Blue Sorbet

A
Bottled
Coast

~*~

By Timothy Walker
(C)2006(C)
swimthroughmilk@gmail.com



(first draft)











Beginning
~* 1 *~

Wednesday afternoon. A day like any other, during the last, dying throes of a wet winter. The sky was overcast, sullen. My toes have been chilled for days. All the same I could not focus on the weather to intently, other things were on my mind. Other aspects swimming in circles, cluttering my head like massed goldfish in a jar.
Tangerine tornadoes dominated my vision, I blinked twice and shielded my eyes. A shaft of sunset had broken through heavens cowl. The four pillars of the library were illuminated for the space of three moments, then all was gray and my mind again fell still.
A blankness of perception leads to a blankness of mind. I wished my surface activity would cease to fluctuate, in the taking of mental forms, the scurry of thoughts. If only I could have mimicked childhood dream worlds, calling upon the ponds of nowhere, those pools that have never known a ripple. They would pour empty-rain into my ear. Whispers of silver will always put the mind at ease for sleep. It was a Wednesday afternoon and instead of going to the library I went home and got into bed. Until noon the next day I slept.
On waking I walked to the sea. I threw one rock and sat down. The sand was wet and cold. It was Thursday?
What were days? Mere stones in a wide stream on which I hopped. Where were the stones taking me? To what bank, what fallen tree, what waterfall? There never appeared to be any interconnectivity with the days, other than their having names that traditionally followed one another in a set sequence. More and more it seemed as if I might have fallen asleep on one of those stones, or worse, drowned. The life I led grew more dreamlike with each passing day. At what point had I faltered, lost sight, been grounded?
It was when Timothy came to visit. Ever since then there has been a haze. Out of this haze came Alice. Lovely Alice, whose mere existence served to validate the cosmic scheme of things for me. She had arrived shrouded in cloud, but it was a cloud that blocked out an impartial, glare filled sun. But she was a storm unto herself.
Behind her eyes the flashing spit of lightning split a dead night sky.
In her sighs thick thunder hid, distant rumbles mumbled behind a croon.
The cloud cover had not broken and I had yet to see the color of her blues.
I wondered at the secrets tucked away in the corners of her mouth, where it upward curled in glimmer smile and thought about their voice and meaning. Were her stories really to be believed? Was her grandfather a fairy tale hero from a darker day, what was to be believed? If not that, anything? What was the meaning of her voice telling me three words, in a whisper so loud, flocked birds fled their nests?
But how could I question the possibility of delusion in another, when I felt so deluded myself.
For surely I was deluded. How else could I continue to follow through with the murder of a blind man? Timothy had seen my hesitant side and was always quick to light the fire once again. He refused to let me be deterred. But what could he possibly gain from so doing?
So many questions. I picked up a handful of wet sand and let it fall. Every pebble of sand was a question, but to each and all there came only one answer.
The ocean. I stood up and began to walk in. I made it up to my knees before the cold forced me to pause, gasping. It was numbingly cold. The muscles in my calves and feet locked up and spasmed. I made it a few more steps until an incoming wave, larger than the rest, knocked me in the chest and almost sent me under. Full immersion into freeze. What was I doing? I dragged my weighted body back to shore before my legs gave out on me and I crumpled to the beach. A sopping heap of shivers and chill.
“God damn it.” I whimpered.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves...




















Marooned Together Watching Shapes Spin And Form In A Featureless Sky
~* 2 *~

The first time I met Alice was at the train station. She was standing on the edge of the platform, not staring down the length of track, watching for the coming great black dragon. No, she stared at the building on the other side of the tracks, intently, like it was the only thing she had ever done in her life, like it was the only thing she ever would do. For this I was intrigued.

“Excuse me?”

“Yes?”

“Are you waiting for the train?”

“Is that a silly question? I'm standing at the station, am I not?”

“I don't mean it to be silly. Of course you are at the station. It is just that, I can't help but notice you are not sitting on the benches, or inside, like the rest of them. Rather, you are standing over here, where I sometimes stand. But I never stand here for any trains.”
“Neither do I.”

“The name's Paul, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you Paul. I'm Alice.”

That was all we said. I turned back to watching kittens rolling about in the pet store window, as did she. The tumbling animals made me think of laundry drying and I cannot remember when exactly she left.

















Navarro Point Mendocino County Highway One Towards Oregon
~* 3 *~

Piping trill of a seabird, floating wispy on the high cliff wind. A condor flew within ten feet of me. Slowly swooping, a black mass that was all wings and a burnished red-orange head.
An old lady had sat reading a book in her car where I parked. I wondered if she came here for the quiet, or the trails running alongside perilous drops of sheer rock, those elements that I found impossible to pass up or ignore. Most likely she came simply to get out of the house, to feel less cramped and constricted in the free life she called her existence.
I sought to teeter.
My gaze swept the flattened stretch of sea, searching for disturbances in the surface waves, seeking the rare sight of humpbacks breaching and venting their spray. A fishing boat lurked to the far right of my position, resembling a bedraggled and hungry bird of prey. No way the wise leviathans of the deep would come within miles of an aquatic death knell such as the ship might represent.
The view suddenly splashed over me an acute sense of vertigo. I was susceptible to the rising air beside the cliff, the cross currents that wove in and around me, buffeting and pushing. I, who had never before found heights to be dizzying.
At the cliff base to the left, a dozen seals, colored a slate shade of khaki, lolled about. They looked like rocks upon the torn sea edge. I called to them, doing my best impression of a seal bark. Three of them looked up at me, soft black eyes looking into mine.
“Who are you and what do you need, we are trying to get some sleep here, okay?” they seemed to be saying.
I had need of nothing from them so I let them be and continued my walk. I was enjoying the solitude. Having nothing to focus on but my own self fed sensations, I suppose it was no wonder I noticed the biting cold so well.
Another bird made a hollow clucking sound. A mental note: must wear more layers next time I visited the spot, so that I might meditate longer, on hazy sea scapes and lands of jagged rock.
Never had I noticed how swiftly the sun sometimes chances to descend. It was gone.
Mauve hues played about the edges of distant clouds, blending upward, into an innocuous blur of shallow blue. Time was seized by the tide as it prepared to rush the beach in full earnest appeal. Long furrows like liquid tongues slathered up the flat baked sand, seeking, lapping at where I sat. An eagerness for solidity, perhaps?
The time neared six o'clock. I rose and set a brisk walk back to my car. I had to be swift as the advancing tide to make it to the library before seven. Municipal closing times wait for no man.



















Racing To A Predetermined Finish Line
~* 4 *~

I opened my eyes. It was morning. I blinked once. My eye lid rasped open and shut with a dry crumbling leaf sensation.
“A blinking occurrence,” Timothy was often known to call it.
“How are we?”
Rhetorical questions. Pointless. My chin hairs were long enough to have weight, thickness. They poked inversely to my chin when I lay on my stomach and read books by the light of the lamp outside my window. The light broke apart in the branches of a manzanita and dripped neon orange over the pages of my book, striping the text in tiger. Tiger's striping about the page, my lap, the carpet, the telephone.
The telephone. I stared at it, stuck as it was in the thick carpet like a stone amid thick tendrils of magenta sea grass. I had her number.
So late and still I had not called her. I did not have the energy, nor the strength to lift the cell from its plush bed. No force to apply pressure on light-up rubber keys, no way could I interpret the perception of numbers, as typed out in true type courier, in blank ink. No way could I survive the flurry of thoughts that drown out all exterior sensation.
I wondered if perhaps Timothy could make the phone call. He was generally good with that sort of thing. The knack at making quick conversation, an exchanged joke or quip to lighten the mood, instilling some stark quality in the cake-like atmosphere of a claustrophobic committee meeting.
I asked Timothy if he minded making the phone call,
“Do a pal a solid.”
I knew he would agree.
Blue steel thread colors my socks. They are a durable knit blend of cotton and wool. They are hiking socks I purchased only recently at an Outdoorsman store near my house. I figured a sock is the most simple article of clothing one can wear, save a towel around the waist or some carefully placed mud of satisfactory consistency. No zippers, buttons, sleeves, ruffles, breathing holes, tassels. I took some sort of peculiar pleasure in recognizing the sheer simplistic brilliance of the socks. A very Zen addition to any respectable persons wardrobe if I did say so myself.
Timothy raised a finger for silence. Someone had picked up.


Burrow Into Sweet Your Old Apple
~* 5 *~

A most joyous feeling coursed through me. Rippling, over and out like a wave on sand, glittering as it were, the sunset dimpled tide. I had made the first phone call.
I had checked and double checked the half smudged number on my wrist. I deliberated whether or not the four was really an eight in erroneous disguise. A long winded approach is often necessary to get one going any place important. Some slopes must be wound about like the climb of a corkscrew, twisting steady in an orderly fashion, taking the long route in lieu of more impossible and unlikely alternatives.
But it was not the time to scale cliffs.
In the west hung a limp moon, melting down an indigo curtain, pin pricked a thousand times, setting off the jagged ink silhouettes of the inland mountains. I was home later than usual.
I fist gripped small hopes and wondered. What were the odds my uncle invited paranoia over for dinner?
Times are when the fear rustles about his old bones and I have not returned for sleep and the nightly lock up goes uncompleted. Though he has his entrance and I my own, the kitchen door connecting our suites does not have any mechanisms against unwanted intrusions.
On nights when I was late in home coming, my uncle was known to dead bolt my door for me. Then it would be the back seat of my sedan or the tent behind the garage, both of which smelled of detergent and sour orange juice.
The key was in the lock. I took a deep breath and crossed my toes and the fingers of my off hand. I twisted, pushed, nothing. It was one of those nights. My uncle had flipped the dead bolt. An early spring cicada cried out in sharp staccato. A response perhaps, to the odd gears and pistons sighing soulful clicks as my car calmed and made ready for sleep.
I crept about the side of the house, stepping gingerly over Christmas lawn ornaments, various garden tools and two yet to be installed sections of rain gutter. The Santa-Claus-with-sleigh-and-Four-Reindeer, bleached a pallid off white from years in the sun, glowed an eerie shade in the yellow light of a waxing moon.
Stepping through a bed of calla lilies I rapped three times on the window pane of my uncles bedroom. A dark breeze kicked up through the hedges and I clutched my elbows, cupping the knotty joints and pulling at nerveless skin.
I was in disgust with my uncle. It was not even nine o click. Who goes to bed and falls irrevocably asleep before nine? I rapped again, this time harder, louder and I stared at a spot on the bricked exterior wall, through which lay my uncle. Probably snoring. Night cap pulled low, newspapers draped about the comforters and sheepskins like charred mounds of ash at the base of a volcano. I was surprised my eyes did not bore holes in the wall, looking as I was with such intensity, using my mind to psychically will my uncle into consciousness.
Having for the moment given up I made my way around the perimeter of the house. On the north side I noticed my bathroom window was left open by some careless occupant. Any other day and I would have cursed the nameless other, but, cold as I was and in need of sleep, I thanked Timothy for having such disagreeable bowel movements, the likes of which require maximum ventilation to ensure full use of all available breathing apparatuses.
I hoisted myself up and dropped silently to the floor. I made quick use of the bathroom. After flossing I tossed my jeans and shirt over the computer chair. I took out my contacts and dove into the sheets, burrowing my head mole style between pillow mounds. Only then did I allow myself a reflection, a perusal of recently acquire memories and sensations.
Such a busy Saturday it had been, dating back to the wee morning hours when the first indictment was made to the beach and the accepting of present facts. Finally to the library for research, where there were books and it was nearly dinner time. A new girl was working the check out desk. She was the girl from the train station platform. Alice. The most beautiful girl in the world, with the smallest hands, willow soft fingers filing Dewey card after Dewey card with. Her hair was held up in a messy bun by an awkward nest of number two pencils. Her voice had again been perfect,. Air light, dropping and rising like smoke tendrils through a sunbeam. Her name was Alice. Silent beneath the pillows and sheets I mouthed her name Alice Alice Alice until I realized I might be in love and sleep seized me.










Mid-October Fields Of Cold Sunflowers Hang Their Heads In Shame During The Glitter Hours Before Sunset
~* 6 *~

Went for a walk at the dunes. Saw four rag tag youths to the south, headed north. Noticed the tide was going back out and a rich collection of fresh debris had been left. I didn't see any footprints so I realized this was an unexamined trove, not yet touched by the beach combers and shell searching elderly. I proceeded to walk, head down, looking at my immediate below for anything of interest.
I saw a large crab scuttling within a tangle of seaweed and pearly-hued shells, broken bits of glass and a fully intact sand dollar, whose markings and etchings were wondrous to behold. I heard a noise and looked up. Fifteen feet away I thought I saw a little boulder or rock among the long lines of flotsam that gathered on the beach. Upon closer inspection I realized it was a baby seal. I squatted down a few feet away and watched it writhe about in the damp sand.
It was as big as a small dog, yet so very tube-like, a veritable stuffed sausage, wrapped in blue-white fur. It couldn't move very well on the beach. It was very young. A pink-roped bit of flesh extending from its stomach I took to be a still attached umbilical cord. A baby. Left all alone on the beach.
Looking up, my eyes swept the cold crashing waves, searching for a sign of other seals. Where were they? Why abandon such a youngling? I had a sudden urge to pet it. I could hear Timothy in my head,
“You found a baby seal and you didn't find out how incredibly soft it was?”
Moving slowly, I began to lean forward, closer, closer, just about touching the back of it's tufted neck. With a squeal the seal wriggled around and tried to bite me. I jumped back. It continued to scream, sounding like a barking human baby and I began to grow unnerved. The tide was coming in. Could it swim? Had I spooked it too badly? Suddenly I was unhinged.
I essentially killed the seal.

I was seven the last time I had seen my father. A sunny day the weekend before school started. I was eight, heading into third grade. It was on the front lawn of the hospital where he stayed.
Father sat in a chair with his nurse and watched me climb a tree that seemed to soar past the hospital building roof, reaching for the sky and all that blue. I found a birds nest half way up. There were three tiny eggs, blue and speckled, about the size of a thimble. I wanted my father to see them, so I tenderly placed them in the front pocket of my shirt and began to climb down.
I ran back, my face full of smile from the sun in my eyes and the treasure in my pocket. Eagerly removing them from my pocket and placing them into his upturned palm, I was dismayed at the look on his face. There was no excitement. No raised eyebrows indicative of joy.
My father sighed and looked me straight in the eye, his head bobbing to maintain focus.
“A mother bird will turn her back on an egg that isn't her own. She won't care for it, won't sit on it, even if it hatches she won't feed what comes out. She tells her eggs from others by the scent she leaves. If anything disturbs the scent, the egg no longer has a mother to keep it safe. Even if you put these eggs back in that tree...still three Robins have died today.”
I remember not knowing whether to cry or laugh, I could never tell when my father was cracking a joke and when he was growing moody. He must have been moody because the nurse told me the time was up and sent me off to find my uncle. Before I went back inside I turned and watched the nurse leaning into my fathers ear, whispering something, while he looked off into the branches of the leafy oak, his face completely devoid of expression, feeling, love. I never saw him again.

Had I killed this seal in the same manner?
Did mother seals leave a scent? I theorized that it was out hunting and normally left the baby to fend for itself, as it would be safer on land than in the deep ocean, young as it was. Perhaps she was in the surf, even as I thought about her whereabouts, watching me from some darkened splash. Howling green bubbles for me to leave her child be.
I tore myself away from the scene and ran, stumbling through the thick sand, my eyes blinking away ocean spray and three tears.










Take Heart, Pain
~* 7 *~

The sun was above. The waves crashed in rolls across the stretched beach covered in tide scattered sea debris. I was so happy just running along barefooted and jocular. At my side Alice laughed. The gulls foam hopped through the surf and I ran past, making for a beached redwood.
I leapt upon the bark-stripped top and danced along the sandy smooth ridge. I called out.
“Follow me!”
I stumbled heavily, slipping on loose rock pebbles and sandy granules. Off a protruding section of broken limb I bounced. My breath played at vanishing and I was left gasping, back to earth, staring up at the cloud swept sky.

