s taken an enormous broom and swept the city clean. It’s not too cold or anything. Traffic is light. And the sidewalks aren’t very crowded. A beautiful night to be alive in the world. Me? Well, I haven’t slept in a week, you know, ragged and delirious, and I’m clanging and battering from bar to bar anyway. So, well, I end up going out to this thing. I get there, and it’s pretty packed actually. It was one of those places with a stage where bands play and stuff up in the back, and the bar runs along the side, and then there’s all this open space where people can mingle and hold their drinks in one hand and strut around trying to look hip and smart. I see her roaming around, all nervous and jittery and talking a yard-a-second to some wienery-looking dude with those black-frame Buddy-Holly glasses on that people wear to look cool, and it seems she’s like invited a bunch of her friends to come witness this spectacle.

b: Oh lord. Don’t tell me it was an open mic.

a: Yeah. Oh lord is right. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

b: Oh lord.

a: We chat a little. She’s prepping. Getting herself amped. Pumping herself up. Going into some histrionic hopscotch to warm the oven of her performance’s tone.

b: I get it.

a: So I leave her be, give her a quick lip-to-lip peck, and repair to the bar, where I proceed to down beer after beer while plenty of these odd characters keep parading up on stage and doing these very serious and faux-emotional readings. All stilted, un-edited splendor. It was beyond horrendous. It was unendurable. I just kept getting more drunk and more drunk, and it wasn’t even close to cutting the ketchup. The bartender was laughing at me and shaking his head. He was very amused by my suffering.

b: Man. Like being held hostage or something. Tortured. Death by recital. Shit. That sucks. So, how did her reading go?

a: Well. That’s just the thing. I had to stick around and wait. It seemed like there were like fifty people up before her. I kept waiting and she kept not going up. She kept telling me just a few more, almost. It seemed interminable. And I had to keep clapping along with everybody after each asshole finished with their Namby Pamby hokum. Nothing but whining piffle and poached self-pity.

b: Oh lord.

a: But finally, after eons of humdrumming through pints, her turn to read comes. She’s up on stage, all nervous and shaking under the bright stage lights, sweat beading in rivulets down her forehead from her dyed-blonde bob. And she’s squinting and holding out this notebook in front of her, adjusting the mic stand, testing out the loudness of her voice. And, after some stalling and a few small coughs, she starts reading this poem about The Toastman.

b: The Toastman?

a: Yeah. I’ve got no idea what the fuck that is. And she’s going on and on about this Toastman frolicking in the woods with her.

b: The Toastman frolics?

a: I guess so.

b: Is he like the Taxman?

a: Ha. Maybe. I’m the Toastman. Yeah, I’m the Toastman. And I’m working for nothing but butter.

b: Don’t ask me what I want bread for. Toastman! Yeah. I’m the Toastman. And you’re toasting for no one but me.

a: Trust me. It was nothing even close to that. It was very serious and dark. And super fucking weird. Something to do with animal spirits and gathering nuts in the woods, and how The Toastman was always waiting for her in a shady nook.

b: Holy lord mother of god and mary fuck.

a: And I’m sitting there trying not to look at her. Trying to pretend I’m just there all by myself. And I aggressively nab the bartender’s attention and order a shot and a beer, and down them as fast as I can, and then I just sit there and try to wish it all away, but I can’t. This chick is really going nuts about The Toastman. She’s going on and on about this frolicking bastard.

b: Man. You needed to make an exit. Like right then.

a: I know. But for some reason I couldn’t. I just kept sitting there and trying not to pay attention to anything going on around me. All this shit about The Toastman. It was insane. It went on and on, and she’s getting all excited about it, and she’s raving and getting louder and louder. As if the microphone isn’t amplifying her annoying, nasally voice enough. There was something cloying about the whole thing. You know how those poetry readers do that cadence thing where they like leave dramatic pauses between words, and emphasize things with breathy blurts. She was pulling out all the stops, in spades, and jiving on about this Toastman the whole while. But, I mean, I didn’t want to sit there and like judge her based on this performance. That’d be shallow and mean, right? But I hardly knew her at this point, and there wasn’t much else to go on, and it was, I thought, very telling of her personality, her inner life, or something. It wasn’t like she was making fun of serious poetry reading. There wasn’t an ounce of satire in her recipe. Actually, there was something downright dismal about the whole thing, like she was trying to be naked without taking off even one article of clothing. I don’t know. I was fucking freaked out though.

b: For good reason. Please tell me you jetted and never talked to her again.

a: Wish I could.

b: Oh lord.

a: Yep. I mulched around and stewed at the bar. I couldn’t move for some reason. My body felt heavy. My mind was dull and numb.

b: Well, you maybe were like a sponge sopping up shitty water.

a: I was as lonely as I’ve ever been in all of my years.

b: Figures.

a: But that Toastman.

b: The Toastman.

a: Yeah. That fucking son of a bitch. I couldn’t stop thinking about him. He was playing a trombone. He was chucking apricots at squirrels. I imagined him taking a shit, his toastpants around his ankles, butter running like sweat from his crumb hair. Then I thought of his crust. Toastman’s crust.

b: What kind of bread do think he was made from?

a: Riga-style rye bread. At least that’s what I’d like to think.

b: Wow. That’s quite a bread for Mr. Toastman. Starting to like this guy.

a: Yeah. I was too. He was like a superhero to me.

b: Would he have a cape?

a: Yes. He’d definitely have a cape. A red, yellow, and blue cape made from Wonder Bread bags.

b: I’m imagining a plain white suit. Like Mark Twain used to favor. Maybe a red bow tie.

a: And his shoes would be dusted with powdered sugar.

b: He frolics over hillsides!

a: He hurtles small animals in a single bound!

b: It’s a slice. It’s a loaf. NO! It’s Toastman!

a: Of course this was not the way this gal’s poem was leaning. She was very earnest about this Toastman. He was some kind of savior to her. Some kind of, I don’t know, Jesus figure or something.

b: And you’re just sitting at the bar, taking it all in, dreaming about this superhero-like toasty guy you’ve conjured up, and you’re getting more drunk and more delusional.

a: Yeah. I was really swaggering around in some uncharted territory. Felt like a real fancy pants at a hoedown. There was nowhere to go, nothing to do. She finally finished the damn thing, and, well, I don’t remember. People clapped. They gave her some polite applause. I felt miserable.

b: What did you say to her?