"Jesus, are you all right?"
Alice stood over me and I closed my eyes, going inward to seek out any potential sources of pain. I remembered the flash of falling and realized I could not feel my left leg, just below the knee, bordering my shin. I sat up and rolled my jeans up, to reveal a dark, gaping wound.
I just managed to gasp, "Holy shit," before Alice hovered closer, peering for a better look.
"Ew, you got punctured man."

A wave of revulsion passed through me and I looked back down at my leg. A hole around an inch long, quarter inch wide and a quarter inch deep had been opened up just below my knee. I almost thought the wound was to the bone. You could see tiny deposits of fat, oozing a yellow, unctuous fluid, mingling thickly with the blood.

“That is so gross.”
“Think I am going to need stitches?”
“You probably could use them, that cut is fucking wide, but it would prolly set you back a few bills.”
“Yeah, I can’t afford that.”
“Well, can you walk? Let’s at least go back and clean it up a bit, then we can look into how we should go from there."







Old Ghosts Of Predators Predetermined
~* 8 *~

It was mountain lion country. Land of bear caves. Long since emptied, but still lost, amidst the mists and scattered rock of forgotten hillsides. Twigs snapped when walking the paths. Staccato echoes birthed somewhere deep in the fir dark, the hollow tread of ghost cats walking old haunts and hunting trails, unused for over two hundred years.
The great mounds of muscle, sinew, fur, fang and claw were driven back by the long rifles of the first mountain men. After them came the hunters, trappers, panhandlers and glory seekers,. Finally the loggers with their great trucks, accordion saws and ax blades that gleamed whenever a new hole was opened in the redwood ceiling.
But still the predatory air remained. Lofting about ancient nooks hidden atop cliffs and headlands that jerk sharply towards the sea. The desperate brown arms of those who built the land's railways, reaching back, across the Pacific, for the wistful homes of bygone days.
Had I stumbled upon one of these earth made jars, so filled with the past's violent miasma? Once infected it would seem I sought out the most logical prey, one that would yield the most return for the effort expended during the hunt. I fear it was a young age when I was first infected. Twelve. A walk by myself into the mountains. A night spent in the burnt out cave of a great redwood. I woke to the chatter of chipmunks, coming from just beyond my loam lined bed. They fled at my movement and I suddenly felt alone, sinking into the fog lined firs, becoming like vapor.
That was when I decided to hunt chipmunks. I would lay snares or shoot at them with my uncles old Stevens .22. I took on the bloody pathos of the lion, the bear, of sharp teeth and bounding leaps, and interpreted it on a basis I could understand. Quick reflexes of the physical sort became mental fortitude and an ability to outwit my prey. I was the mastermind, pulling strings and dropping lines of razor wire as I saw fit. I killed three hundred sixty-five chipmunks before stopping the summer after high school. I stopped because of a girl.
I stopped because I fell in love with a girl who I thought to be the most beautiful, fragile, fiery and ridiculous thing I had ever seen. In the mirror of her company I saw not polar opposites but creatures of a different species.
She was prone to self doubt, fear of the world, hatred and jealousy but she was pure.
I was not.
I could not imagine snaring her with wire, shooting her between the eyes, just because I wanted to hold her and she might not let me. The girl was Madeline. I did not have to hunt her. She came to me.






















Questing For Warmth, A Bauble
~* 9 *~

The north wall of my room held a pair of windows, both of which were sectioned into four paneled parts and set at an equal, symmetrical distance from the other. On this morning in early march the sky shows a youthful blue through the left window. The right reveals an overcast sky of blended gray, the glow of morning gleaming dull and pallid. A morning of stark contrast can only confuse and irritate. What will the day bring, when there is sunshine on the left, rain on the right and two feet of blank white paint separating the two opposing themes.
If only I could see how they were blended, if the clouds are being pushed thin and clearing, or if they are fat and spreading, like some gigantic, diaphanous smoke balloon.
A whimper at my side; sounds of the present ground me and scatter thoughts of weather, like a waving hand disperses flies from a picnic basket.
Alice spent the night again and one would take that as indication of some degree of understanding. I had always thought the simple act of sharing a bed was enough to clear up stray doubts and shed clarity on the otherwise dubious nature of interpersonal relationships. But no, three nights running she has dreamt by my side, our elbows barely touching, and three days running have I stayed confused. Perhaps it is only heart beats and the rising falling rhythms of a sleeping chest that keep her close, a sense of comfort drawn from physical things, a way of leveling ones mind state in an overly airy world.
She whimpered the whole night through, piping tiny squeaks and quick trills, a baby field mouse caught in the grip of terror cast by the shadowy rustle of owl wings and I wanted so desperately to hold her, to rock her, to provide a gentleness that would soothe both our quavering.













Tell Me That Song You Like One More Time
~* 10 *~

The majority of the previous week was spent with Alice and for that I angered Timothy.
"Clearly, you do not show the dedication required of someone undertaking a murder," he said.
“Who said I was? We have yet to make a decision, you know.”
Timothy is quick to point out the facts, that money is at stake, that love is tangling up all that money on the stake and setting fire to both ends. My answers are never satisfactory for Timothy. I cannot explain how good Alice makes me feel, how she makes me feel like I am in perfect health. I do not know how she does it but my entire physiology responds to her presence. Yet how to explain? The important details, the bits and pieces that are Need To Know, these are what slip my mind when switching from the present awareness of a pure moment to the after the fact leaden dull.
I rarely remembered what we talked about.
"What did we talk about? I remember words and I remember sounds, but they have no definition. They are vapid and empty as the stillness in the space of a hollow tree. I remember sounds but there is no memory of those sounds gaining the distinction of understood speech. They have been reduced to a background drone. A steady echo inside my head, flitting about the wings of a larger picture, one comprised of extreme details. Her face, pieced together with a variety of exaggerated elements, seeming like a collage of magazine models for a junior high art class in craft work. Photographs of models taken from magazines, a set of eyes, a nose, a cheek, a pair of lips, eyebrows, ears, hair and accessories. These details are what stand out, but they are the details of all our meetings up until this point. She has the same distant look, a simple glassing of her eyes that serves to reflect my own face on her pupils and my words seem that much more for myself and I feel that much less alone. Her face has the smile of a recent rendezvous, the way it curls on the edges, her right cheek dimpling in, the other widening a curved crease up high on her cheek. A wonderful face for laughter. There are certain inescapable details. Her eyes are never the same color. They are like the sea, always shifting. Deep cat eye green to an indifferent blue slate, a wall of clouds backed by deep pupils."
Timothy was silent and I was lonely and love sick again. I wanted to hold and be held again, so badly. It had felt so real. I was so alive. Not this indistinct half life, feeling half invisible. Being half invisible. Floating ghost like through the hallways of an overly quiet house, tip toeing lest I made a noise to wake the accompanying inhabitant.
Not that it would have really mattered. It was all just paranoia. I knew that. But it was so much better when she was there. I wondered at the impulse of mine that decided to encourage her leaving. I was afraid to trip. I knew I would fall.















Curious Remarks Spoken In Early Light
~* 11 *~

I think better in the dark. I can focus on things easier. Direct my attention with greater intensity, narrow in on specific ideas and thoughts. I like the dark. But it is not like blinders on a horse, darkness. It is not a restriction.
I pulled the lamp cord. The field of stretched light vanished into empty darkness, lacking in objects, acting purely as space. It was in the dark that I did my planning. Chunks of black shift and meld in my peripheral. I concentrated my gaze on an undulating pinpoint in the midnight of my ceiling. Out of shadow the visions came.
I made decisions while time lulled itself on idly fancy, playing checkers and Life with the sheer ink. Connections drawn upon the ebony slate and it had been decided. A death would occur. But why? Evidence was needed to support an order for execution, surely. One must not act on the whims of an irate and altogether unknown party. Decisions should be left to patience. I do not make rash decisions. I think things through, carefully, examining them from every angle the darkness does not provide.
A brief review of the facts in order to proceed. That much was clear. I would go out and perform a comprehensive examination of the accused. After a sufficient amount of evidence is accrued, I will return to the dark and pass final judgment.

In my bedroom with the door closed you cannot hear a thing. It was very quiet in my bedroom. But for the tapping of my restless foot on a desk leg, there was no noise and my room was silent. Silent, that is, unless I opened my door and stepped into the hall. Then I could hear things. Movement in other parts of the house. Odd creaks, groans, clinking dishes and tapping pans. Most of all I hear the wood floor sighing beneath the heavy padded steps of a large biped. I made my way down the hall, not so much creeping as I was sliding, a slow sock glide across the bare floor. The snuffling grunts of a hog, nose to loam searching for truffles, sounds out from between half centimeter slats in the swinging kitchen door. I crouched and crawled forward, craning my neck to peer between the door gaps.

“Ah, “ mused Timothy from behind me, “The accused takes a midnight luncheon of chocolate, I see.”

The accused. The source of the house movements at such an ungodly hour. My uncle, shoveling down cake like a backhoe lifting soil. A large man and it was for his size that I feared him. The strength that surely lay beneath his fully fleshed frame, skin pinked from years of hard labor under the beating of a yellow sun. It is unknowns such as this that cause me to worry.
Late night and my uncle had forgotten his glasses. Sunglasses, to be sure, but the old man was blind, his pupils wracked cloudy by cataracts. He did not like it when people saw his eyes. They were the only thing for which he felt any semblance of modesty. He could water the roses clad only in a torn and oil stained white tee, with no pants, junk dangling in morning light, and not give two licks when the postman called him out as a perverted old coot. Just so long as his eyes were clad in dark lenses, my uncle never felt naked. Had he been drinking? Was it in some stupor that he forgot to lift the shades to his nose bridge before entering the kitchen? Or had he thought I was in bed, asleep, in a far away place where Timothy could not remark cruelly about his dead eyeballs.
But I was not asleep. I watched my uncle eat cake in the glow of an open refrigerator.
Timothy does not waste opportunities to verbally harangue my uncle. While normally quite jocular in nature, Timothy does seem to grow abnormally antagonistic and belligerent when faced with the great old shambling heap of my blind house mate.
“Ah, Taddy me boy, good evening to you,” whispered Timothy through the door, causing my uncle to jump with fright. “And how are the little ones this eve?”

My uncle choked, sending bits of cake flying across the counter top.
“God damn it boy,” the old man managed to gasp. He always hated it when Timothy called him Taddy. His name was actually Cullen Cartwright and even though he would answer to Cully he never approved of alternatives. My uncle also found reference to his little ones extremely irksome. And by “little ones,” Timothy is of course citing my uncles lovely pair of eyes.
Once, when we were smoking a joint, Timothy said, “They look like little fish eggs, all cloudy and discolored, like someone popped his pupil and the yolk went and filled up the clear jelly. Like a baby tadpole, y'see? Ha, tadpole eyes. Ol' Taddy vision.”
“Why're you always creepin' around th'night like a god damned spook anyways? Huh Paul?” Uncle Cully shouted and clenched his knife and spoon, knuckles showing white.
I inched carefully away from the door and, straightening up, flattened myself against the wall.
“Little prick if you ask me,” Uncle Cully muttered.
Sounds of ceramic on oak counter top, a chair squeak and foot steps tell me he is moving. The refrigerator door clasped shut with a slight exhale. The slats of light showing through the door were gone. Darkness reigned paramount and I tried to still my breathing.
I heard my uncle say something about “even ground,” but his voice was nothing but a whisper coming from the other room. Foot steps approached the kitchen door and hinges scraped as it was pushed open. I could feel the resulting breeze fan cool across my face. I knew that Uncle Cully was standing there, listening, just as I was, trying to hear me out so that he could catch me and box my ears.
Since he is blind he thinks his hearing has increased, or that he has super powers, elevated senses due to his one being deprived and all that. I thought it was a bunch of baloney. There I was, breathing in and out two feet away like a steam engine and he was alone in his little blind world doing nothing but listen to sound and he could not seem to pinpoint my location, let alone realize I was still in the same room. “Just go back to sleep,” he shouted, “and leave an old man alone.”
But still he stood in the doorway so motionless did I remain as well. You never knew what kind of tricks Uncle Cully might pull if given half a chance. His voice dropped to a more subdued tone and there was just a hint of melancholy in his words.
“Please, Paul. Let's not make this harder than it needs to be. Just go to sleep. Please.” He sighed and I heard the door swing shut and his footsteps receded into the back of the house.
“Is he gone?” I managed to whisper.
“Sure,” Timothy said, “and I say he's guilty.”
“But why? He's weird and all but-”
“The money Paul. Your fathers money. Your money. He's after you because he wants the money.”
Creeping on tip toe back to my room I still was not convinced. It was a democratic process, the kind of thing I would have to put to a vote and decide by the majority lean. I could not make any sort of decisions until all had weighed in. I had to return to my room and the dark. There I could go over the nights events in greater detail.
A mind fresh from action needs rest before it can be thrust back into the tug and pull. Heedless of the noise I slammed my door. The jury retired to make their decision.





















We Who Drink As Lords At A Funeral
~* 12 *~

I tripped onto the pavement and lay there, unmoving. Kenneth stopped walking and I could feel his eyes boring holes in me. I could not move. I was a gelatinous mold heavy as lead smelling of gasoline and dog food. A low moment, to be sure. I thought something was shaking me but it dawned on my nerves that Kenneth was actually kicking me with a good deal of force. More stomping on me, than kicking.
"Fuckin' cut it out," I managed to gasp in between dry heaves. Kenneth was my best friend.
"Then get the fuck up," said Kenneth. "Not to make too deliberate of a point or anything, but may I remind you that I started slamming hours before you, I've been sophisticated since you switched bottles and," Kenneth crouched down and smacked the back of my head. "I shouldn't have to put up with you being such a god damned vagina about all of this. We need a lighter. One of us has to go inside. I'm even more liable to do something terrible than you, so I can't go in alone. So get your sorry ass up."
"I hate you."
I managed to get back on my feet, then marionette walk my way into the station, Kenneth in tow. The lights in the store were blinding and I had to squint. The atmosphere had changed as well. There was more noise. My head felt like a balloon. I made for the cooler in the back, ducked down and stuck my head inside the freezer. I needed to cool off. Get back to feeling normal. The turgid air calmed the heat choked surface of my skin, turning the halo of steam back into sweat, the sweat into icicle veins that bore into my brain, calming the chatter and chaos with the passing of sweet cool.
I removed my head from the freezer and turned around, just in time to see Kenneth testing a lighter from the shelf. He was reaching to place it back when the station attendant shouted down from the center kiosk.
"Hey bro, don't light the lighters in the store!"
"What?" said Kenneth, his face screwed up in confusion.
"I said, no lighting the-"
"Yeah, okay, I got it. Why not though? How else am I supposed to test to see if they work?"
The attendant was silent. He blinked once, looked at me, then looked back at Kenneth. He shrugged.
"I dunno. I guess I never really thought about it. Maybe it doesn't matter. Go ahead."
"But wait, hold on, I can actually see why you shouldn't be allowed to do that."
"You do?" I interjected. Kenneth nodded eagerly, his face bright red and perspiring. He was drunk as a peasant boy after his first dance in the wine. I had no idea what was about to come out of Kenneth's mouth. I was paranoid for a moment. Where we spooking the kid in the uniform out? He looked to be around our age, laid back, well groomed, a trimmed beard and glasses. But it was the circular look of his eyes that made me worry. They were the eyes of the simple, the eyes of some ones youngest grandson, one with wide eyes, a sharp little nose and a terse mouth. I almost failed to notice Kenneth was still talking.
"...so you wouldn't let someone eat a few tic-tacs, right, just as a sample, because then if they didn't buy there would be less for the next purchaser. You see what I mean? By letting people test light lighters, you are effectively allowing them to freely use a product, completely at your expense. This place is overrun by idiots who come in here and fiddle with the lighters then leave, and paying customers are left to purchase half empty lighters!"
I jumped in again. "But why would the gas station care about that? If anything, it just means that lighters will run out quicker and the customer will return to purchase another lighter before he might normally do so. They stand to benefit from letting people protest."
Kenneth looked at me, looked at the attendant, then walked out the door. I grabbed a lighter and paid for it with a handful of nickels I had saved. The cold air was divinely refreshing after I passed through the glass doors. I exhaled and caught up with Kenneth. He shot a look at me of mock scorn once I caught up.
"Why does everything involving you have to be such an ordeal?"
"I don't know. I always feel like it's the next guys fault, to tell the truth. Like I think you instigated that fracas."
"I'm piss drunk and I should have used the bathroom in there."
"Should we go back? The guy seemed like a bit of a pumpkin, it shouldn't be too sketch."
"Yeah, what the hell, lets do it. I really do need a piss."
We went back and relieved ourselves with no further adventure, then flung ourselves back into the wild.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“To see a friend. The guy who grows.” Kenneth said.
“Grows what?” I said.
“Plants. Trees. It was your fucking idea, man. You said you wanted to find someone who knew about potting soil and rare fucking amazonian vines. I don't know. I just made the phone call.” Kenneth growled.

“Do you remember being a kid?” I said after walking in silence for a while.
“Sure,” Kenneth said. “Why do you ask?”
“I was just thinking about being the age when ages didn't matter. What mattered were the days and the parts of days. Do you remember? Sun-blue mornings when the air smelled of boiling asphalt and sawdust and green on green on top of more green. There never was any name for it, the air just gave off an undeniable sense of color and the rest of the world fit into place around it. Embedded in the dominant scent-hints of subtle variations on the colored summertime. I think of being indoors at mealtimes lunching, while the sky outside would grow overcast and chalk like. Then it was afternoons dimpled by rain, yellow rubber suits, soggy socks and puddles that splashed all on their own accord.
“Only now that I am older, at an age when ages do matter, do I remember how young I was in that far off time, how raw. But with that recognizance of years passed comes a forgetfulness. Only through careful focus, molding odd whiffs of ancient memories together into a concentric ball, can I present even my own mind with a clear picture of those events.
“Tiny parcels are all that is left. The smell of lasagna. The cramped crouch when building blocks. Lying asleep on the couch back, arms and legs draped over cushions stained with orange juice and soy sauce. Flashes of a sand box. A rope swing, the bare mud between tree roots exposed by erosion, worn down by tiny feet clad in Velcro sneakers...” I trailed off, my point and thought process having run away from me.
“Only by gathering those bits can we present something resembling a whole. We cannot remember being a kid on any specific level. It is only the overarching feeling of childhood that lingers.” Kenneth said. “I do dig where you are going with all that. It is such a peculiar thing to observe, knowing the details of a past event simply through some intrinsic feeling, but being wholly unable to dissect that feeling and present it as a discernible collection of parts, comprising an actual memory.”
“So then are these memories any less of value to us? Those lumped periods of our lives that have been worn away, broken down and reduced as it were, to the barest of essentials. A simple feeling, a quick rush of sensation, nothing more,” I said.
“It would seem to me that these softened and now indecipherable motes of memories are the pieces of our general experience that have gone into the formation and construction of what we now consider our very being. They are the building blocks of our psyches. So much so, there is little need to remember them, in the normal sense of the word. It is not necessary to re-know those things that have been assimilated and are now a wholly complete part of ourselves,” Kenneth said.
“What then, of memories that we can recall in great detail? Are these then proved to be so insignificant by the fact of their having never been absorbed?” I said.
“Perhaps the detailed memories are those which we have not been able to learn from. We have not unlocked the secret to the specific experience, so we are unable to meld them into our psychic make up and truly know them on the most intimate of levels.” Kenneth said.
“And maybe some experiences have no truth in them, they are simply perceived sensations that have no larger effect on us individually. These are the experiences created for those we are with, to learn and grow from, while we are simply parts of a scene in which they are the star,” I said.
“Which would mean that there is no need to bemoan yourself for being unable to remember your childhood, or the first time you fell in love, or that first car accident. Those events have transcended the surface reality of our conscious minds and trickled down, gathering at the very base of our psychic well and hardening, becoming a part of us on a purely subliminal level,” Kenneth said.












The Contradiction, False Wrinkle
~* 13 *~

To be given some sort of method for dealing with the impossible. Afraid to blink on cloudy days for fear of the sun. Might it break when my lids fluttered apart? The subtle twitch of beetle wings exposed the back. The light dried holes on through to the underbelly, where ships of flecked blue rode a white-ribbed, oval sea.
Timothy did not understand Alice's taking a likeness to me. He thought there was something more to the situation. Surely outside factors were playing heavy handed royal flushes.
"It is impossible," he said, "for a man possessing such a parched humor, to corral a girl like that, not to mention keep her attention for a week straight. And damned if it don't seem to me like someone's gettin' their funnel fucked in the wrong sort of way."
How crippling it was, to have ones actions undermined by such incessant chatter. A self defeating enterprise, to be sure. I lived out my life scene to scene, reading the cue cards as they were tossed into view. There is no script to study between shots, no play book to guide me in my decisions. And so I learned to trust what can be termed, 'stage instincts,' going completely off base impulses, to guide the twining spool of spilt yarn. Life got to where I could not help but behave on an instinctual basis. I had built a framework of nails and repetition two-by-fours. The pattern ground into my very being, like tire ruts on some tired road, high up in the mountains of Bavaria.
Yet I did not mind the enclosed track of varying behavioral modes I could have potentially limited myself with. Quite the opposite of displeasure, my mind is for once, no longer a terror to be mistrusted and disbelieved. I have cultured the millions of nerve endings, stretched out within me like a wooden finger-canopy, of some December forest filled with bone bark elms and great oaks bricked in sad loam, into something reliable, a comfort or pleasantry to brighten an over-dark world.
The lungs breath easy without the nagging dust breeze of second guessing.
To the world I'd say, "This is my life. These are the steps I take. In these things do I find peace."

Until Timothy chose to get involved.
He was the flock of bats hiding in the trunk of your grandmothers Buick, mere whispers in the shadowed eaves, waiting for the delicate night after bar close, when a tire goes out and you are forced to pull over, onto a shoulder of prairie grasses, shining silver in the panting light of a full moon on an overcast evening. He was the released flock of bats knocking you to the ground when going to the trunk for the spare and a jack. The wet wool fear that clings to a shivering frame, as the bats scatter and but briefly blot out, the closed sphere of downward darting platinum. Timothy was the confusion felt once the warmth returns, the rhetorical question asked upon porch swings in late summer, "how was it ever that cold?" He was the once upon a time winter that howled ice from Halloween to Easter.
Most times I never noticed him. He was generally kind and, for the most part, understanding, albeit in his own special sense of the idea. He was a neutral entity, a moot point, something I recognized as existing but had no need of acknowledging. And then would a moment of crisis appear. A heated change to the malleable elbow of foundry steel, something gone awry and the gears tumble-shifted into producing Timothy's grating opinion. Except it was more than an opinion. Once delivered it reduced me into some sort half-man, empty creature, lacking in structure and form. The world ceased to make sense and I felt like I was falling. Where are the hand holds to slow my downward lazy feather fall.
I had felt like something newly awakened, fresh from a wet and powerful birth, full of fresh energy, trailing streamers of womb essence like comet tails on the flashing divine. The last week with Alice was a shedding of skin, a sloughing off of tea colored flakes, in great rustling bunches. The trees dropped spring green appearances for something out of the new breed. My whole world melted into a distinct swirls of neon infused pastels. Senses, awash.
But it would not last. I returned to house as a means to gather strength and reflect. A few choice words delivered by Timothy finds my entire happiness shattered. After which I locked myself in the bathroom.

Knees clutched to chest, I pulled the bathrobe tighter around my shoulders and listened for movement in the hall. Timothy had probably fallen asleep, having no real need to torment me further. All the same, I could not face him, feeling so sore and undermined. I feared I would do something terrible.
I decided to sleep on the bathroom floor, wrapped in what meager accouterments I could find, towels, robes, hand cloths. When Timothy woke the next morning, he would stumble upon me on his way to morning toilet and then he would see how I had been forced to sleep in such mean conditions. The guilt will overpower him into apologizing. he will take back his condemnation of Alice having actually taken a real interest in me.
After this line of thought I rose on impulse and strode silently into my bedroom. I could hear Timothy inhaling thickly, sounding full of sleep and dreams.
A shaft of moonlight illuminated his face. I stood by his bedside, staring down, a fifteen pound curling weight gripped in my right hand. I observed his features. The curvature of lips, offset by a face lacking in jutting definitions, though lined by short cut facial hair on the chin, rising up both jaws. A bold set of eyebrows drawn with fat sections of charcoal, thumb smudged and messy. An almost overly bulbous nose. Long lashes attached to lids colored a faint birds egg blue. Hair sprouting in great dark chunks, curl twisting their way down his face and across the pillow.
A judge with a yet to be dropped gavel, I raised the weight high above my head, fully prepared to deliver punishment or payback. Suddenly I was overcome with tiredness.
I awoke and some time had passed. The moon had vanished and the room was completely dark. I was lying in bed, fully dressed, above the covers. I could not hear Timothy's breathing. My only thought was that he had left, forced into seeking alternate sleeping quarters, upon waking to find me standing above him with a potential weapon of assault. Snoring with eyes closed in full somnambulistic repose.

The thought of this comforted me somewhat and I fell back to sleep.


















In Quick Bursts Quiet Down the Angel
~* 14 *~

“Sometimes I feel like I love you.”

The house was quiet, the lights all out. We were on Alice's balcony. It was late. We had both been drinking. She still was. Six feet of peeling redbird planking separated us. She was in a mood, disbelieving, refusing to fall, voicing aloud the fears I kept in locked drawers, ignored. Necks kissed, legs stroked, knees licked. How could she try another if it was only to end up like this?

“I don't know if I can do this.,” Alice said.

“Who's to say? Who's to say unless we try?” I said.

Alice started to cry, silently, face composed, though her eyes welling up with tears.

“There are nights when it is cold and I want to hold somebody near. I want to hold you,” Alice said.

“Then why don't you?” I said.

“Because if I cannot have you forever, why would I want to have you right now? What is forever without today, tonight?” Alice said.

“What is this forever you speak of? We build forever every day that we mark as lived and won.” I said.

“Whose winning? I... I just can't take any more memories, they are already suffocating enough as it is, coming in swarms.” Alice said.

In the distance a car honked and somewhere down the street, voices were heard, sounding drunk and ridiculous. Alice kicked at a cigarette butt and looked at me.

“I just get scared. How can you hold it against me? People have obstacles and they overcome them. That is something couples do, Paul. They overcome the problems that face them. How can you wilt the moment it gets tough, how can you call that love?” Alice said.

“It is love,” I stammered, “and I'm just as scared as you!” I stood up and walked towards the railing, leaning over to spit my conundrum.
“I often don't know if I have the internal fortitude to maintain, to prop up anothers feelings, desires, hopes and dreams. I have a hard enough time propping up my own. My life is a tree slowly losing all it's leaves. It feels like everyday the sun comes in my window a little brighter, the wind blows a littler harder and I find it so difficult to do the most basic of tasks. But that doesn't stop me. Who's to say if love is the only thing that will catapult or serve as catalyst to an evolving life?
Alice turned and walked back into her apartment, leaving the sliding glass door open for my departure. I wondered how I could have done things differently, then left. The age of chivalry is dead, yet why do women expect such knightly qualities in their mate? One must be infallible, incapable of doubts, remaining strong and supportive. The man must be the one with an iron spine and steel shoulders, the pack mule carrying the weight of mountains, of moons, of love. Why is it so terrifying to her for me to show the chinks in my armor, when she so loosely and without conscience reveals her own? The stars had no answer and miles off, the ocean murmured a thousand questions I longed to ask.

Simple Missing, Her
~* 15 *~

It rained for days on end and I kept trying to forget her but it just wouldn’t work and the sky stayed gray and heavy. Clouded dew breaks in the mid afternoon haze seemed yellow in the half storm light. This was how I felt, caught in between two worlds, tugged in both darkness and light. An urge to return to her, to fall into her arms and never leave. Then I remember my purpose, the decisions I have made that cannot be reconsidered. The path has been set. There are times when one cannot succumb to love.













From Rivers Did Come Fish and Fisherman
~* 16 *~

I held a photograph in my hand. It was of a man, clad in a crinoline suit the color of whipped cream with walnut buttons. He stood near a decorated pulpit of pine on a shortly cropped lawn under a white arch. In the crook of his arm the man held a Remington model twelve gage. It showed in sharp contrast to the colorful bouquets wreathing the latticework above his head. It was my father at my mothers funeral. In his eyes you could see his anger, his sadness. He disappeared into the hills after the photo was taken. Years later, relatives told how the sharp, cracking echo of the shotgun was heard long into the night, coupled with the muffled song of whiskey blues.









No Matter The Weather Do The Sun And Moon Meet Though Through The Clouds You Cannot See Them
~* 17 *~

It had begun to grow quiet in the house. I no longer heard my uncle moving about. The timbers and floor boards stopped creaking. The books ceased their whispers and the spiders fell asleep at their itching. It was silent. Too silent.
Or not. I could not tell.
I was almost certain it was peace I had attained. A pool of refresh, dribbling up and out of my psyche. I marveled at the novelty of what I can almost be sure was bliss. And I was so shocked by its silence.
In the corner behind the chair I sat, knees bent, half hugged to chest. I stared at the spot on my bed where Alice had sat. I could almost imagine the mark of her passing, a slight depression tucked up in the covers. A curvy crescent moon etched within dark folds of deepest night. The pillow still had some of her hairs, saving them for when she might happen to return.

The sky outside my window had been a soft, luminous gray tone for most of the morning, before giving way to a large swath of dark clouds, looking like pieces of burnt driftwood washing up onto a shale colored, wind torn beach. Then it had rained.
It rained and I felt silence melting me from within.
From the open window came whispers of spring, breathing leaves and fresh rain and I couldn't help but think they were her. It was as if the sky collapsed upon my roof and I had drunk of the downpour, coming out bathed, glowing, new. The ringing phone almost mingled with the orchestra of a thousand fingers, drumming my roof and walls.

I picked up the phone and said hello.
“It's me. “
It was. Alice. The silence within shed its skin and grew a new coat. Bubbles tickled my stomach.

“I'm watching the rain fall. It's- are you at work, near the window? Isn't it beautiful?”
“I'm at home.”
“Doing what?”
“Nothing. Just thinking. Listening to the quiet behind the rain. The music of the drops makes me want to fall asleep, more so to dream, than to gain some semblance of rest.”
“It is a lullaby rain.”
“I think you are beautiful.”
“Come over. To my house, at five.”
“Your house?”
“Apartment, what ever. It's the maple colored brick two story a block off of Berman. I'm at the top, on the left.”
“Sure. What do you have in mind?”
“Does it matter? I hadn't really thought about it, but maybe we could make love, eat apples, watch the Simpson's premiere, more lovin', drink some wine on my balcony, love, a dance to the rain before sleeping...” Alice paused for emphasis. “Would that work for you?”