a: Say to her? What? I couldn’t talk. Remorse was cheapening the watered-down music of my life. I was slumped there, dead to the world, and hating everybody and everything. Nothing was going to be okay.

b: What?

a: I don’t know. It was really depressing. She was a nice girl, and really attractive too. It seemed like such a waste. I really wanted to like her, but now she’d ruined that. How could I possibly become romantically involved with a girl who read poems about some Toastman.

b: Not too cool.

a: All she wanted was toast, and all I could offer was crustless emptiness. I felt so vapid, so sapped. Nothing could lift this lethargic dullness from my head.

b: Brooms and batons, my friend. Maybe it was just about a guy who liked to raise toasts? Like at bars. He liked to say, “Cheers!” and clink glasses before imbibing.

a: Loopy, deranged nonsense fluttering indistinctly from…

b: There’s nothing subtle about dying, right?

a: No. It’s more like instincts getting their own goat.

b: Who?

a: It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. It don’t.

b: But it does. It does matter. You can’t suspend your judgment. You can’t impartially observe your life from a safe distance. You might mimic attachment, attempt to be burdened by things you feel should be burdensome, concrete your own guilt into a theatric bumbling where you always end up the victim of circumstances, “beyond your control.” But you don’t know. You don’t ever know what’s going to happen to you, except that you’re going to die.

a: I’m suggesting otherwise?

b: You’re playing dumb with this effeminate munching.

a: What the…?

b: It’s being soft and easy, a chaise longue for others to take comfort in, something that’ll always be there, a sort of break from the hard reality of their lives.

a: Reality is easy.

b: Really? You think so, huh? But you don’t really put an honest effort into your empathy, into your “so caring and loving” personality that you present oh-so-humbly and graciously to all takers. You sitz bath your emotions. I don’t even think you comprehend, at least not consciously, what a charlatan you’ve made of yourself.

a: Nobody can come close to imagining what it’s like to be another person, to dress yourself in the clothes of another's tribulations and tsoris. You will always be you. That’s it. Until you’re dead. Then you’ll be nothing. Until then though, you’ll always be you. It’s all you’ll ever know about what it’s like to be alive.

b: You’re nothing but a mess of cliché riddles and trite fatuousness

a: But things happen to me. I’m alive. Things are happening. All I can do is go along with it. That’s what being alive is: having things happen to you.

b: Or having you happen to them.

a: Exactly.

b: Bullshit. Whatever. So. Did you hang around? What happened?

a: Nothing. Nothing happened. Nothing ever happens.

b: Blah, blah, blah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get over it. Come on.

a: I got drunk. I passed out in a cab. I don’t know. The moon was low and big, and it was like the clear coffee-black sky was staring at me with a gargantuan jaundiced eye. It doesn’t matter. What happened? What were the events that occurred? I vomited in a cat’s food dish. Woke up at 4 am in the dark, in a strange bed, and didn’t know where the hell I was or how I’d gotten there. She was snoring. I wandered around, befuddled, and ruined my shin on a bedside table. I mistook the closet for the bathroom. I climbed back into the warm, safe womb of the covers and held her close in my arms.

b: Wait. You didn’t…No. No way.

a: Yep. Sadly enough. I am a weak man.

b: Oh lord.

a: Just call me Toastman. I don’t give a damn about my bad reputation. Oh no. Not me.

b: Oh lord.

variations on red warren

Promise that you’ll make wishes on the grain elevators that blow by off the highway as it screams along with me. Give the pan to a caboose or two, and the faces of geniuses camel up the worst of it, then the splatter bugs get their fate decided for them by wind and glass. Gone by in the giving that graces the presented gallop of information, like the way a horse gets when it whips full of beans, and you’ve got those catalpa tress of course, maybe lining a wide boulevard, or it could be just sand on the dashboard, and the cold shivering foetus of it all making irreverent speeches in platform shoes tooling alongside burnished triumphs of amphibian-breathed holiness, and all of this rudimentary gall-giving crater-happy silent treatment doesn’t do a burp of good among wardens and stalled vehicles. But getting the side view is necessary. In fact, speaking to Luddites with pin-tail souls is pergola-watching at its finest. After you retreat. The gaping Sunday-faced marrying along bloodlines, and the shoulders sag and the armpits drip and the lint sticks to chewed gum in breast pockets and flints and is flicked away, those who do such things, we make the dandiest little greeting cards, well, those who worrying are we-ing and whoopee-ing under the hard-packed dirt of another day to have to suffer through, those are plenty and they are left to themselves in keeping pennies and playing keep away with a box of doughnuts. “Come on over and get your reward,” sing the chariot racers, but there’s nobody to listen. Cascading past the ruins of the highway’s scarry past, sucking up all the sugar cubes, making speeches, getting tired of window-looking, fiddling around with a pocket book and scotching a few canceled checks, and the wind plays tricks on the stereo while a passel of july-bugs shadows by. Cordial, and willing at any cost, to bemoan the youthier currents of any suitable event, the boss stays put and paints murals on the ceilings of outhouses. He trims the gristle from the marrow of what you used to be, and then tells you to put a lid on it. Keeping the bulge and the glitter alive, manila-envelope skin and telegrams from outer space, knowing that the end of man is to know, or just passing the afternoon going north-east out of the city. People pray for their own demise at certain times of the year, when the weather won’t stop playing games with their god-fearing spirits, and that great big eye slowing them down from upstairs somewhere. Tilling the backrooms for spare gold coins, we sift through what’s left and bag the rest. Love’s tablecloth stays stained with who you are in my dreams, nothing too dramatic, not like weaving in traffic, not like tossing peanuts in a panhandler’s palm. More like getting in on the joke, swanky and loose in the tongue, sporting a boiled shirt, cussing high and low and not upset at all. And the commissaries are streaking down the line, holding off colds, playing spoons with a few shirtless dweebs, and patches of chokeberry and meadowsweets and photinia rub the hillsides with splotchy dashed color while you run errands and play fetch with ballots and cure your own shyness with watery ebullient cheers like hey-ho-let’s-go stuff. Sure. Run a hay-wagon through it and take off all your clothes. Go pantomiming the great potato, tousled hair crinkled and matted down with perspiration over his forehead, the pudgy face, cagey, the trenches in his eyes, the seven-fifty seersucker that’s long in the pants with the cuffs crumpling down over high black shoes, the tissue-papered tie, imbibing orange soda with two straws at once. But assuming the nicest of things about all involved you can lead a cemetery tour group to flat-out indecent or just drowned decisions, and you with your taffy hair, you’ve got to lead a duck, even with famished cheeks and an unfinished smile treading water on your swimming-pool face. So, please do not rest in peace or chaos, like when you’re reaping profound things from a private conversation, and then somebody else walks in the room and it’s like everything is dead and you can’t talk anymore. Wonder comes in bunches and blooms like crepe myrtle. You leave it at smokestacks. You leave it at love-vine clambering up out of the weeds, to those of the wool-hat and cockle-burr variety casting their lot with the jumping-jack-flashers. You leave it at b-b-b-b-as-tuds with spit flying and screechy tires rubbering the dirt shoulder off the high shining bright slab. A gun holstered like a tumor under an arm. Tamarisk and hobo décor strangling the gaps between here and way way way way over there. Nothing more to keep you brightly lit. Make sure you count the telephones poles as they spool by fishing for compliments, stringing along the race of the wires, as your eyes dance bumpy and troubled, a shade pulled down over your features by an unknown hand that no matter what you’ll never get to know, not the way you could’ve, once, long ago, before the cold-glove grip of the past caught up and strangled the guts from you. As you were. Taps plays. Quiet prevails. Your heart breaks over and over again. Blaming the deviant nature of one on the whole’s nurturing. And you run like a cat escaped from a sack, and you part ways with mahogany wainscoting and the massive stonework of the cellarage, and you crowbar your way back into the wreck of your past. Don’t answer the phone for a stretch. Guess what’s for dessert. Leave your name and number on a velvet jacket’s cuff. Let’s shake the dust off our inner-selves and gussy up the fraternities of now for mud-shack parties that just might never end. Hopelessly redeemed. You get weary making plans. Divorced from the higher things in life, handling it all too well, after the well’s dry and the moon’s gone, and we’re waking up in different beds. The coffee’s taking too long to work, and nothing’s resolving on its own. Sundown’s got its own mess to clean up, or what’ll do until the mess arrives, but then we’ve still got the awful responsibility of time, on our side and against us too, with the highway lowing off scrubbed and matted, sounding out distance into more distance.

“I don’t rightly know, there, well if it’s just to lend out parking spots then…”

His creamed and curded face was meadow-muffin colored, and no amount of mints would take the sour garlicky odor from his breath. There wasn’t a lot to like about that bloated mug, as scowling and twitching were its most salient attributes. His head wasn’t as big as a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, but it’d give you a hard time seeing around it in a movie theater even if you were sitting about 5 rows behind it. Calling him a heavy sweater would be doing an injustice to marathon runners; sweat pits would form under his arms almost instantly after donning a shirt.

“Grub around and glom onto the clutch of things. I’m hightailing it to Virginia where they’ve got apples growing wild on the trees right there off the highway and you can just reach up and pluck one down and eat it right there on the roadside and ain’t nobody gonna bother you none about it.”

I conceived an idea. I let nothing pertain.

“I’ll smart aleck you to death I reckon,” said I as I sidestepped a remarkable remark.

And in the slow muscle of the evening foaming with a greasy, slush-like moan there would be the cries of strays and the hee-haw squawk of seagulls, and near the church-bell melody of stoops cluttered with posy and feline purrs and mechanical trinkets that hum and bump and rattle, and the swinging of doors; and now, because you’ve kidded the hotel chippies long enough, you take the charm of hand-holding clowns, you set the saucepan away for good, you toss aside filmy gowns and the punched-through spackle of deteriorating drywall. A purpling mass of sky descends, or seems to, as everything is close and all around. The marsh sings, half repulsed by the flash of car headlights, half unaware of even itself. People drive on and over things--the thin, crackly crust of the present--with vowels that clack like spoons.

“There’s no weather in it for us.”

“Spilt and dreamless,” he croaked. “That’s about all the gum I got.”

“Christ. Bladders like teaspoons. There’s no getting around it. Swimming around with your ken, some pother and semantic struggling. Christ. I mean, Jesus.”

I threw a tennis ball at his head. It missed, but I made my point.

“Stop your infernal suffering.”

He was a flypaper-souled guy, and his ambitions lent towards card tricks and needle beer. Nothing made sense about him. He’s the kind of guy who’d instantly make comradely raillery turn to dour subjectivity. Skin rough and worn on his tooled and tan face, fresh bloody crust in nick-cuts from shaving peppered here and there on the sag of his cheeks, gumball-blue eyes always squinting, peering circumspectly at whatever happened to be passing their way. A huff and a spleenish groan. A public servant serving himself. Nothing but poly-ticks.

“Stop your fussing. The sun’s come to light, and I don’t know how long it’ll bear witness to the likes of you.”

The backyards with their patchwork fences of chicken wire, mesh hexagons rusty and sagging in places, the grass sopped with rain, muddy puddles pocking humps and clumped weed-flowers, and their chimneys so lonely, cobbley, smoking above tin or sheet-metal roofs where the rain patters and thumps and makes those below sink into a somnolence, an almost-trance that keeps the yawns coming and the coffee brewing all day, and then there’s time for to listen to the train whistles as those hunkering gray beasts smoke and screech into the station to remind all that life is motion, even when it’s being still, even on a late rainy afternoon while the moths are still toying with the idea of playing hover over the flicker of yellow bulb light, even when this here train is grumbling and grinding to a halt, the people inside just shadows, just figurines, just chattel awaiting another destination in an endless line of destinations, none of which will, as they never should be, the end. A rumble stirs through the dining car, dishes and wine glasses awkwardly cavorting on tremored tops of tables. Windows frame rectangles of the forlorn landscape. A water tower leans gawky over rows of corn. Klee-klee-klee whines from a tidings of American Kestrels. Squares of fallow farmland checker the flat stark terrain, the bland similarity of monotonous pastures, a place where nothing can hide, where nothing can be obscure, and the sun sets fire, and the sky’s so big it’s like it just wraps around everything and makes you dizzy and lost in it. The porches are warped and creaky and covered with wind-blown dirt. A man chewing on a pipe pauses for a moment, sets down his newspaper, sits up in his rocker, and stares at the ruddy and scaly flesh of the world, his drifting mind now settling on something, something that curtains his sight’s movie screen, something that bread-and-roses his instincts, and he might even chance to catch wind of dogwood and redbud, or part ways with dreaming Chickamaugas and Chattanoogas in an attempt at expiation, short-lived as it may be, for the horded company of his past. The skyline trembles.