I purred an “I'll be right over,” then sailed into the hallway for a jacket and boots, before slipping quietly for the darkened, mid afternoon streets. Small rivers formed in the gutters on either side of the road. Every house seemed to drip under the downpour .
Never had the eaves looked so very ready to touch the earth and become like mud, mere liquid pooling in circles on the empty lawns.
The apartment building was indeed the color of maple, though the rain had surely darkened the brick-work a shade drearier than the usual. The shingles were old, pockmarked, and moss covered. It would have been a wonder were it free of leaks.
Bounding up the stairs, two at a time, I stopped in front of her door and listened. Bare feet rustled through carpet. A bowl set to counter top clacked. I knocked. Her voice glided through the door.
“Come in.”
I let myself into a small hallway, four feet long, veering to the left. A closet on the right. It smelled thickly of cat musk. I removed my shoes and hung up the dripping jacket, ruffled my hair then stepped into the apartment. Rounding the corner, I smiled.
Alice was working at the sink, still wearing her clothes from work, a khaki skirt and white blouse. I thought she looked lovely. Without looking up, she mumbled,
“Do you want some?”
“What are they?”, I asked, approaching the counter top .
“Cherries.”
She popped one in her mouth and smiled at me, having barely enough time to reach out her arms before I was around the counter and into the kitchenette, my arms rapped firmly around her waist, my lips on her neck, below her ear lobe and hers roamed my ear. Half to her, half to her skin, I spoke, not knowing if I was talking to her, the silence, or both.
“Can I tell you that I missed you?”
She pulled back and raised a finger, pointing it at my eyes, waving it around in a circle. In a whisper, she said,
“Here is the ring of fire, surrounding the center of your deep-sea blues. I- I can almost feel the warmth coming out of them when you look at me Paul. I cannot help but devour it. I am ravenous for the warmth of your looks.”
The bubbles were too much. They floated up my spine and out my mouth and into hers, and I could feel them popping and tickling up all across her body. We stood half leaning into one another for only a few, brief moments, before we melted and fell, like snow figures placed side to side in a late winter sun.

Afterward, my head on her shoulder, hand to breast, her legs wrapped around mine, she murmured, “Penny for your thoughts.”
“That's the only thing thoughts're good for these days, pennies. What does that say in the big picture? Thinking is cheap, acting is what is valued. What kind of action is this society condoning then? Thoughtless, stupid action. But all this is beside the point. What are my thoughts? Well, I was thinking about what my gimmick is.”
“Gimmick?”
“Or, I don't know. My 'thing'. What is the key to my charm.”
She laughed, “why would you need to identify that.”
“Just curious. I mean, why am I the man? I'd say it's because of my pleasant aloofness.”
“Aloof?” She giggled again. “Your a loaf of loopy loofness, more like it.”
“Yeah, people always want to poke, or prod me, because they don't know how to express how they feel about me, because of my cheerful loofiness.”
“Is this something someone told you and your taking to it?” She tickled my ribs.
“Yeah. But I kinda like it. It sounds so.. aloof.”
“You're a nut.”
“Well then, what do you think is the secret?”
“Your demureness.”
“Really? I like that.”
We lapsed into silence and as we both began to fall asleep I whispered,
“What does demure mean?”

Happy Harp By The Mantle; Melody
~* 18 *~

We had gone wine tasting that day. Alice and I. Now we were at her apartment, in the living room, talking over cheese and a five year bottle. My head was filled with a liquid that sloshed and gurgled whenever it moved. I lay my head back and closed my eyes. I heard Alice talking to somebody, Timothy perhaps?

“First time I fell in love was in high school at a rock show. I was told a story out on a patio bathed in the blue light of old Christmas tree bulbs. He wore a cream fedora and tapped his right leg to the beat of the Galois balanced between the index and thumb of his left hand. Tattered black jeans, a leather belt and a white muscle shirt with pictures in permanent marker drawn across the surface completed the picture. He had no shoes. He had this peculiar way of looking intently at me with those raw eyes and his head would swim down to mine and he would shout fireworks.”

I always forgot that Alice, like me, had a past. I forgot that it was both wide meadow and coiled bramble, both barbed and smiling. My visions were full of hills.
Her parents were from the mountains of porcelain in the east where the sun burnt the clay into little pots and bread baskets and the gray reeds grew dry and crisp and the air was full of the dust of the pots and baskets and the reeds crumbled when ever the wind blew. The sky was blue and the clouds were ghosts. The father was a white haired gnarl bone, liking rectangles and strudel and puddles in the hill side after a rain. He would watch them, the puddles, from a seat in the fir grove. He saw the sky reflected in the pools and it was a crystal clear reflection. He would begin to suspect that the puddles were not puddles at all. They were not reflecting the sky and the clouds and the blue. He would stare at the holes in the earth and realize he was floating thousands feet up. The world below was but a mysterious dream from the last week and he was just having a hard time remembering. The pools of water grew to be pearls in the crisp cream of full moons. If he was lucky he could see the tiny folk dancing pirouettes about a gem studded hillside, like an interchanging field of pale glow merry go rounds.
Her words filtered in again, fronting the deeper drone of Timothy's words. She sounded almost as drunk as I, perhaps more so. Her voice was husky and damp from the wine. The words struggled in the air like fish out of water.
“Mother was from the south country, near the swamps, but more on dry land than wet land, because they used carts and the boats were for flood season or whenever the ground froze solid in the dead of winter the sheer oak would slide like some sailing sled, over the white capped tundra's and icy marsh fields filled with winter geese and shivering clutches of cat tails. Backgrounds melt in the imagination and father is dead and I am nine and he is alive and I am seven and then mother cries every night in her soup and I am five and the twins have just died and I am too sad to have lived those overcast years.
“A dream of being awake inside my childhood! Welcome back to the bank of a river and nothing is happening just father has fallen asleep and mother is cutting her foot with a butter knife, quietly, beneath her skirt, where she thinks we cannot see her. We cannot see her, at least, the twins can't see her but I can and I tell the twins what I see but they just smile and throw rocks at me because they are only two and sometimes I wonder how far I could throw them if I really wanted to and I figure, at least to the other side of the river, where the drift wood collects like the debris of some sunken ship on the beach of a deserted island. The buzzards circle the wreckage, bartering with the waves for rights to the fleshy bits, while the sun works to laminate the white sand into porcelain.
“It was always mother, father, mother father: the cousins told me, what fun to have parents like that, parents like leering scarecrows who dress in the clothes of a small town parishioner and his wife but wear the loose garments sizes too small or maybe they don't make priest robes big enough for giants, trolls, or minions of the devil. The cousins told me to save the hair that fell at midday and make rutabaga voodoo dolls of their faces and their hair and their arms and I should use the slick chisel from the back shed to carve vengeance into their gnarled backsides, like lovers carving hearts and arrows into tree bark with a swiss army knife received at camp so many summers before.
“Who watches the moon bleed? My brothers were nice but they weren't like the twins. They were more like I was or so my father said and my mother looked like he was saying the truth because she was staring at the light intently, her eyes watering from the inability to blink. My mother did not blink. She cried all day long. My mother cried all day long but it was not because she never blinked. Father cried every night in his soup. Imagination said that Father was dead. Pigeons from the south country died nightly despite my best efforts and I had dreams the boy next door was raping me inside the pigeon cages and I'd batter my arms bloody and feathers would fly when he moved in and I would wake up. I don't dream about the twins anymore.
“The boy next door sometimes gave me a flower from the floral shop up town but I threw them away because I suspected they were stolen because the petals were loose and the stem was gouged and I had dreams that he raped me. An image or a lightning bolt in the sky and the mind fills with two identical faces and a car drives by and takes them and the sky closes in and the pigeons have bled more than usual and the feathers are crawling in white maggots and I have thrown up all over her and she has dirtied her dress and I used to wonder if I was pregnant like the wise woman said.
“Oh wait, you're smiling, aren't you?
“I can't seem to shake when I was six and I ran off with some class mates and we broke through the fence where the hole was tiny and jagged and my dress tore and they laughed at me and I was the only one in a dress and father had a twinkle in his eye before the sun went down and his eyes would crinkle softly the way skin folds into itself and parents give hugs and hands clasp your shoulder when you are falling asleep and rock you good night.
“The day has almost explained itself and the breakfast has yet to be eaten and the eggs are surely cold and the salt and the pepper are waiting for me to pour them and the dust will rain on the food and I will eat of the dust and the plains will be fruitful and live for at least one more day, vines twisting and turning in the peculate dusk. Father slipped between a hole in the floor and we left him for a week because Mother had stopped crying and we could finally eat something. We hadn't been able to eat in weeks, what with the tears and the soup being old dishwater from the people upstairs. I heard my mother laughing and talking and I remember she said, “the blue is a green sort of way to let the light in, like sprinkling a cloud with some sort of smile in the hopes it will give way and disperse and reveal the sun hiding asleep like a blue boy in the hay, with his nubbin feet bare and pink and a straw hat with the name buddy stenciled in hand knit cursive across the rear brim and I always liked to eat them when they fed me them and I didn't have to eat them I suppose but they asked me and I said yes because I thought he wanted me to say yes when the short ones came with their suits and the twins are dead for good.”
“Mother wouldn't leave the house for fear she would forget the agreement and she couldn't help herself when they scoured across the hillsides in early autumn, treasure hunting, looking like a field full of stars when the night is dark, with their torches and their tents and the constellations fade to the back, shadowing their glow with shadow, retreating from the intrusion into their silent conversation across the infinite waves of distance and time.
“The stars all glow, some larger than others, but all of them scream to me of time, remind me how much longer my years last, how the very trees fall before I gain two birthdays and the birds change feathers and the sky is full of them all the time fuck they fill the sky flying south and back north and then south and every damn day it's the same and mother wants to do something about them up on the hill ruining the stars when she wants to relax after evening meal.
“Life doesn't make the promises.
“Moisture will return, said the crow to his feet. He looked to the east with his beak holding meat and the sun broke the mountains, spilling rivers of gold down the whipped faces of an eastern ridge. At night the mountains are swallowed by the sky and then the stars glow and the feet say to the crow, who is bowed oh so low in the summer snow, the moisture has returned, see it in the damp stars? See how the light seems to shimmer like blades of sunlight piercing an Oceanside fog.
“I have this lady who lives on my block, an old lady, seems like a queen to me, all wrinkles and time and haughty bearing. I am convinced she has it in for me and will strike at a moments notice. Why? Why. It's too long a story for such a sleepy evening, what with my head positively swimming and my body crying for a lie down.”















Daffodils In Sea Shell Cases Like The Memory That Erases Old Sentiments And Half-spent Sense
~* 19 *~

Distraction was the telephone poll outside my window. A wired double-tee cross that blocked the maple tree growing from a spot of brief grass. Distraction was the tugging of my teeth when I woke. The dismemberment while staying whole. The inability to take 'I Love You' notes from out the pockets of all my jeans, softened by blue breath and a hundred desperate tumbles in the wash. Ten thousand afternoons spent wood pin clamped on drying wires, warm tethered in place by a baked clay sun.
She had felt my wind-bent fingers crouch about her naked hips. Caresses like the shift of seasons left her loved, and for a moment, I stopped bleeding.
Distraction was the train car rattle and an engines lonely moan. Distraction was me wondering, “is this, even home?”
I looked out my window and felt haunted, thinking as I did of all the other windows, in whose presence did I linger overlong. The views of my resign, etched upon stone tablets within my head. In the beginning there was a rope swing, fir trees and the sky, all swathed in the fuzzy bathrobe glow of early childhood. Then a skylight that never caught the beams right and as it would glare so would I back, the both of us awaiting the clouds formation and subsequent collapse.
So many! One that was all tree, massed birch branches, one nest and some leaves. Another the gray aluminum face of a neighboring trailer. In high school, two angles, one east, one south. One a short crab tree that pink blossomed every spring, framing the black fresh asphalt. One the eggshell siding of a neighbor and a wiry path that ambled between all the picket fences and chicken wire and into the darkened distant beginnings of a gorge's overgrowth.
I felt cold and hugged my blankets. A pastel chest against the back wall holds pictures of old loves who held me and kissed me and told me that they would never let me go. A little girl broke my heart and I had been coursing along ever since, riding an iced river with tumble skates.
An armchair and a blanket were all I had. Alice had the sky and mountains. Where did that leave us? With untouchable mirrors and downcast eyes? Just like Alice the water flickered as it talked. Just like Alice the clouds smiled but were never to proud to cry.
Outside there was a bird trying to fly but the wind would not let it pass. One who is supposed to love turned against a choosing that is beyond its control. Who has misused the judgment, the taker or the one enticed? Seduced like lucky sellers at a live antique auction. Just as many people can break a fortune as can never reach.
This was me staying up late on Thursday nights, just dreaming, just trying to get an understanding of what she meant to me. I had thought there was a promise spoken the day before, coming light like gossamer wings, fluttering into the cave of herded sounds and stolen glimpses of pink mouths. Wet slipping with desire. Churned by a knowledge of what to do and be.
All we are left with is this far off sound, so familiar, but truthfully unknown. Distant scents long spent on months of ache and bad spills that she never helped me swim through. How could I believe her eyes, when she could not see past mine?
Sometime before all of this, beneath the sifted forkfuls of porch dust, enamel paints and aquarium sand, there was something she gave me, left me feeling like fresh lemons, bursting, watered, twisted and delirious. Alive as a sailors cards, hooked on some smile she had handed me five weeks earlier on the couch.
But of course those feet touched cracks in old cement. That tongue sung songs of sad lament, of dead mothers and picture frame friends. Who pretends to have no shadow, when the moon falls like soap and the sky is streaked yellow? Wrapped up in a body I could not forget, holding on to some old skins I still laughed about. The restless page never lets the book clamp shut when the eyes are tired and the mind in need of sleep.
















However Alice Might Have Been She Heard The Seagulls Cry In The Sandy
Wind
~* 20 *~

I had never before felt such a strong sense of tactile rememberence. I felt like I needed to get out of the house. Run for the beach. Compose a piece of poetry or something. Anything. A way of getting my mind off of what was deemed important.
It was just that, I could feel her lips on my ear. I could feel her warm breath on my neck, her voice whispering, sighing. Long, winsome sighs filled with soul seemed to have been feeding me. All about would become as if on fire, every inch of my skin aching in mad memory of the way she felt. I shuddered, half ecstasy, half pain.
I wonder if she thought about the way I held my lips to her skin, pressing at the base of her neck, in between and behind the collar bone, where there are soft depressions to lay lips on for long hours. These stained sigh thoughts are drunk as vapor in the night. I had fed her dreaming lips ten kisses and two lies, standing in the still of her apartment, still holding her feet, still too far gone for sleep.

An Echo Before Sunrise
~* 21 *~

Had that really just happened? The phone call, from Madeline, at two a.m.. Was it a memory? Perhaps a remembered phone call, an imagined conversation. The other way around? Was it all imagined? Voices echo in the head, harking back to lost times, long ago.
I stared out my car window, over the town, looking toward the graceless sea. The sails of pirate ghost ships misted the horizon in patches of cotton haze. Birds danced about the sea edge, faint specks riding soft upstreams of warm air, emitting the kind of hollow clucks catch on breezes and scatter. I watch the tide go out and come back in. A pack of seals show up as dark blips on the floating blue, rolling with the lifting surge and slipping out of sight.
The sun framed the galleon sails, grown dark and full with an approaching thunderstorm. I finished the last bite of a cookie and drained an inch or so from a liter of two percent. The winds picked up, shifting more to the west, bringing in moisture stripped of the chill ocean. In response I pull my blazer tighter and flip up the collar. While sharp in appearance, the coat afforded little in protection against the various weathers produced by the coastal environ.
I gathered my things. An empty can of chilled espresso with cream, a grape fruit husk, cell phone and a Murakami novel. The clouds behind had formed a solid wall, encircling the sea scattered horizon like a boiling swarm of bees. Lightning flashed but I did not hear the thunder.
Upon my arrival home, I placed the empty can in the recycling and composted the grapefruit, then shut and locked the door. I thought Madeline did call. I flipped open my cell and checked the call list. Sure enough, received call at two-fifteen, early bird time. So we had spoken. She had said those things. I had failed her in those ways. I ran away because I felt trapped.

“But you love me, don’t you?”

“Well, of course.”