In a wild, electric way her hair, cut off at that crazy length, very black and choppy, by itself could make you fall in love with her at a glance. Something disinterested strolled around in her eyes, which were glassy and moon-like, and which would sparkle at you but only if it was necessary. Being close to her was an occupational hazard, though one you’d risk every time, as the summer dwindled and the lawns faded to a burnt sienna and cow smell crept in to chase away the cedar and pine. There were certain times when that graceful turn of her hips, her luxuriant and languorous stride, the way she stood on tiptoe to spoon sugar into the coffee or playfully shadowboxed with your palms, were enough to make you stick around. So, then you step off the train and it’s cold, a biting cold that pinches and slaps at your face. You weren’t made for weather like this. The gravel scrunches like dry Quaker Oats as you step away from the platform. The houses clap and board up your dreams. A shiver warms beneath the pavement, and you carry your bags to the terminal bar where you’ll sit and smoke cigarette after cigarette and drink beer after beer until they oh-so-politely ask you to leave with the utmost brevity and class, and you’ll go, quietly, without causing a ruckus, lugging along ghosts in gray suits with plastic daffodils sleeping in their lapels, dragging your feet, on your way home.

The road sweeps, tilted and crumbling, and mulls in a wash of moonlight. Rabbits and prairie dogs mingle and dart and artfully dodge drool-hungry wolves out in the chaparral’s dark. Rounding bends is a serious high-risk situation, but it’s got to be done, without the aid of streetlights, so you do it, matching wits with the Doghobble and Barberries and Corkwood and Hollyleaf Buckthorn and Smoketree invading your mind’s garden. For a minute there, as the horizon marbles and the guardrail corkscrews and culverts clunk underneath making your head rattle like a clogged Hoover, you start to think you’re drowning, but then you realize it’s just the hogwash of terrible gutless remorse suffocating and botching up your reason from clear-headed to sappy wilted-lettuce numb. There’s a sneeze’s moment where you know just what needs doing and just how it will be done. You walk along the side, mud clinging to your boots, scratched by thorns and wiry branches, socks brambled, eyes peeled for headlights, ears wary of engine sounds, treading along careful and hurried, carrying yourself like a carton of eggs, awe-struck, an iota of kindness still hell-or-highwatering down your swallows, slicing at the mean-stitched blimp of what it currently means for you at this moment to be alive.

“Why are you always eschewing me?”

“I’m not. I’m hachoowing you. It’s not what you think.”

“No. You’re always eschewing me out of things.”

“Yeah, and Francophiles are girls who love crooners.”

“Could be. Could very well be.”

“Lunch is a mistake these days.”

“Every apple counts. Been sick with vitamins for too long.”

“Friday’s don’t come often enough, but when they do it’s too much.”

“Braces and other obstacles to popularity stick with one even after the darkness lifts, the trophies are all handed out, and the invisible people win yet again. Play that fucking sandwich like a bass guitar. Sippy cups are for sissies who hang Olympics banners from their backs like capes. Get out of my way with that Hasidic drool.”

“Quiet listens.”

“Silence hears.”

“You don’t maybe exactly want to be that kind of guy but you already are that kind of guy and as you modulate and go through your life you appear to others to be that kind of guy whom you don’t want to be, see, then what kind of guy do you want to be? It gets confusing and sometimes you’re just plagiarizing. So, maybe you are suffering from flashbacks of being born. There’s no cure for that. There’s not cure for shyness or jealousy either. Just drink up the water and dive in.”

“Suzette came home at 8:13 PM. She tossed her keys on the kitchen counter, took off her peacoat and laid it over a folding chair, made herself a sandwich with last night’s leftover meatloaf, plopped down on her bed with the sandwich, and put the movie October in the DVD player. October is a 1927 silent film directed by Sergei Eisenstein. A re-creation of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, the film chronicles the events leading to the Bolshevik takeover and is considered to be an historical masterpiece.”

“What was she wearing?”

“Nothing but clothes.”

“Oh.”

“A smattering of spellcheck-dither had hooked her attention and she thought, ‘well it was nearly summer when we sat on your roof, when we smoked cigarettes and stared at the moon.’”

“Oh.”

“She wanted to be amused. She needed something exciting. All she kept getting was credit card bills and grocery bags.”

“Whose spelling was she checking?”

“Her own. And yours. And mine.”

“Did she ever sing?”

“No. She had no cause to sing.”

“Oh. Did she ever watch the film?”

“October? No. Well, she tried. She just couldn’t have worked in an orange-juice factory.”

“Wha…?”

“She couldn’t concentrate.”

“Makes sense, what with all the spell checking and Tom Petty lyrics in her head and stuff.”

“Too many directions for her thoughts to take. Too much to think.”

“Oh golly gee. Tell me now what I already don’t already know.”

“Suzette wanted to change the weather report. She believed the devil was controlling the numbers in her bank account. It’d been a long time since anyone had brought her flowers.”

“Did she think that she made other people dumb?”

“She might have. Sometimes she wondered, ‘If I fart and nobody is around to hear it then have I really farted or has it all been in vain?’ This usually occurred after she’d eaten a giant bowl of broccoli with American cheese melted over it.”

“The sun is a nothing wheel. Snow isn’t soft and it doesn’t taste like vanilla frosting. Have you ever seen a black and white rainbow?”

“Well, charge my horoscope with murder. I’m all idea’d out.”

“To the moon, to the moon, to the moon, moon, moon.”

“Creeping off to the waste of space in plum deals of time are movies without end.”

“I’m keeping my hands to myself.”

“Maybe that’s there is the damn problem. Like fabricating a Bill Of Wrongs.”

“Being sad is a right I’m not about to give up without a fight.”

“Mild, trivial catastrophes are the accidents of modernity, as the balance between the individual and the world has been lost, and we’ve lost so much more, and all before supper too.”

“No more chromium 6 in the drinking water. Nobody’s going down to Oxford Town. Not now. Not now. We’ll get back at Mother Nature one of these days. One of these old days here. Yep. Any day now. One of these days. Riding on a train headed north. Give me early hours and coffee on the stove, a ring made out of tinfoil, and a hurt that barks more than it gnaws.”

“Cullion.”

“You can’t talk like that. Not in here. It’s not allowed. It’s in the lease.”

“Testicle.”

“That’s more like it. Knew you’d shape the ship. Like wearing madras on a rainy day, or the Mormotomyia hirsute, the fly that doesn’t fly.”