“What, you loved me too much, so you had to move? Is placing two thousand miles between the one you love really love? You have hurt me, wounded me. But I have seen all this before. It always happens like this. Gemini’s can never make lasting friendships, anyway. It is all destined for misery in the end.”

I was sorry but I had nothing to say. My silence was took to be some sort of judgment. She accused me of wanting her to feel that way. She said that I was punishing her, a physical distancing on my part because of an emotional distancing on hers. But it was not like that. It never was.
I had a sudden urge to smoke something, watch television, check email. I had to get my mind off her. Off of what I had potentially done. Digging around the paper clips and stationary of my desk drawer, I found a small glass jar of indica. It was guaranteed to get me floating through my reflections wearing blinders and inflatable arm bands. Before sleeping I wrote a letter and placed it into an envelope with Madeline's address on the front. The last words for me to give, to last her a lifetime and me an eternity.








Madeline-
I’ll ride home to you on wind borne waves, from distant shores, where once I walked alone. I dreamt of staring at the pores in my hand as an early glow placed lines on the comforter. Yours was the buttercup head, mornings in autumn, keeping your own sort of spring alive, beside the crisp chill of a window. Did you feel those kisses, eyes closed, asleep? Like leaves I once thought- leaves drifting gracefully in the silent moments of Return. Sea air smells of solitude and sadness. The people walk bent in warm winter rain, fat drops break apart like tears and the wipers blow them all away.
-Paul














Love Letters: Simple Squares To Stow In Jacket Pockets
~* 22 *~

The mind rushes when falling asleep.

Directions and ideas seem to leap about, running cramped down stone halls. Am I the one to wait for day’s glow-burst? The tossing of light over fields and hills of ungraspable green. A crack in the open. The fleeting glimpse of this man, as seen through a tiny window, is enough to understand the collapsing earth beneath his blank steps.
My heart has changed, shifting in guise like water in a bay. The intersection of still tableau’s. The ragged spikes of a sound. Back and forth, left to right, from me to you, the gifting and the receiving. But when the steps are inverted, pulled together rather than apart, a limitless horizon unfurls the now unbounded heart and hope crackles the air all around.
Hearts break, like the loosening of a knot, setting free the kite (that which knows not loneliness though the sky be empty all around).
Our desires remain forever present. They simply morph into different shapes, forms and themes, as our mind fluctuates and evolves. An exchange of emotional power, as seen by two beings rocking, back and forth on the see saw of falling love. The process of hiding wounds with cheap makeup . Refusing and refusing to share a pain until one lonely day, when you meet that someone who is just right and you notice they too are hiding dark devils beneath an angels powder.
A little pop in the jaw reminder of the rigorous strength needed to follow up on past memories. Facing them head on. resisting the urgent desire to succumb. Launched back into the now familiar fray-- no chance to catch a breath.
I wanted to be a part of the force that drove her molecules on the most subtle of levels, ingrained in her very essence. The unconscious mind flaunts memories, making the briefest of separations intolerably painful, immensely long. Desire: a raging wild fire, spreading, from fingertip to split hair follicle, trailing river-like
down said lover’s back.

A slight lull in the dreamy soup that is love.

Before any words were written, before the universe was exposed, there was my original, innocent and completely adoring intent. How did it get misread and discarded?
Pride and stubbornness can severely hamper a relationship. Everything should be grasped warily and with careful hands. In order for one to explore and learn new ways to feel and think, one must first let go of what he already knew, close their eyes and rest assured that eventually you will hit stability once more.
"Perhaps it was not you that acted the part of militia on assault." A wonderful example of self reflection. I knew that perhaps it was my created mind set that builds the stage and the props and the lighting for such volatile confrontations as we had.
It sounded like jealousy. Wrapped up in ribbon, but spiteful jealousy all the same. The technique of letting go while holding. In the rift of love pulled apart, one tends to regret everything. Wondering if it was all for naught, the pain and suffering. I grew bitter and withdrew, ignoring wishes and requests for the sake of inflexibility. A refusal to let go.
Rounding the corner I came face to face with recognition. I was fully in love with who she was, who she wanted to be and who she would be. All were beautiful. The canvas was worth it, no matter the color scheme or who chose to paint it.
The epilogue to this wonderful story points to the sickness so many of us choose to be stricken with needlessly, without real consideration. It is the act of being love sick. Why have so many chosen to live so many miserable mornings spent alone, simply because the will to surrender remains rooted so deeply, below the permafrost of our instincts. We refuse to melt.




















You Are This Heart Ache So Vast And Distant
~* 23 *~

The day was gray and I was nervous about talking to Alice. I wanted to see her. Be with her. So why then the feeling that I had already lost?

"Are you depressed?" Timothy asked.
"I don't feel like it,” I replied, pacing around the room. “I just see things playing out before hand, like it has all happened before and nothing is going to alter its flow. We are born into the world as nothing more than mere nubbins of soft and as yet unfolded sinews of molecules and thought.” I flopped back onto the bed.
“But then we age, we harden, casting our own souls over and over with layers of lead, borne through years of presupposed hardship. Real or imaginary, it has no difference."
Timothy was silent for a moment. I was sure that my gloominess caught him off guard. Generally I am the one to play the part of a cheerful, splashing sun and he the dour clouds of rumble and boom.
He spoke, "we are a race doomed to loneliness. It is almost as if we seek to further this sprint to solitude. We are scared of what we could truly become if we shoved down our barriers and actually connected with something."
"But I get it already. I see where the leaves have fallen. I can read the placement in the dew laden dust. Even so, still I find myself terrified at the prospect of leaping head long and blind into another's outstretched arms. But to me, this is because nobody seems to present arms that reach. no one seems to provide a welcome spot for those willing to risk the leap," I stammered in reply. Gaining steam I continued, rising to my feet even as my voice began to rise.
"So I try to do what I feel to be the next best thing. I go about my life as one of those people, marching arms held forth, hands upturned to the sky and sun glow. I try to manifest the feelings of comfort and security in my attitude and character. Yet that is not enough. Perhaps it would be, to one searching just like I, but how is that even possible. How long until it could be, if it is? A thousand days, or years?"
Timothy nodded in agreement.
"You are beginning to understand, Paul. Those who stick out honey paws to try and grasp the fast passing branches, filled with glitter leaves and the empty smiles of those who do not allow themselves real love, are only able to do so because of an abandonment of true, inner self. They have hardened their psyches and beings. It has created an inability to share in the exchange of the primal cosmos held in unlimited reserve within all of us."
I was sleepy and my head began to nod. I still kept my jar safe. Until Alice there was no one asking me to share. They may have told me to grab a chunk of their hair for safe keeping, but it was always only hair. Who has use for odd sprigs of an ex-lovers hair, besides a dusk wind, or some attic credenza that delights in the tidbits and morsels, offered up by That Which We'd Like to Forget.
I hold summer grins to no certain guarantees, because of the inevitability of autumn acquiescence and the broad expanse, of frost’s rolled back.










Quantifying How Much I Really Don't Know How Things Work
~* 24 *~

The truth: the weather was beautiful. I thrived in it. It made me grow. Every morning when waking I usually feel some sort of discontentment with the world, with the way that I am feeling, the way that the world has made me to feel.
But on mornings since meeting alice, things started differently. I would wake up and be revitalized. The dreams of night had left me and I was awake, ready to face time and reality and the world outside my front door. I didn't always feel that way. Before, I would wake up cold and alone. The desperation would set in, a desperation to fall back asleep. I read somewhere that a preference for sleep over the waking side of life is a sign of suicidal tendencies, or at least, thoughts. I was not suicidal. Just afraid. Noncommittally afraid of going out and being relied upon.
I never knew where this idea of failure stemmed from. What place in my life had I unconsciously let myself down? When did this thing happen? Was it a singular event or a series of events, all battering down the door to my inner psyche, forever denting it's armor.
So difficult to fully pinpoint.
I drifted. The keys were mere static lullabies fronting a soundscape of angelic. My ears drifted within my head on some sort of pleasure wave. A pulsing that trickled and tickled and stung. The crescendos ebbed, rolled.
How easy it is too trigger thoughts of another, another person, another time, another place, another you.
I recalled those times. I was thinner then. Less assured. I was the willing follower. And then three hours later I remember being out of my mind, delirious, confused, unsure of anything that was going on. My perception was swimming through a clear bowl of glue-like liquid, my limbs thrashing as if in slow motion, churning the jelly with my undulations and fresh birthed psychosis.
There is the fear in me now. I have seen what I cannot control, face to face. A true horror, a turgid place of frozen pains held over open tar pits layered in flame, melting the icicles even as they grow, the air full with steam and dense vapor.
What can I gain from knowing this?
Traveling to the top of a mountain, a general may see the massing army of an opponent. He may track his movements to the last, calculate the opposition to the very last man, organize stratagems to best harangue the perceived weak points. All of this may be done and more, but success is never a guarantee.

























Letting Winter Burn
~* 25 *~

The sky was the color of slate, the leaves alive with autumn wind and I felt like writing a letter. I decided against it and entered the first phone booth I found. How many years had it been since I last used a pay phone? How many more until I used one again? Conversation is so hard for me as it is. I clam up so terrible. My mind races like cars around a Nascar circuit in fast forward. Every option is forced upon me to be considered and thought of and it all becomes too much for me to handle.
Which is why I often enjoy writing letters. To gather my thoughts together in one concentric place, like lawn debris in the back of a red convertible. But why did I feel so strongly about communicating to her? What was the drive? I knew that, after the fact, after the day had passed and night had fallen sleepy and slow, my sober logic would conclude such contact unnecessary, or bad.
We were both adults. I felt like I could bring those things up with her, trusting that if brought to the open, they would not seem so daunting or ridiculous and we could share a laugh about it, instead of my feeling like something was pressing against my chest and I could not breath. The phone stopped ringing and a voice said hello like the last drop at the end of a rainfall. I said hello back. It was Alice, wanting me to come over. I rolled a joint, threw on a blue raincoat and a pair of fishing boots. I sparked up as the sky further blackened and began the long walk.

The bedroom of her apartment. It was raining outside. I was feeling chilly and wanted to put on socks. Alice was on the floor picking at her guitar, the same note, over and over again.

“Do I love you?” she asked, staring up at me, her head resting carefully upon newly folded arms.
I thought about it for a moment and smiled, then shook my head.
“Probably not. It is probably just because I am adorable and funny and you have just lost someone, so you have placed all of that love onto my being. In a way, you haven't created a new statue of love dedicated to me, you have instead simply transferred an old love onto a new face. In this case, mine.”
I leaned back in my chair and swiveled around, stopping to stare at myself in the mirror. I tried my best to look serious. But eyes sparkle. She opened her mouth to speak, pausing for a moment before beginning.
“It isn't like that. I know that I could be placing pent up emotions on you, but Paul, this is genuine. And that isn't even the problem, the sincerity of my feelings, that isn't the point at all.”
“The problem is that I am not interested, right?” I said, looking up briefly from a sketch pad, where I drew cerulean ink swirls.
“Of course not. Because you are interested.”
I looked up and opened my mouth, then smiled and shook my head.
“Go on.”
“I know I am not alone in this little confused emotions game. You are in awe of the way things are going just like me. You said you aren't interested, but I don't think that is true. I am an enchanting individual. Or at least, I can be, if people let me. But that isn't what I am trying to say! I think it is clear that there is something between us, but the problem is that our corresponding lives have thus far offered no reasons to encourage a further exploration of that something. And it doesn't help that I'm not your type.”
I switched from swirls to lines on the paper and I could hear Alice take a deep breath. I laid down the pen and raised my eyes, arching the brows and giving a slight grin.
“What do you mean, 'type?' That's a rather superfluous phrase. Nobody actually has specific types.”
Alice jumped from the floor and clapped her hands, then paced furiously about the white carpeted room.
“Regardless of what it means or how it has been used in our culture, the simple fact is that I am not your ideal. This is why this is such a complex situation! Logic shouts that it is foolish, but I have lived my entire life not giving a fuck about logic and I have turned out just fine, or at least.. I just need your confirmation that I am correct in making the decision to suppress-”
“You should never have to suppress anything,” I said, my voice quieting.
“Right, what ever, but I am doing the good thing here, by deciding that,” Alice's chest heaved and her eyes were filled with moisture, “that what ever may be gleaned from action in that direction, ultimately the odds are stacked against it, so it would be an exercise in being silly?” She sobbed and I stood up and enveloped her in my arms. “We are too old to take these risks, our lives are panning out into too many schedules and times and dates and places to be, people to care for and for us to potentially disregard all that in favor of... we just can't do it, I can't...”

Her eyes captured, I rubbed dry her cheeks and tilted back her face.
“You should never have to suppress anything.” Her lip quivered. Her mouth was filled with sadness. I wanted to drink all of it.

I did.
















The Dragon And Kenneth
~* 26 *~

Kenneth and I were in the car in the parking lot of the dunes. It was raining. I thought it would let up. He did not. We were at an impasse, in the duration of which we decided to finish off our supply of grass. Through the haze of weed smoke, Ken spoke and his voice seemed to float out of nothingness, coming ethereal and whisper like.
“I wonder. If one were to avoid showering and bodily cleansing of any sort for say, ten years or so, would they then begin to develop pollen on the surface of their bodies? Perhaps we are all just flower stamens, but we do not allow ourselves the time to grow into our true and ultimate purpose.”
“Yeah, but then where is the winged creature out there that would alight upon our pollen heavy backs and collect of the heady substance? I queried, my words, sloth like. And if such a beast could be found, where would it fly, what location or source would be ingrained deeply within the simply workings of such an innocent mind? What would be the end result, the final destination for the careful cargo stowed on the bristling tufts of hair, running up and down said creatures limbs.”
“Some hive, perhaps? Or maybe this creature would be taking the pollen to another creature, whereupon it would alight and collect still more pollen, while also sloughing off the gold dust collected from previous human stamens.”
“As fantastic as it may seem, I do believe there is some truth to your notion, if one were to use it as an analogy or metaphor of sorts. Say the pollen is actually love, goodwill, happiness, what have you. And then we notice how, for what ever reason, the human race seems to be scrubbing at this totally natural substance that coats our very being, down to a subatomic level, acting out of some bizarre culturally driven impulse, to turn on the thing that was at one time so vital and key.”
Ken replied in a somber voice. “We need to allow our souls time to properly germinate and produce this pollen, so that the winged angels of spiritual connectivity may fly between us all, spreading each and every one of our unique smiles and joys among the people of the world.”
A moment of silence, then our laughter was like a great sheet of water breaking.




Unnamed
~* 27 *~

In the beginning there was an old man that could read minds.
This didn’t let him see the future, it let him see the past. And boy, did he see it. He saw the glaring wounds of terrible memories gaping wet and bloody on the faces and arms of the people passing his house. He saw the flowers of love sprouting from their backs and hovering delicately over wavy hair. He saw it all, and more. But he did not like what he saw.
He shut the blinds and returned to his reading. Crossword puzzles. He couldn’t understand those. He was years behind the stack of papers with unfinished puzzles hidden within them, it took him weeks of constant attention to wholly finish one. Then it was on to the next days paper, already growing yellow and delicate, to double check the answers and begin the trial anew.
Over time his eyes grew weary and the words began to blur. The doctor gave him glasses whose lenses grew thicker every time the rains came.
At forty seven he was blind. At fifty he could no longer read minds. At fifty-five his brother went mad at the death of his wife, who passed during childbirth. At seventy-nine the son came to live with him. Now he was nearing eighty. The son was older now as well, maturing in age, in manner of speech, as well as in potential for darkness, muttering to himself in the hallways, trying to remain a shadow, a ghost. And for what?
The old man was coming on in years but he had a sense more tuned than a thousand like aged men. That was the sense of Just Knowing. Just Knowing when things would turn bad, when sun would shine, when the newspaper wouldn't come, when a present would. The old man could no longer read minds, but he could read the rest.
It was only the blasted boy that remained a mystery. All the old man knew was that something sinister was afoot. The grass just did not seem to stand as straight. The clouds flew a little farther away. The ever creeping silence, the one thing in life the old man longed to see more than anything, only that remained. If only the boy would make a noise, make his presence felt, make the ghost house feel a little less haunted, make it feel a little more like home.



Timothy's Story With Dreams
~* 28 *~

“Let me begin with this much. I lived in a rundown portion of East Bay, close to the warehouse district but closer to the fish market. I purchased coconuts from the newspaper boy two blocks down every Saturday morning. I got mugged for most of my paycheck on the fifth, a bit more on the tenth or eleventh and I generally got cleaned out around the seventeenth. By the twenty-first or so I ran the risk of losing another freckle and gaining a scar.
The reason I chose to move to the rundown portion of East Bay was because of my love for literature and the literature way of life. You see, all the workers in the warehouses and the fish market and the sailors and the gamblers and the mafia and the mercenaries and the freelance freedom fighters and the pederasts and the eaters of hearts and the prostitutes and the theater performers; they all wrote stories. Everyone wrote stories. They lived the stories and then they wrote them down.
They lived stories on street corners and alleyways and lonely docks lit badly by lampposts sizzling in twilight mists.
If you weren't writing the stories and you weren't living the stories, but you lived in the rundown portion of East Bay, then you were selling the stories.
You sold the stories out of ramshackle plywood push carts. Canvas stamp tents or from the tops of Broadway balcony byways. Tossing books down like grain to molting pigeons pecking stupidly at the scorched asphalt.
I lived in the rundown portion of East Bay because there the literature was truly alive, there the people ate too much and drank till the sun rose, there the wine rained like blood and the blood ran like wine. There the floor boards of taverns and apartment complexes were soaked with sweat and saliva. There, “to live,” truly was to be a life, alive.
I had run away from home fifteen years before, at the tender age of twenty-two. I had been living in my parents attic ever since dropping out of the Teacher Education program at the local university. But then I got a manila folder in the mail, addressed to some guy named Duluthe Bhrati. It was covered with the tattoos of 'return to sender' stamps. I've never been one to care about conventions concerning respect for other people's property, so I took the package, went to the attic and dumped the contents onto my patchwork bedspread.
Inside was a blank postcard with a picture of a large fish, a pamphlet for Sister Fisher's coffee company and a wallet sized photograph with a brief note stapled to the back. The picture was of a rather attractive young woman, with a large and brilliant smile, soft chocolate eyes and a distinctive jaw line that seemed to leap, out of the photograph.
Intrigued, I carefully extracted the note from the staples grip and read:
“P- Please come as soon as you can. I need help. I fear the grandfather's succubus to be all too real. She is my neighbor. I am scared for my life. Advise!” How fascinating, I thought, and I checked the return address. It was smudged over and faded, but I could make out the city and part of the zip code: “East Bay #2#53.” I'd never been to East Bay because of all the crime, but I'd heard the rumors, how it was a place for dreamers and lost souls, for people like me. For the first time in over eleven years, dating back to my eleventh birthday when I hadn't invited anybody, I knew exactly what to do.
I packed quickly, shoving a few pairs of jeans, some t-shirts and underwear into a blue duffel bag, then threw on a gray zip up hoodie and my sneakers. I called a friend and got a ride to the bank where I emptied my savings then got dropped off at the bus station. Two hours after opening the manila folder and I was on a bus to East Bay.
I had no trouble locating a taxi on my arrival, a cabby with a hair lip and a rotting ear played the part satisfactorily, giving me a serviceable ride to the Hotel de Scopo, which was the only one in the area code listed on the folder return address.
I spent a few days in the hotel before making friends with a group of long haired loose-lipped straitjacket types in the lobby bar.
They all wore green one-piece work suits and their hands were covered with burns in various stages of healing. Their hands looked to be covered with gloves of flesh-toned camouflage. The tallest one in the group with the longest hair, a man by the name of Mescalito Ted, invited me for a drink at their table. We talked about shooting at cat tails with shotguns as the sun went down, the way the 'tails would burst apart like a kernel of corn metamorphing into a cloud. I found they shared an interest in other things as well; Frisbee golf, listening to old 78's in dim basements that sagged, drinking five year bottles on some beach or rivers edge with some guitars and a chorus of bold voices. By the end of the evening I'd solved my need for a place to stay, agreeing to move into a flat they all shared a couple blocks down. As an added bonus they had offered me a job working with them, as a janitor of sorts at a nearby hospital.
Mescalito Ted'd said, “If you came all the way from pillows and cooking to a place that'll gnaw your elbows raw just from bumping into stuff, and you don't have a good reason why, well damn the stumps of my wife I think you'll fit in just fine, if you stick with us.”
I thought that I did fit in well with my newfound friends, despite the fact that I kept my hair short and took to maintaining a sense of decency, bathing, wearing a suit to work, so as to improve or keep steady my questionable self-esteem. In the back of my mind lingered thoughts of the manila folder, yet they soon evaporated, the photograph and note sifting to the bottom of my desk drawer. The first day evaporated pretty much any thought or memory I had established up until that point. I thought of a soldier believing himself borne anew after his first day of battle, baptized by a wine berry brine that steamed, in life's last exhale. Until the day life regurgitates itself back into your mouth, you have not truly been alive. We are not limited to being just a human, as a tree is only a tree, a rock only a rock, an elephant only an elephant. We are blessed with the sublimity of all, should we only choose to splice life's blinks and taste.
On the first day we went into the Ospedale di Incubo it was late evening and the stars began to wink out across the heavens. Mescalito Ted led the group to a supply closet, where he began to hand out large rubber trash bags, one to each janitor.
Next, Ted handed out the most bizarre contraption I had ever before seen.
It had a metal shaft the length of a broom, but the end was more like some sort of robotic eggbeater, with colored wires entering and exiting the head in peculiar places.
Taking the eggbeater-broom and rubber trash bag handed to me, I tentatively spoke up

“What are we going to clean with these?”

The men laughed. Ted gave a sort of half grin and scratched his balding head.
“Just check and make sure yer balls are intact. Then follow me.”
The group split up, a few following a corridor to the right, a few to the left, while Ted and I went straight. As we walked, Ted nonchalantly began to explain the exact nature of our janitorial duties, while with each additional word, my eyes grew wider and my mind felt like it was trying to wriggle out of its skin.
“This here is a coma ward for long term patients. All the coma victims from up and down the coast are sent to this hospital after a year or so, because the government is trying to crack down on this little problem some lab scientists discovered a few years back. You see, all of these poor sons of bitches lying in this infernal place are asleep, passed the fuck out, for god knows what reason. So you'd think that all the doctors would have to do is stick a little sticker on their heads that says, 'Down for the Count,' and move on, cause they aren't doing anything but sleeping, right? Right. Thing is, the human mind is a restless and impatient little bugger. It can't stand to sit still and do nothing, having nothing to stimulate it, keep it involved. So it dreams. The mind dreams all sorts of crazy shit, but you and I, who have our daily stimulus to keep us occupied and distracted, don't get anything close to the intensity of the dreams that coma victims experience. You see, all they can do is dream and since it is our nature to evolve, pretty soon the mind gets pretty experienced at the whole dreaming process, and pretty soon those dreams, well, they get a little messy.”
Ted stopped in front of a large iron door marked, 'DANGER,' removed a set of keys and unlocked the door. Silent, Ted led the way through the door and then shut it behind him. We stood on a gridiron platform, in a sort of enclosed alley behind the hospital building. There was a series of catwalks and ladders running up and down the sides of the building. Every now and then a large turbine protruded from the massive concrete wall and before each of these was a three-step ladder bolted to the walk. Clearing his throat, Ted continued,
“Where was I? Dreaming. So all these poor fools can do is dream, see, and pretty soon their dreams get a little out of control. A theory I have is that one of the reasons these dreams get so messy is because of the nature of the accident that put this man or that woman in the coma in the first place. See, when your put in a coma, it isn't due to something minor. Is is because of something terrible, so terrible that the body unconsciously deemed it necessary to switch off the 'wake up' function, just so it wouldn't have to remember the car wreck or plane crash or sledgehammer to the dome, that put this or that individual there in the first place. But see, that is where the body fucks up. I think the mind still does remember the accident, in fact, I think that is ALL the mind remembers. I think that is why these dreams get so violent. The accident is the last memory these people have imprinted on their brain. This, this terrible photograph is all they have to entertain their unconscious for the next five, ten, fifty years. And in that time the brain turns that accident into a mutated nightmare of awful proportions.”
I told Ted that I still didn't understand what my job was, or what I was supposed to do with the eggbeater-broom and rubber bag. Ted pursed his lips and began to tread lightly across the catwalk toward the closest turbine. He motioned with his hand to follow. I stood a few feet away from where Ted stopped. He turned to me and lowered his voice to a whisper,
“This is where our job gets messy my young friend. We have to clean these dirty whores here of what the bosses call 'radiator coolant overflow.' But let me tell you, I've never known radiator coolant to burn like this does. And this stuff'll burn through things you didn't think could burn. What I think happens, no, what I KNOW happens, you see, is once these coma victims stop dreaming of the accident in it's simplest form and it switches to an ever worsening nightmare, the body begins to reject the thoughts the mind keeps churning out. It seems to be some sort of survival mechanism, some reflex where these new mutated dreams are hurting the individual, so the automated response system in the body begins kicking them out the moment they enter the conscious mind. The problem though, is two-fold. First off, the mind is creating this nightmares at an insanely quick pace, and correspondingly it is rejecting these thoughts at an equally fast speed. Secondly, these dreams have reached the point where they no longer are simple flashes of instantaneous lightning in the brain. They are now taking physical form, lighter than air, but still solid and real. This substance seeps out of the coma victim's hair and rises to the ceiling, where it is sucked into the ventilation shafts and powered outside, into these things.”
Ted pointed at the massive turbine stationed just above us. He walked slowly around the side of the turbine until he stood directly in front of it, whereupon he motioned for me to step up beside him. Pointing into the depths of the turbine, Ted continued, “These are the outtake vents. They have a complex configuration of fans and blenders that catch the dream substance on a series of tiny fibers extending around the circumference of the turbine. Our job is to use this pole here to collect the dream substance, then place it into our bags. Once your bag is full you bring it to the storage vat in the basement and pass it off to the attendant working there, Ally. She'll handle the rest. Now, this stuff can be pretty nasty. It'll fly through most fabrics and if it touches your skin you're in for a wicked surprise. So move slowly. Stay quiet. Don't get the nightmares riled up.”
Needless to say, I was terrified. My uniform was sponge wet with sweat. I stared into the dark of the turbine until the black began to wrap and twist around itself and I shook my head to dislodge the hallucinations from my eyes. Ted handed me the rubber trash bag and slowly moved his pole up into the outtake vents dark, gaping mouth. On the inner lip of the vent were tiny filaments that stuck out in rows like combs of whale baleen. Ted placed the pole inside the lip and pressed a button on the side of the pole. The head began to turn. I watched, fascinated, as thin strands of a barely discernible substance began to get sucked up and collected on the end of the pole. It was like twisting your fork in a plate of spaghetti, except the strands collecting on the end of your utensil are black as the bottom of a smoke stack, almost glistening from some twisted damp. Ted continued to twist, circling the mouth of the outtake vent slowly with his pole, collecting strand upon strand of the peculiar substance in the process. Sweat poured down the craggy lines in Ted's face.
“The bag.” he whispered out the corner of his mouth. “Hurry.”
Opening the bag I stepped up in front of Ted's place on the small ladder and stared at the lowering pole, the head of which teemed with writhing black tentacles of Ted's supposed dream ooze. Ted pushed the pole until the wriggling head was completely buried in the bag, then pressed another button on the handle and swiftly drew out the pole, barking as he did, “Shut it, quickly!”
I pulled hard on the draw strings and closed the opening of the bag. Ted set his pole down and sat hard on the ladder steps pulling out a rag and wiping his brow. “One down, forty eight to go. Just leave that bag here and prepare another one. We pick em up on our way out.”
I nodded in assent and followed the man, half stumbling, not sure if I was awake, dreaming or lost somewhere in between. I wondered if it would be better or worse, were I neither of the two, instead of being trapped somewhere in between a swirl of rainbows and a full moon, at once both howling at the heavens with fire in my mouth and falling backwards into soft, completely agog, marveling.”

Perhaps A Stone Might Suddenly Feel
~* 29 *~

I was exhausted; fingers and nose numb, cheeks tear stained and red. The walk to the bus stop had been exhilarating, although cold and somber. My shoes were untied, strung out on the sidewalk, lost clouds in an empty sky. Funny, how I could relate with my laces, those inanimate tendrils.
Someone to my right coughed. Smirking, I pictured a petite woman with long, wavy blonde hair. She would be wearing tight black pants and a button down flannel coat. A wool cap and mittens would finish off the picture. I would think nothing of the fact that she was over dressed for the dreary rain. An overcompensation against the elements is something I find endearing.
Looking up, I saw the approaching bus, splattered in mud and grime as it was. It squeaked to an unsteady stop and the same person coughed again. I mounted the bus stairs and allowed myself a soft mental shrug. Some things are better left to the imagination. Not everyone felt as I did, of that much was I sure. There are those that require a glance to confirm or deny the hazed suspicions in the mind. It itches at them, tickling their temple, feathering their ear canal, until they can take it no longer and they look.
It seems suspicions are most often denied. Ideas, instincts, they are all off. There is no continuity to the way we interpret our lives. We are either moving to fast, or to slow. Would it be better then, to not move at all?
The bus left me with a two block walk to work- a twenty hour a week job at the brewery, handling shipments. I moved a lot of boxes with a bunch of students from the local college. I entered the back door and stopped briefly, the faces, I did not recognize any of them. I controlled myself, but was reminded how frequently that seemed to happen, more examples of my inability to get comfortable with my environment. Every room I enter seemed like the wrong one. Every dull face and pair of sightless eyes failed to mirror any semblance of recognition. It felt I was a deer, coming home to visit my herd after a long journey, only to find a pack of wolves devouring the very relatives I was supposed to meet.
I clocked in and started up my line. The bottles came rolling down, clinking together as they went and I placed them into cardboard and boxed them. I popped five tic tacs into my mouth, crunching once, before letting the rest marinate. The joyful relief that comes from Vice Fulfillment. After three hours I wrapped up what I was doing, said goodbye to the rest of the employees and went to a soup and sandwich shop across the way.
The food was good and warm. A perfect remedy to battle the gray of rainy days. Whenever eating by myself, setup is key. Pack on my right, headphones turned so low they are almost inaudible, notebook and pen patient waiting. If possible, I liked to sit facing the road, so I could watch the pedestrians and traffic ever marching by. I found it peculiar just how different people appeared to be, depending on whether or not your personally know them. The average stranger walks around with his wick pointing outward, waiting to be lit. First, however, one must speak to them, enjoy them on their own turf, in their own environment and they yours, before you can outstretch that hand and give them flame. When going places with a group of acquaintances I had found that I could always tell them apart from the rest of a crowd. Not necessarily because of their familiar faces, or clothing that was comfortable to the eye. It was something more, a special glow that everyone enhances within their companions, an aura that enabled one to identify them, even from the back, hundreds of feet away.
Dipping my sandwich into my soup, I pondered the various possibilities, the nuances that could lead to new connections. It was so fascinating to think of how you meet and become acquainted with people. The random acts and situations one goes through in order to earn love and friendship. I remembered how I met all of my close friends. From building a sand castle together, to playing a keyboard at a drunken party, we had established unbreakable bonds. How then did those bonds break? Crumbling from misuse and carelessness. Of these things did I try to talk with Timothy, later, in my bedroom.
We sat staring at the rug for some time, mulling it over, listening to the tunes of Coltrane. As the song ended an incredible stillness descended upon the room, clutching at my heart, choking the atmosphere with its weight. I tore myself away from the couch and hurriedly put on my jacket, grabbed my pack and exited the room. My feet resounded loudly against the damp cement, echoing against walls far off in the shadow, only to be muted by thick coastal air. Breathing heavy I dashed, near to stumbling against the hard sidewalk.
Something inside me had hiccuped for the first time, something had bled that I never even knew was alive. Someone gave me the right to see.
The benches outside the library were covered in water, but that mattered little. Sitting down heavily I leaned back, wincing as the tears slowly fell down my cheeks. I was confused, hurt. Hurt because I was confused. I hurt because I could not explain why I was confused, even to the face staring back at me from the puddles. Now that this wound had been open, it had to be closed, or surely I would die. Was my life to be determined from that moment forth by a search for answers and questions to ask? The reflection in the puddle quivered slightly; nature eloquently understating a point.