“If you mean certain things, well, tigers flying on t-shirts, incompetent happiness, cotton socks sticking to toe hair, well, if you mean, well…certain things.”

“Classy.”

“What’ll you do now, my baking-soda eyed son?”

“Pour plastic money over the Lone Ranger’s hanging head.”

“The way I love that woman I swear it’s about to get me killed.”

“Aren’t you ever going to grow up?”

“Where, where, where, where are we going?”

“Oily-greasy-glimmering in the slanderous rays of lamp posts.”

“Cranky and improbable as the calliope plays Dixie, as still as a tomb, as cold as a nun’s panties, while the clumming strips naked night’s enemies just ere the sun gushes a blush on the drowsy chilled hills, and it’d take a hell of a lot more than all the king’s horses and all the king’s men to patch up this old heart of mine all over again and all over again.”

people with high hair who talk a lot

x: I just get so annihilated by the suffering of others.

o: Like a scalpel for your emotions.

x: If you’d say that kind of thing and think it to be true then…

o: Oh. Well that does say a whole lot more about the sayer than it does…

x: Lord it over yourself, why don’t you?

o: Pussy.

x: Hard-on.

o: What the fuck? And you’re going to sit there and tell me that you have this over-active empathic capacity, and you’re going to sit there and say shit like that?

x: I could stand and say it.

o: Ah, go twist a nutsac.

x: Please. You can do better than that.

o: Would it were that I could, but, alas, my hindside is blind.

x: Shit. So. What I was a saying…

o: Or more like what you meant.

x: Is that there’s no real reason for me to be so, well, overwhelmed by this hurt I see going on in other people. Well, except that I want maybe to have somebody else feel that way for me if I were in their situation.

o: A morsel of harm does a body good every now and then.

x: But it’s not really driven by selfishness.

o: Really? That sounds like a butt plug for pity.

x: No. It’s more like a condom for tears.

o: Not bad. It’s like you don’t want the mess, or…no. It’s more like you don’t want the consequences of your, or their, suffering to like ejaculate all over you. But it saps you nonetheless, perhaps more so because there’s not the same release. It’s almost fake. And then you tie up the soiled rubber and toss it away.

x: Away. That’s just it. It’s maybe sort of a purity issue. Keeping my soul as clean as possible.

o: Your soul? No. More like a crusty rag for the finished product of your baser instincts having the rule of the roost.

x: Maybe it’s embarrassing. Like I don’t want others to see the real me.

o: Ah. Well. Let’s not go that far. You’re doing fine treading water where you are. Keep at it.

x: Genital wart.

o: Dick cramp.

x: Ah fuck. Anyway. People go into convulsions. I’ve seen it. And I’m not talking physical pain.

o: Of course.

x: That’s a different ballpark.

o: A-whole-nother cup of piss.

x: I’m talking about emotional pain, manic grips of depression wielding insanity as a hammer.

o: Who’s got the sickle?

x: Oh, the tortured physics of understanding. How much must be taken before we learn to give?

o: I’m going to pinch this loaf pre-sphincter.

x: Be my guest.

o: People hold a lot of stuff in, right?

x: Sure, but that’s not…

o: Hold on. Now. I’m going to veer here.

x: Go swerve on ahead.

o: It’s the whole that-person-in-the-picture-is-not-me thing. Though it is you in the picture. And you know this. But you don’t want it to be. It’s not the person who you think that you are, who you want to be when others look. And it freaks you out. It makes you question the very nature of your existence.

x: And a bible to the head could knock some sense into the creepiest among us.

o: I once was lost but now I’m found. But there before the grace of blah, blah, blah go I. Yeah. I know. All that crap.

x: It’s the steps you take to get where you end up, right?

o: I don’t know about that. To tell you the truth, it sounds like a load a manure to me right now. But it might pass.

x: And then you find yourself in line at the grocery store, wondering why they can’t change the express-line sign to read, “Ten items or fewer.”

o: Something like that.

x: A best-side-facing-the-world-at-all-times thing. A minor kink in the operations of expressing your personality, of gaining access to special moments of rapport.

o: Something to live for, right? Or would that be creating things to make your life seem like it’s worth living.

x: Is there really a difference?

o: I don’t know. Really. I don’t. Maybe that’s part of the problem. Is seeing really always believing?

x: My default mode of thinking keeps getting set to the same things. Hell, and I’m stuck with screen-saver sensibilities.

o: It’s like we’re defining ourselves more and more by the things we like. Who we are is what we like, or more importantly, what we own, or, um, that is, I guess, what we import into our lives. We’re turning into a bunch of spoiled kids who are addicts of instant gratification. Gimme, gimme this. Gimme, gimme that. Gimme it all, and gimme it all right now.

x: Gershwin slimmed down to an airplane commercial. Jabba The Hut reciting Milton. Outdoor space heaters.

o: And we get all the news we need from the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

x: There’s a flattering going on. An urge beat into us, something that is constantly trying to persuade us to attempt to satisfy our desires, to want without end, to drink and eat and laugh and play video games and watch the latest big-budget Hollywood movie and to, above all else, spend money on things that we’re taught to need. We’re instilled with a poison-ivy-itch hankering to consume, to be impatient and greedy, to pay with the dollar-sign-hued hours of our days for this priceless gift of existence.

o: And all you’re left with is this life you’ve built from pop songs and loud TV commercials and WiFi tendencies and logos of professional sports teams and the immediate, though extremely ephemeral, satisfaction of texting.

x: Emptiness. Unquenchable desires. And only an escalating debt inflating all the time in the ruins of your spiritual bank account. A job that leaves you dead to the world, exhausted, barely able to push the buttons of your remote control, eat some corndogs, and cachinnate like a Tickle Me Elmo doll while plopped bloated and weary on your couch.

o: O’ beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain!

x: So where does that leave us?

o: Thumb wrestling our way through the cosmos.

x: Shouldn’t I have more to show for myself than a handful of gripes about other people and their problems?

o: Maybe you know it is o’ so possible. Brother, by the way, could you, uh, maybe, perhaps, spare a dime or two?

x: Just being appreciated. That’s what most of my emotional trunk of levied hurt comes down to. That wanting to feel important to somebody else. And somebody with whom to appreciate this distinctly short wonderful thing called being alive. I’m not thorning from the sidelines much these days. You know. You know. You know. Lap it up and let the moonlight wane on away.