Hippos And Whales Are Descendants Of The Same Land Based Mammal
~* 30 *~

“I feel great today. I haven't really burdened you with the fact that I have been feeling sub par the last five days,” Alice paused, hearing my sharp inhale in preparation for an interjection, “And don't give me any, 'I don't mind if you burden me,' crap. I am and have been going on the assumption that you do not mind me burdening you. However, that does not mean I need or choose to burden you when a burden does exist.
“Continuing on.. I don't know why I haven't been feeling great, because all the symptoms are there for me to be perfect. But I just haven't been feeling all myself, sorta sick, work drags. I know that I would be feeling even worse if I didn't have you to think of- Which sort of reminds me of something I wanted to talk with you about, concerning dreams and our placement in them, but I will save that for another conversation.
“I am very thankful for having you to keep me smiling. But, at the same time, it is sort of irritating, because I have lived with this for all my life and I always think it has left me, until it returns. It is a very peculiar sort of seasonalish depression. Not depression in the normal sense of, “I am sad,” but a depression that covers all functioning's of my body. My feet and legs subtly ache, I always feel fatigued, I feel very misanthropic and it is difficult interfacing with other people. It is like I am unplugged, but still expected to perform and work as per normal. I am sure there is some sort of medical terminology for it all and I am sure a doctor would love to give me something, but it happens so rarely that I would rather not make any sort of big deal out of it.
“The biggest thing that seems to help me is plenty of exercise, really rigorous exercise, but I can't do that right now. I can do lap after lap on the track, just power walking, but that only stirs up a bit of what needs a good whirling. What is also unique to the cloud that passed over me this particular time, is the reason why I am mentioning this to you at all. Generally when this happens I cannot seem to stop myself from shrinking away from the rest of the world, completely retreating into my head and then staying there for anywhere between three days and a couple weeks. In that time I am very unsettled and I avoid contact as much as possible. But you really have kept me grounded, Paul! I love you for that. My feelings for you have been enough to overcome the nameless sickness, giving me strength to reach out and touch you, verbally. I am just so awed by the fact that you are able to cut through this whole mess and pierce me where it counts.
“For my entire life, this has been the real problem in my relationships, or at least, what starts the problems. I enter into the dark stage at some point and drift away from who I am with, for the duration, until it passes. But they can never fully understand it, which I can totally sympathize with, because to them it appears that I simple, 'no longer care.'
“It is like, 'why don't you return my calls,' 'I don't know.' 'Why can't we hang out?' 'I don't know, I just need some time.' 'You don't really love me, do you?' 'I don't know...'
“I am sure this is entering too much information land, but I need to get it off my chest, because of the significance. You... are... keeping me.. grounded. I cannot understate the importance of that. I do return your calls. I do want to hang out with you and I can only interpret that as me really loving you. I mean, our physical connection is th best I have had. I smile and want to laugh at almost everything you say, even if it isn't remotely humorous in a comedic sense. It is just the way you say it and the fact that you are saying it tickles me so much I want to laugh out loud at it. Both of those things really say that I like you. A lot. And I don't want to screw anything up, because I see how special it is.
“And then, sometime this past week, I felt the darkness creeping up on me and I was terrified. I didn't want myself to fall into the soup, not now. I could see it all playing out in horrible detail. It was almost deja vu-- I would give you a blank wall for a week and in that time you would have enough doubts to permanently chink the wall of our love, thus weakening it and preparing it for an eventual fall. You would wonder why and I would try to explain, but it just wouldn't be enough. Maybe it would, you might be more understanding than anyone else has been, but who knows, I am just glad it wasn't put to the test so soon.
“I remember, it was a Sunday, but already I was dreading the next time you would call, knowing, or at least feeling, like I would not be able to answer the phone, that I would be terrified for no reason into ignoring it. And then, your phone calls came. Little blurbs on my machine. A joke, or anecdote here and there. Your name on my caller id. No hesitation I called you back. And I listened to your voice. And spoke back. And I was soaring.
“Anytime I have not been directly thinking of you or hearing from you, it has been the absolute shits. And like I said, there is generally no break in that shitty feeling, until the fog lifts permanently. Except this time. Even if it was only for an instant, each time you reached across time and space and caressed me, I was transported to fields of wild flowers. A blanket of brilliant, burning color.”


















Ash Birthed Love A Phoenix Rose
~* 31 *~

I was on the beach with Alice and Kenneth, walking. The two of them were debating the finer merits of my personality and the detractors. Mostly they just talked about less desirable traits.
"It's just that he wimps out sometimes." Alice said.
"Exactly, he's a fucking armadillo with no sense of balance." Kenneth shot back.
"What about this?" I said, trying to change the subject. On the sand before us lay a dead bird. It seemed to be a blue heron. The spear beak and spindly legs jutted out from a body feathered like an oily dark bush. It was bent, twisted and very beautiful.
"That's cool." Kenneth said.
"Too bad." Alice said. "Should we keep going to the water?"
"I think I'm just going to chill here and think about how beautiful death is, if that's okay."
"Have fun with that," Kenneth said.
I watched them walk away, dwindling into stumps of black crayon, a ladder of foot steps in their wake. A song was playing in my head. An old song. I had trouble placing it at first. A simple guitar melody, lilting up and down in waves. The lyrics were clean poetry speaking of empty oceans and moonlight and forest blessed with bird song. It brought me back to early childhood, or at least, it brought me to photographs of my early childhood, to which I had created specific memories; real or imagined I could never say.
I remembered a time visiting friends when I was five. We were riding little three wheelers up and down the driveway. A long, sloping black chute it was, down which we would fly, whooping and screaming. In the photograph/memory I am talking to a friend, at the base of the hill, getting ready to walk our tricycles back to the top. I have one hand on the yellow plastic handle, the other motions toward the sky. The face of a younger me is either smiling or squinting at the sunlight. I cannot tell. My friend has his head down both hands on the bike. In the background my friends' parents sit at the driveway top, watching side by side, holding hands.
The song and that photograph/memory. What connection did they have?
The song created a strange, empty sort of sadness. It was like I wanted to cry, I wanted to gush and I wanted to fell that release that comes from letting go. Cutting the threads and having it all come crashing down. But the knot holding all that sadness in was not wound tightly. There was no pressure to speed up a type of climactic release. Then again, perhaps the knot was wound too tightly. Stretched thin, worn out, elastic gone. Pushed to an extreme then snapping. Oh, inglorious collapse. The mighty tree, survivor of a thousand storms, cracks, shudders and descends on a quiet spring afternoon. Crumpling undergrowth. Staining the crumbled bark skin a brilliant shade of green.
Something Timothy said during a conversation about the way emotion is perceived came to mind.
“Everything is more or less linear. We travel along lines until we reach points, rest stops if you will, before we hop right back onto the line, until the next break, and so on, our trek marking time like a connect the dots picture done backwards. All of our physical functioning seems to be governed by a set pattern of beginnings and ends. Why shouldn't the emotional be the same?
We travel along lines of feeling. Be it feelings of gladness, contentment, self-doubt, sadness, remorse, anger or fear, we experience emotions until they reach a point. We suffer indignities until our anger comes to a head and we retaliate.
Our smiles stretch when in the company of close friends until we burst, laughing, rainbows ripple up and down the spine. Pushed to anger, we strike. There will always be an emotional response to the stimulus of the active.”
In my head I could hear this song and I felt sadness, yet there was no rest stop, no end to the feeling. I could not figure out the brakes to the melancholy ride. The singer crooned. The guitar strings sweep and moan. I wanted so badly to shed a tear yet it never came. Perhaps it was the lump at the base of my throat, making it difficult to swallow, my feelings sliding against an obstruction that is wet and rock like. If only I could have reached down into my throat and pulled the rock out, that I might have hurled it against the distant rocks, so that it shattered. Trees of mint-needles bristled shadowy and dark, sobbing unrelenting in the high coast fog. The song trailed off, vanished. What sort of reason was attached to the song that made me feel so low, yet prevent me from appreciating any sort of culmination to the emotional experience? Where was the steel wall for me to crash this hurtling vehicle?

It was days later when it hit me. I was wearing a sweater and looking in the mirror of the waiting room of an eatery down by the docks. It was a seafood joint that specialized in a caramelized shrimp and catch of the day platter, pan seared and tossed with rosemary, garlic and lemon. The service was poor but the the cook bought grass off of a friend of mine, so I always got the freshest cuts.
The sweater I wore was given to me by my father at Christmas. When I was four. I did not understand how a sweater that was a world to large for me could be the real present. My uncle kept it around and I had just recently dug it back up.
Khaki colored, with stripes across the chest done in thicker thread. A spiral design seeming to explode from the center, the swirls broken apart in scattered chunks. It was a very strange sweater. I had grown to like it. I wore a fragmentation of wholeness. A wholeness disrupted before my birth, with the death of my mother, my fathers nervous breakdown and permanent collapse of sanity.
Often I imagined them sitting together in the evening, holding hands. Not out of habit, as some couples are wont to do, but out of genuine love for one another. The genuine desire to feel the pulse of another. A specific pulse, one that beat in tune with your own, the blood broiling beneath the surface of the your hands, pulled as if by magnets toward the other. And then the fingers would clasp and the palms would meet in a wonderfully, simple union. A tryst of minute proportions, magical, epic, seemingly timeless.
Clearly not timeless. Their relationship had traveled along a line until it reached a point and then it was over. They had laughed, loved, cried, hugged and parted, pried apart by my inclusion into the universe.
That night I dreamed about my mother. She was singing a song. Though it was a sad tune she sung it on her honeymoon. It was a song about gulls flying high in a distant blue. About boys lying asleep in sun brushed hay fields. She sung about being tossed upon the sand, a pebble birthed of the surf, aimless and unresisting, having long ago given up to the powerful flow that spins the wide earth. She was singing to my father. They were on the edge of a lake, in a one room cottage they rented for cheap, it being the off-season, ten below and snowing outside thin walls. Did my father grasp what the song meant? Did I?
For me she sung to him as if in plea. Tragic, her cry, for it was the silent cry given by someone who falls backwards with their eyes closed hoping, for swift arms to still them. My mother sung my father a song after their wedding, throwing herself into his heart in the blind hope that he would forever receive her. The song was my mother giving her all. She put it out on the table and said, “this is what I have for you.” And it was Everything.
The song she sang was the one that made me cry tears that never came. I could not cry those tears because it was not my emotion to feel completion on. It was my fathers. Is that what it was then, his breakdown? Had he been frightened off, scared away from the realm of love with wounds too deep for healing. In his hurry to scab over and forget, had he draped a callous over Everything?
Perhaps there is a cavern hidden miles with my fathers chest, in which walks my mother, stepping lightly along, laughing as she goes. Beside her bubbles a brook, stippled and brindled by a thousand rays of afternoon sunshine that cut through the forest canopy, lush colored with verdigris and sage.






Is Love So Very Specific To Deserve Such Names?
~* 32 *~

Another day found Kenneth, Alice and I down by the beach. Each to his or her own thoughts, we meandered about the sand, picking and kicking at odd pieces of driftwood or shells. What ever refuse and debris the sea had chosen to discard and vomit onto the pebbled expanse as a loping, high roped line.
There were so many things that continually logged my mind. Thoughts of why. I was always questioning the inner workings of interpersonal dynamics, the how's and why's of every gesture, every expression of happiness and sadness that one goes through when in the presence of another.
How many of these emotions are felt on a regular basis, for the sole symbiotic purpose of mutually shared, heart felt creation between two beings? So few. So often do we disregard or let ourselves be disregarded. The process seems to be never ending. An interplay of he who sits and he who is sat upon. In all relationships there is a pillow and there is an ass and the ass rests upon the pillow but does not recognize the pillow for such services rendered.
We built a tiny little village from the debris on the beach. With the larger pieces of driftwood I made towering pillars, tamped into a firm foundation of pressed sand then hung, with various accouterments like sea grasses and sand growths that might befit or otherwise seem worthy of topping such pillars as I did erect.
Alice worked on a smaller scale, building a little gate and a wall and minute temples out of smaller pieces of bark, twisted tips of wispy twigs interwoven with small pebbles and bits of glass.
My taller shapes created long shadows in the setting sun while the orange glow glinted and twirled across the varied surfaces of her miniature village. The pieces of coral and sea melded glass winked and flashed in the twining shades of a twilit sky. The setting sun was a congealed mottle of crimsons and ruby reds. A play-doh jewel burning hotly on the horizons burnished edge.
As the sky fell to blackness we built a fire, starting small with a pyramid or tee pee of minor sticks and bramble, then building upward to the larger and more water logged sections of sea strewn wood. By the time the stars came out and made their subtle constellations known on a purely visual basis, the fire had grown to a towering height. It warmed thoroughly those standing as close as three feet, serving adequate at a distance of almost ten. We wrapped turkey dogs in tin foil and placed them at the center coals to roast, then tucked them between leaven loafs of wheat bread, slathered in generous portions of mustard. They were delicious.
Afterward, we went back to Kenneth's house, an R.V. by the ocean, and talked for some time. We opened a bottle of wine. Kenneth read a water marked novel with knights on the cover. Alice and I flipped through a book she had received by mail only recently. It was a copy of an old trio of novels by a post nineteenth century fantasy writer, one that she had enjoyed greatly as a girl. Watching her eyes glitter as they skipped about the colorfully illustrated pages filled with pictures that rendered the fictional imaginations of a crazed British lord's wife into all the more harrowing and realistic detail, I could not help but think about how much I loved Alice's peculiarities, her eccentric manners and methods. So much so that I wished them to be my own.
What would let me play dispensationalist to this common experience, this flimsy attempt at an understood life, an escape from the solitary nature inherent to an abstract progression, a collection of puzzle pieces thrown together in a cardboard box and labeled “my existence.”
Alice's argyle socks gave me sudden deja vu. Of a message Madeline once left me, a week or two after our one year anniversary. She had said, “I came home to change before tonight's event. I think you would like what I am wearing-- argyle stockings. Nothing else. But it is too cold to stand here in just socks so I am going to put my robe on. Just thought I would share..” I remember being instantly turned on when I got the message, picturing Madeline standing in her apartment, nude save the argyle, holding the phone, thinking about me and me alone. I had so wanted to burst through the walls of time, enter her room and take her, just me and her body and the argyles.
I couldn't help but transfer the remembered lust for Madeline onto Alice. Suddenly her ankles were chocolate I longed to sculpt and knead. I wanted to rise up her calves and thighs and wrap firm hands around her waist, grip her rib cage, pulling her close until the smell of vulnerability became too much and we kissed. Fragile tongues afire, desperate to dip for wetness.
I did not think I was ready to meet someone else. Such an inopportune time as well. So many things that would not quite work out. Timothy and I's project, for starters. But I loved her. How can one try to quantify such a variable? Love
~* 33 *~

I have caught glimpses of Alice in her varying states of knitted concentration: whether she is brushing wide paths of charcoal, trying to figure out where she put the salt, or just staring at the wall, as if deep in thoughtful conversation.
Alice liked to eat flower petals.
“When I was a little girl I thought about being a famous dancer on the great stage in the big city. The lights would shine down from high up in the rafters and I would be staring at those lights as I sang to an enraptured audience. I would sing and they would listen and I would stare up at the lights, past the lights, up higher, into the metal rafters and tangled wires, past even them and into the catwalk two hundred feet up. There my masked lover would be waiting, watching, my death in his hands, if I failed he would let go the rope from which a sand bag accurately placed would drop. But it wouldn't drop. I would perform perfectly. Afterward when left alone in my changing quarters the man would come to me and we would share love until it was time for me to go, where upon I would say good bye and try to actually mean it and he would smoke cigarettes and act like he did not care.”
Sea Finds Hard Shell No Good To Remember
~*34 *~

Alice found something in the scattered surf. A mollusk of sorts. Perhaps an abalone shell. She held it up for me to see but I could not make it out.