o: And you’ve got to ask yourself if it’s merely self-serving, this love you keep forking over.

x: Getting fucked over for.

o: Or fucking over somebody else. If you can tell the difference.

x: Reading bodies and predicting the past.

o: Fall maundering to the ground and ghost the roots of your passivity with chummy sucks of face.

x: Vested interest comes and goes. We pocket what’s left of our heart and move on and move on and move on and move on and move on and move on and move on and move on and move on.

o: A manifesto for evading whatever it is that’s been put in us by nature. A call to arms for the ass scratchers and the mouth breathers and the leg humpers and the condiment lovers and those who’d rather spell words than watch TV.

x: Well clear cut my forest and mistake my mountains for spider bites.

o: It’s never enough.

x: What is?

o: Everything. Nothing. It’s never enough. You just keep wanting more and more and more.

x: Love decks itself out with airbrushed delusions, and we wait and ship off for the ruinous smoldering shores of carpe diem satisfaction.

o: Horace is still quite hip among the heathens I take it.

x: Odes and Epodes, motherfucker.

o: There’s no substitute for lunching with passionate dos-à-dosers. An eclogue raspberries to obscenity. Violence bojangles to freedom. Hear my lust roar!

x: Can it. I’m hullaballoing until the cows croak for dragon-tail snacks.

o: Materializing as a look-the-other-way kind of guy.

x: Fly down into the hard-back chair of your life and kick.

o: Who wants to see the way they are seen?

x: You rise from the plain astral plane of your thoughts to new dimensions of decoding the chaos you believe to be the world around you.

o: A ruche of distilled memories taking root in the briar patch of your hindsight’s sunglasses-tinted retrospective. Tread or be trod on. I guess.

x: That man in the picture.

o: Yes.

x: That stranger who others mistake for being me.

o: He straggles about in your clothes.

x: He puts on my face and wears my hair.

o: There is no you in him.

x: No me to be.

o: Just an imposter who serves as some kind of margrave seeking resources to feed his troops.

x: Pestering me with indifference. Gandering the unanimous night. Nobody knows his name like mine but something the whole tipped-over rent-apart flushed-toilet of wiped-cleaned forgiveness in just-for-you don’t-look-backs follows and follows, and we are born into things too.

o: How many yous can you be at once?

x: Never enough. And still the traffic lights clack up to red, lined up and flashing as they jog away by the ocean in the deep air-sadness of it all. Lately I’ve been noticing the limning that goes unsaid in the amphetamine nightmares of hilltop gazing. The breaks in the yellow-orange decadence, the wounded lines scratching through black-boned swaths of mangled tree and concrete. Mist chugging through in the clumpy cough of fog’s junked lungs over the ocean’s forgone disappearing longing. There’s nothing except everything wrong with me.

o: Empathy swears off bathos and dons a red rubber clown nose.

x: I can’t offer succor to every fucking asshole screaming her way through the chains of being a person alive in the world.

o: You can be you.

x: Ass dimple.

o: Butter fart.

x: Punching through the surface of small talk, of chatter, of burping wit, of dinner conversation, of we-need-to-talk seriousness, to get to the bloody pulp of being singularly you in the plurals of made-up selves.

o: We’ve got to get down to the white, fibrillose ballerina socks of the thing.

x: Fuck it. I’m learning sign language.

o: Yes. We strive for new endeavors of self-expression.

x: I’m growing a mustache. I’m shaving my head. I will give ear to a cut toenail’s final plea.

o: Ten thousand. Ten thousand and one. Ten thousand and…

x: Guns drawn. Hair slicked back with motor oil. Couples getting married. Why not? Why? Why not? Why? Why not?

o: Short pleadings for attention scribbled on tiny scraps of paper tossed towards a trashcan. Balled up. Gone. Still here. Gone.

x: If I could climb inside of your suffering and build myself a fire to keep you warm. If I could cry your tears for you. If I could fight Sonny Liston on the moon.

o: Help me Geraldine! Help me Geraldine!

x: Somebody else always running to your side or running for cover. It’s a gaff to support the woebegone sails of trying to be everything that you are not.

o: And me here all vaccinated against courage. You thriftily spend through the dollars of your days.

x: I tell stuff. I says, ‘I’ve got sleep in my eyes for you,’ to some curdled-milk mouth of a dame. Cat hair all over my clothes. Frozen toes.

o: The mustard’s on the sandwich. The syrup’s in the coffee. The rubber bands are on the wrist. The hotels are all out of vacancy. The best of who we are is only streamed at the speed of the sound of loneliness. Nail a sign to your door that reads, “My heart is not my own.”

x: Got it. Stop twisting my titties about it. Seriously. I got it down pat.

o: By rote. By rote. That’s all. You learn it but you don’t know it on the inside. You just taste it. You don’t digest it.

x: Pacing myself. Keeping the ship afloat for my personal time being.

o: Not anybody else’s?

x: Hope not. Hope not. Hope not. Hope not. Hope not. Hope not.

o: Me too.

x: Do you believe in sanity?

o: Something more.

x: Just suppressed anxiety maybe.

o: Something less.

x: We’ve got more filling. We’ve got tastes like pie.

o: Starts out in all directions, perhaps, or maybe, like a new moon, like shushes chowdering the night, like hassle-free checking, like fallow periods for crop plots, like bloody gums, like the way cars blush in traffic.

x: Where does it end?

o: Warmly.

x: Where?

o: Distinctly when the maple leaves are falling, falling.

x: In the hopes of recovering a surface tension that was lost in the sad closeness of rubbed-the-wrong-way yesterdays.

o: Of course.

x: Yep.

o: The coloring doesn’t go away, does it?

x: It might not. It’ll change, swirl around a bit, pop up for air, deal a Kansas City to your misery, hopscotch over your heart. What is much less if it’s not going to be more eventually? Bad habits add up, and we’ve got bowling shoes horseshoed on our lonely feet to dance away the blues with.

o: A sneeze of gold dust?

x: If not then likely something particularly similar, in the way that disparate things can often times be found to be oddly related.

o: A pedestal to stare from. To feel better about being you. To grunt up hysteria and fool passivity into being humble and never grumbling.

x: A frigate to laugh at the turbid waters of your life from.

o: Hoisted and balled-out. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Must we always make only muck from our missteps?

x: Probably.

o: Fuck.

x: Oh well, oh well, oh well, oh….well.

o: I want to reach out my window with an arm longer than an oarfish, and I want to nab an oranged greeny sheen-slick slippery maroonish leaf from the drooping wiry branches of the tree out there, outside my window I want to sail like a chucked goldfish into the street-slapping rain, I want to extend a hand to the bullion-skinned clouds, and if I draw back in fear let the lasting imprint of my summery seduction leave itself alone, at last, and then, let me reach outside, let me blunder, all the cities of me, let me fail to see what’s right there, let me join a chancy traveling sideshow speaking badinage and wearing horse-mane scarves, let me run to other skins, let the roof hold me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let go.

x: Oh.

o: Oh?

x: See?

o: Never. Never.

x: Dependent on others for the thoughts they keep you in.

o: On the thoughts of others. Sometimes, late at night, I lie in bed, wide awake, making faces out of the darkness, and I want to talk to all of my old friends whom I don’t talk to anymore. I want to be connected, to be enmeshed in the lives of others, to have somebody else care that I exist, to fit into the mechanics of their schedule somewhere, to have a place to do my living in that coincides with where others are doing theirs.

x: Likely it’ll end in Missouri.

o: Like Kansas-City eyes?

x: Almost. Eyes are hard to tell.

o: If there were a storm to tremble the spell from your…

x: Stop it.

o: Now, lord, now here’s a needy time. Jesus why don’t you come by here? Don’t stay long on your knees and pray. Come on by here, come on Jesus won’t you come by here? Don’t stay long. Don’t stay too long lord. Jesus. Lord. Why don’t you come on by here?

x: Keep it up.

o: Parlor talk. Staircase stuff.

x: That need be enough in this case it’s general and we’re speaking troves of pampasy-clear shrugging like indoor wilderness almost.

o: Impersonal. Needy.

x: Galvanized with personable automobiling.

o: Lie down on your bed in the middle of the day and turn all the lights off and turn your phone off and unplug your TV and your stereo and think about who it is you really are when it comes down to it and ponder if that’s who you want to be.

x: Been here. Done this.

o: Check out the ass-cheek flapping on this guy.

x: Go percolate a jar of shit.

o: Sure. Sure. Sure. I guess bliss is not for everybody.

x: Seems like I hear somebody calling, calling, calling, calling. But are they calling me?

o: Not by name. A prominent custom though it is, still, the lottery will take you by number. And that’s not your dollar. There’s a you who license-plates your corporeal shape with letters signifying personhood, this self that is a calligraphic assertion of what this specific entity bearing witness to the world is. A form you take. Hats on a cotton roof. A rustling of leaves. And then, after nobody’s noticed, drooping home to peter out in the shallows.

x: Older than old times.

o: Similar to new times.

x: Just like it, almost.

o: Let me blink and forget about my self for a while.

x: Please. Do the rest of us a favor.

o: I’m like a sorcerer who unwittingly constructs a labyrinth that he can’t escape from, and therefore is doomed to wander within its solitary confines forever.

x: Playing nice with the history of your past. Talking so all the time.

o: So?

x: What’s missing is the retention. It’s like the powder of your experiences is passing through a sieve that catches nothing except empty air in its screen.

o: Bored empathy rears its miscalculating head. Emotional contagion spreading like a smallpox epidemic. Take care of yourself. The rest will follow.

x: Dine alone.

o: Sure, because if there’s a library, and if that library is a universe of multi-leveled hungers, well, my appetite is pathologically strained and full. The tiered nature, whether Platonic or Aristolian, of stacked-plate platitudes will give all-you-can-eat lunches to the more Machiavellian natured among us. And if the news is breaking, and if the bomb’s interminable infinite nature is not my own, is there something wrong? Yes. So wrong. So motherfucking wrong. Something that plows through the current of centuries and leafs through books of days and gets lost in the simulacra-saturated fussy gestures of a generation’s download aptitude. An artist’s rendering of fatty foods.

x: My friends will surround me with the things I need to survive. I will drift in their current. Is that carelessly getting carried away?

o: With care. Always, remember, with care.

x: Being a person can be difficult, can it not?

o: It’s rough stuff sometimes, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

from "slightly altered or drawn-out famous moments in history"

Clapton fell in love rather quick with George Harrison’s wife. Pattie Boyd was quite the looker. It was hard for Clapton. His good friend’s wife. But Clapton was uncredited on the Beatles’ White Album, so that was kind of fucked up. But still, Clapton’s jealousy probably should’ve been kept in his lips. His pining not lost on anyone. Not subtle at all. Wished his friend dead, or more like just out of the picture…no. Not that at all. He could lip sync his love to anybody. Got stuck in some fable about a prince or somebody being given away to somebody else who was unworthy of her company. Turned his pain to the proverbial drawing board of music. Chastened? Perhaps. A lost notation of what not to do with what’s left of his passion. Adultery swinging like an axe through his mindset, which was set on stun anyway, for the time being, whatever time having to do with love at all completely beyond him of course. What did it matter how long? A few months? That could be an eternity if he were by her side. Only a night to stay and hold and be held. That would be more than enough. But Georgie boy was in the way, no longer a moptop, just some longish-haired dude with a mustache who could’ve been a car salesman for whatever it was worth. No longer did it matter. Clapton’s love would throw more shadows on the walls of sorrow. Clapton would play his guitar until it wept. Not like him. Not like him at all. But what could he do? Just move around and on and over. Over? Maybe. Some day. But he was really starting to doubt it rather big time. A movement, one of the lesser known ones as far as movements go, crammed into his head, and he rattled off some scrappy lyrics and tugged and tied them together with some scratchy riffing and some plucky licks. Got himself some dominoes and rechristened himself to go along with them. He dealt himself a stacked deck. Without warning or sign from god this thing came on and wrecked him, his guts all knotted and his head crunched with unrequited longing. He didn’t want to hurt anybody, but he himself was already hurt pretty bad. Clapton was a mess. He played his guitar and dreamed of Pattie’s eyes. Kept his wishes that it wouldn’t last to himself. But really she did have him on his knees, doing a lot of begging please and all the likes. Probably Clapton wasn’t sleeping well. Maybe he drowned his going-nowhere ideas of romance in alcohol and flushed them up and out with cocaine. What was right wasn’t what was whating the whatever of what mattered to the what muttering, “what, what, what,” in his heart. Clapton was in a lonely place. Everything else going on in the world seemed insignificant. He couldn’t sleep. He lay awake at night and made up stories about his life, about he and Pattie making a life together, just them two. It soon transmogrified into all he wanted to do. Sweetly begging off today for tomorrow’s sourest notes. It was no way for a guitarist to be behaving. Time was something just to push his way through, to get over with, or to have to dreamily look forward to. The now he had wasn’t worth having. All we wanted was a then that never came. It sucked. Clapton played his song for Pattie. It got pretty popular. People thought it rocked. Harrison had no comment. He had Pattie. He’d made All Things Must Pass. What the hell did he care about some cry-me-a-river up-and-comer trying to get all smoochy with his lady? Not that Clapton was getting too pretty with his miss, but still, he must’ve been at least slightly enraged at this encroachment upon the attention of his inamorata. Clapton played his guitar. Clapton cried himself to sleep, fists clenched, screaming, “Layla!” at his ceiling fan. It wasn’t pleasant for anybody, especially his neighbors. But there was nothing to be done. You don’t get to choose whom you fall in love with. You just meet somebody, you fall in love, and then that’s it.

*

Jones Very just showed up at Ralph Waldo Emerson’s door one day. It was raining. Jones was drenched. His clothes were covered in mud. He’d been thrashing around in the forest, tumbling in the flowers, talking to trees and squirrels, like he was St. Francis of Assisi or something. Emerson liked him immediately and invited him in, soiled, wet clothes and all. They talked about Hamlet for a bit, both agreeing that the poor prince was merely feigning to feign madness, which made him quite mad, and a hero too. Jones told Ralph that Christ was speaking through him quite often these days. The second coming was here, and Jones was it, kindly donating his body as a vessel for good old JC to speak through. He showed him some sonnets he’d written while under the influence. Ralph thought them badly written, and told him that the holy spirit could do with some grammar and spelling lessons. But while in an ecstatic revelry, well, really, who could possibly concentrate on such mundane things? It was a ghost surging through his veins, and when it spoke to him he had no choice but to listen. Ralph made them some tea. He then proceeded to whine about how much he was at the mercy of the disturbances of daily life, and they spoke of the meteorology of thought, acute loneliness and the paradoxical need for solitude, and about how life was at bottom only flux, transition, and undulation. Jones wasn’t reticent in the least, and told Ralph that maybe they should flee to the mountains for a spell. Ralph guffawed, drank some tea, told him that everyone was dying of miscellany these days, and invited Jones to a meeting of his Transcendental Club. He even offered to print some of Jones’ poems in his tidy, little magazine called The Dial. They were both very excited about the divine nature and mystical prospects of this serendipitous encounter. Ralph told Jones about his recalcitrant, garrulous friend Henry David Thoreau, whom he thought would get along splendidly with this wild, crazed fellow who was born out-of-wedlock to a couple of first cousins. They chatted about how life was all circles with no circumference, and how around every circle another one can be drawn, meaning that everything was without end, that it all just went on and on. Though the night was clawing and scratching at the hours, their small time together seemed essential and immortal. Jones stood on a chair and recited a few of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Ralph looked on, softly smiling, beaming with gratitude for this strange man’s special sort of madness. ‘My eyes are like raindrops,’ he thought. ‘I will not let the days carry their gifts silently away. Fuck it. Politeness was invented by wise men to keep fools at a distance. I will marry this fellow to the infinitely repellent orb of my ways.’ Ralph then also stood up on his chair. He screamed at Jones, “Alone is wisdom! Alone is happiness! Society only makes us all low-spirited and hopeless! Alone! Alone is heaven alone!” Jones looked down at his muddy shoes, his sopping and shredded clothes flecked with bits of fern, and he ran his hands through his disheveled hair, and softly said, “Mr. Emerson. I am the second coming of Christ. I am in the midst of going completely mad, but I, my good fellow, am not quite sure how to do so. Surely somebody else will speak for me, for I cannot.” The wind trilled. Rustling came and went. A mouse scampered by over creak mines in the floorboards. Nothing happened. They both sat back down and silently contemplated what it meant to be alive, to be this particular person who they happened to be at this particular juncture in time, and felt damn lucky to be living just then, no matter what the hell else was ever going to happen to them. Then they both retreated to separate rooms and fell asleep.

fragment #33

The infant was at the door. The doorbell was broken. The thing was whimpering. The thing was soft and small. This thing we’d never beheld the likes of before. Now it was all ours. To be had with an urgent gifting, plump and labile. Trying to share something but it was hard to tell. It was alone and replete with geranium kisses. Rootlessly alive. There was this misbehaving nightlight. There were onyx eyes in a mug’s milk. The aftertaste of mood investigators clearing away the rubble of first times made alternatives to a one or a two. Spatially adept, teary, snotty, this infant folded through the origami of our affairs. Ramshackling and punted into the hurl of the atmosphere’s tendencies towards blue we hardlucked it and made it work. Do not give the baby chocolate. Do not warn me against calamity. Jot down my hunches. In the here and now the infant is not smelling so grand. This pyrrhic victory is starting to stink of defeat. Later the lollipops will sour, the potty-trained will lob skyward, the lucky will come down with a bad case of rheumatism. On this brave day we will all be chewing gum. After a letter arrived notifying us of pleasure and doom, we tracked down the infant’s missing rattle and insulated our cares with Saran wrap. Coupled with exercising our freewill over minor moments of panic, we had jobs that left us uninspired and in bad need of charged batteries. The infant sleeps and wakes and screams and sleeps and wakes and screams all of the night. Music comes in handy. Is there a ballistic missile of opportunity headed our way? Time will tell. For now we put peanut butter on our fingertips. Only once-daily doses will do. The infant is on the floor. The carpet’s thick with porridge. No new deal will thresh beyond the husking of what we’ve come to become. Maundering is our lot. Things are curtailed and growing, and things are hard. The cottonwoods, flushed with flowers straining from yellow to orange to blood-red before they flutter to their destiny, are brushed with wind while rushes sprout beneath, antlering their skinny way through the bonds of love and terrible footwear choices. The infant’s eyebrows gush squid ink. A moral is lost. Zeal sweeps away the tenets of love with snoopings and banana-skin pelts of looking-the-other-way. The infant, that thing that arrived at our door so innocently, that thing that is munching on the snackfood of our togetherness, that thing that is believable only in gasps of want in junked-car hysteria, that thing that speaks in louvered chants and knows not how to whisper, well, it seems the infant’s taken a shine to the porcelain of being on the lam. We don’t hold anybody responsible.