"Should I bring it up there?" Alice asked.

I sat, on a sandy cropped outlook, riding high above the lower beach. The view was incredible. The sky had finally cleared. I did not know how many days it had been since I'd seen the sun. A fluffy-white dotted the far west horizon, streaming east into milk vapor. The sand was damp. It had been raining. For weeks. The wind blew my hair back and I could feel. My reflection showed, in a shell (those mirrors of the sea) the receding line apparent. Times like those show me experiencing moments of self-doubt. Low morale. Sadness. A questioning of my view.
.
Alice topped the rise of the sandy cliff.

"So many clam shells, more than I've ever seen," she said, breathless.

Kenneth lit up a cigarette and hunched down into the collar of his pea coat.

The beach found creature was curled up in the folds of Alice's sweatshirt. It looked like a giant tongue, dark and furled, tinged in reds, pinks and oranges.

"Looks like some sort of sea slug."

"Really, you think?"

"Yeah, it is probably poisonous, I hear they secrete an ooze that is acidic and can burn your skin, some can poison you."

"Bullshit. I touched it already, that is why it curled up, it didn’t hurt me."

"Some jelly fish castings aren’t apparent for a good thirty minutes, then you undergo first degree paralysis, your whole body locks up - and you are shot through with bolt after bolt of lightning like pain. All the time you are wishing you had ignored the jellyfish sting."

The group was silent. None of them believed me. Rightfully so. Perhaps.

"Go put it back," Kenneth said.

Alice turned and made the winding trek down the cliff, slowly disappearing. She reappeared near the waters edge and flipped the odd creature back into the sea. She was beautiful, running backwards from the frothy mixture. Odd sea breezes tossed her pashmina scarf, to and fro, tangling her bleached locks.
The creature seemed to straighten when it hit the salty brine, uncurling in spasms, before sinking clumsily beneath the surface. I was amazed that it survived.

Alice was silent for the whole walk back. We packed the car, got in and began to drive. She stared out the window, tapping it three times with her thumb knuckle.
"What an adaptable thing it is to be alive! We are forced to adapt, given the power to adapt, so that when we are taken out of water and placed choking on dry land, we have the wherewithal to wait it out, be patient, curl up in security until the time comes for us to ocean dive once more.”

Walking Enthralled
~* 35 *~

After leaving the car I found the air rumbling in its wait for the moon. My nose kept catching odd whiffs; cold night smells.
My feet kept me enthralled for the whole walk. The way they struck out, like the very limb of holy solitude, basking in the glow of being a leg and nothing more. Silk hairs colored an unobtrusive brown, a knee cap, a foot, the toes. A leg doing the only thing a leg knows.
The moment was shattered as the rest of my body caught up with the intrepid explorer. And the oh so glorious reunion! The laughter and the drinking, the shifting glances and the out and out lies. Sure, my legs act pleased to see me, smiling those charming smiles and shaking me by the shoulder, crying out,
“Paul! God damn it I was wonderin' when you was gonna show up again an' I figured y'were gone for good! But jus' look at ya, back again, like I knew y'would! Yessir, good ol' Paul and us, together like old times.”
More and more I wonder if their exchanges seem to lack in sincerity. I believed them to be breaking, slowly, and I figured them to have another ten years left, twelve at the most. The both of them were alcoholics. The drink will get to them, drilling holes in their brains like a beetle through cauliflower. Their reasoning will then be shot, resolve broken. Years of servitude will have pushed them far over the counter top, to their knees, metaphorical face against an unpleasant smelling floor of cheap tile. The stage will be set by decades of build up. Years of shameless promotion for an inevitable conflict both parties would continue to vehemently deny, though it occupied their introspective hours as well as moments of action. For how could they ever forget, being tied as they were, to the spine, by thick knots of cartilage and a pelvis.
No weight is carried by the grape vine memories passed down by the soaring branches of high above. Sunshine and a blowing breeze have no place in the thoughts of the buried, questing root. Even so, it cannot detach and burrow deeper on its own accord.
Just so did my legs feel, having no real idea of the sensations I experience, so many torsos and shoulders and heads above their world.
Twilight instills its own mood in those who drink of its impartial haze. My mind was pulled in peculiar directions, considering absurdum and facets of perception I would normally be unable to commit myself to. No matter. Sight of the library steps was made by the rounding of a corner and all thoughts of legs and enthralling feet vanished.
Ripples clear the pond after surface movement, sweeping the slate clean in stretched rings, expanding towards a lip, where they are absorbed and made mute.
So does my mind reconstitute in anticipation of a new stimulus.
The door handle was cool to the touch. It was thirty minutes before closing. I took a breath to collect myself, then twisted the knob and entered. It was time for research. It all need to be researched before further steps were taken.
Reluctant steps walked by reluctant feet and the mind stares off into nothing, humming a two key lullaby, content to simply observe from its secluded room peaking a spiral tower.










The World Of Pictorial Likes And Dislikes Our Desires Forever Frozen In Two Dimensional Representation Of What We Wanted On A Given Day In A Given Year Sometime In Our Multi layered Past
~* 36 *~

Morning. Cold. Kenneth and I cooked oatmeal in his trailer and listened to records. We were talking about love.
“I meet her and I say to myself, I like this person. And then I want to explore that person. But is it that I only have the mental capacity for exploring the still life version of the person I met back when I first decided I liked her? Or is it purely human nature? A natural psychological response?” I speculated.
“Are we locked into a behavioral loop of never letting those around us grow and evolve as we ourselves do?” Kenneth said.
“Perhaps that is the true evolution, a true step of enlightenment,” I said.
“Yeah, but when can we allow those around us to truly move with the careful plodding speed of time? Of life? And we remain sentient and aware enough to capture these friendships and relations we may create over the years in motion picture, with sound, surround even, and taste and smell. Gone would be the still life photographs of yore. We would culture a new basis for interpersonal interactions, ones that are built around the concept of expanded awareness, being open to the imperceptible changes and subtle variations going on within the infinite beings that make up our day to day, rather than taking the easy way out and accepting the facsimile representation put on by a lazy set of perceptory organs.” Kenneth scraped the last bite of oatmeal from his bowl and was silent.

“I just want to notice how Alice has changed,” I said, lying back onto the crushed spring couch.
“It first began in the car, when I was talking with her, some inane conversation, about nothing in particular, whales perhaps, and sightings. How I'd never seen one, how she thought she saw a flipper, once. And now she isn't so sure, having seen first hand how waves breaking over rocks a half a mile from the mainland can often look like the backs of leviathans breaching and spouting spray in a quest for fresh air. But as she spoke I realized for the first time that in our entire time spent together I had never once thought of her thoughts, her needs.
“I mean, I am a very empathetic person and I can easily pick up shifts in mood and changes in emotional state. Through logical deduction of mitigating factors I can come to something more or less resembling a concrete idea of what someone may or may not be feeling. The significance is that until that point I had never really given thought to the fact that she was indeed, feeling.
“I had gone straight from the assumption and in doing so had bypassed the giving of humanity onto her personality, onto her. By my own self involvement and pride I overlooked her reality, just to feed my ego in believing I understood her or that I knew what she was going through. Call it run of the mill as an explanation, but I for once began to truly ride in her shoes. I realized that not all the bullshit she was accepting me saying was being taken with the nodding agreeance I had up until that point assumed was there by mere default. No, she was querying the odd facts that I threw out there, she was making decisions and basing opinions on the white lies that were stretched a little too thin. She saw through my bullshits but she didn't care enough to stop my flow and tell me,” I said.
“I keep trying to tell you this Paul, and I know you get it, but I wonder if maybe you don't, because you continue to act incredulous about this kind of thing. It is weird to be living life! To be walking around day to day, doing what we so often assume to be living and then we meet someone and they touch us and we really start to realize how much living we are not doing. Life is about exchanging energy with others, lending it and taking it in return. The transference of good will, good vibes and love so that as many people as possible can be feeling they are doing the best job that they can. But the only way we can exchange that energy in the pure and unadulterated manner befit for our kind is if we truly look the other person in the eye and recognize them as a real human being. We cannot look at them as it is all too easy to do, as some two dimensional, flat caricature created or manifested solely for our personal pleasure and happiness. Our friends, friendships, it is a symbiotic thing. We must practice the art of being unselfishly selfish. A difficult line to walk to be sure, but the proper one at that. If it was simple the world would be a totally different place, you mark my words.” Kenneth lit a cigarette, offered me one, which I denied.
I had a sudden urge to tell him about my plan, about the inheritance, but something held me back. I wished I could be the friend to him that he was to me.
“Did I ever tell you about the shittiest night of my life?” Kenneth asked.
I shook my head.
“Remember New Years, four, five years ago?” Kenneth said.
“Yeah, sure, when Madeline peed all over the back seat of my car,” I said.
“Yeah, that one. Okay, well, that New Years started with me seeing a buddy of mine and he gave me a few grams of cola he had stolen from his room mates. So I found myself tearing up lines of that with that girl Angie and then we went out on the bus to the show and saw all the old gang, rocking out, and then the floor of the venue started to crack and the chick Angie explained that she hadn't done the shit in over two years, since she had just recently left a mental asylum after a nervous breakdown. But I didn't know this, until she told me as she was flipping out and I was like, oh shit, I totally fucked this girl over and the last time I saw her was after everyone had left and she was alone in a corner throwing up.
Anyway, when we left the shuttle stopped in front of the emergency room and a bunch of people tried to take my buddies sister in for an alcohol overdose, I was trying to let me take her home, but it was good I didn't because she probably could have used the attention, she was blacking out and shit, but then I was thinking I might get arrested, so I was searching my pockets for the rest of my cola but I just couldn't find it anywhere, but it ended fine and I got home and in the alley behind my house I saw the tiny container with my cola, it had fallen out of my pocket when I left the house.
At this time my girl friend got dropped off and she was absolutely hysterical, terribly drunk and crying all over the place. The people who brought her zoomed off and I was left to prop her up, as she sobbed about how her ankle was broken. I looked at it and she could still kind of walk on it so I tried to calm her down, saying it was only a sprained ankle. She wouldn't believe me and only cried more, saying I was torturing her by making her climb up the stairs to where her mother lived, on the second floor of a three apartment house. I finally got her upstairs and in bed, then went and did a few more lines in the bathroom, before bringing some water to drink into the other room.
So there I was, trying to calm down, worrying about my friends sister in the hospital, wondering if her parents would find out and somehow blame me. Then my girlfriend asked for the mug, and I was like, but this is the cup with water, and she is like, no give me the mug. So I handed her the mug just as I realized what she needed it for and she started trying to throw up in the tiny cup and it soon overflowed and we were trying to hold it and my hands were just dripping all over the place with puke. I helped clean her off and she began to cry again, because fuck, it was just terrible. Finally she passed out and somehow I managed to fall asleep as well. I woke up around three hours later, totally soaked. I was like, wait, this is more than sweat, and I realized that my girlfriend had curled around me and peed all over my back during my fitful sleep.
This was just to much, combined with the threat of my girlfriends father coming over for brunch to see his daughter in such an awful condition. I went to the bathroom, ran some water and locked the door, then did a few more rails. Luckily her dad never ended up showing that morning and I finally got out of the bath and was drying off when someone knocked at the door. It was my dad. I was totally confused, but it turned out he was over to help my girlfriends mom fix the bathroom door handle. I hadn't slept, I was all tweaked out, and I didn't recover for almost a month from the shock of the evening.”
“That's pretty bad dude.” I said.
“I just wanted to throw out some real life perspective on all this hypothetical relationship stuff. All that is the real deal. You don't know anything until you've held your girls throw up and had your back pissed on in the space of a few hours.”





















I Tug You Are Not Home
~* 37 *~

My ears work best for hearing. The lines in the grass matched the stripes of my socks. The sidewalk had cracks by the thousand. My palms read like the breaks in a sea of clouds.
We were on the train, an Amtrak headed west, and the place smelled of old people, farts and sweat. I missed Madeline, even as I spoke to Alice. Missed the one before Madeline, and the one before that. I missed being alone. The trees whispered by and a baby cried and I couldn't help but wonder if I really knew what direction I was headed, or to what place I'd arrive.
Alice is beautiful, and warm, and I feel like I could be inspired for a long time. It is powerful enough that I question my ever having questioned her, or us. And yet, I cannot deny the questions merely for existing.
I needed to let go. I needed to forget about the plants and the desks with cups of cold water sitting on old mail in need of a response. Those were the half drugged days, the wispish time of canary tears and border breaths. So many tailored talks and stretched green lawns, running sidewalks glide over and crosswise, hatching the city into something less an ocean, more a framework, a man made grid, with the angular ideals that nothing natural could ever hope to replicate.
There was a lack of hope to the autumn dream. Water was the only thing that ever choose to linger. It was everywhere, in the grass, beading feet in glimmer drops, in the leaves that spend entire afternoons lazy drifting to the murky pools of ground and hollow. It was in the air and on the skin, in her eyes and in my glass.
It was in the sky. The clouds; a thousand tightly coiled rain memories. The sunset; lava pools of melting nuclear neon crayons. The stars; wet blinking sprinkles that tumble back into the black of infinite space.
Whose life was I leading? What was it all for? Such glass half empty rhetoric, yet I could not shake thoughts of other times, both past and present, other dimensions parallel to my own yet completely different. It is foolish to think to ones self that tomorrow will be any different than today, yet it is equally foolish to think it to be the same. How can this be? How can life be all at once unchanging, all at once forever shifting. Just like the stars it seemed to be, this middle ground between rest and activity, alive while dead.


I spread my heart out like wings unfurled draping it shawl like about your shoulders. I only wish I could know that it would make you warm, I only wish I knew how to wear it myself, just to see if it really does fight off the wind and rainstorms like I always tend to think it will.























Parallels Lack Meaningful Contributions, Alice's Story Of Tears and Time
~* 38 *~

Glassy played the sun across the ocean surface. Alice was on a walk but I figured she would be back soon. My coat hung limp beside me on the knotted branch of a beached redwood. I did not know the meaning of love. The melting peach sky loomed.
A soft sound approached from behind. Sneakered feet on quiet moss and pine needles. She sat down beside me and I leaned over, kissing her on the lips. I watched her lids flutter as we kissed. I thought she was beautiful. I buried my face in her hair, nuzzling as I went. Her ears I filled with butterfly whispers and when our clothes were off I lay there for a moment, inside her. In that moment I drank of her excess joy and made it my own, with which to in return gift back to her.
I took a deep breath and gathered up the wonder of her smile and the sympathy of her eyes, as might a falcon that takes in the land from fifteen kilometers up, assessing the angle with which to strike its prey.
Like this did I hover, taking in everything, though her body writhed pleasantly about my lower extremities and her breath came in quick pants and growls. She dug her fingers into my back and I dropped, swooping upon her welcoming form. We rolled about the forest floor like a pair of rabbits. Through it all did she whisper,

“You're the one Paul.”

I had not known what to say, nor did I know later, wrapped under a mound of blankets on the forest floor, when she again whispered,
“You're the one Paul. The one who can save me.”
She pulled herself closer and lifted her leg up and over my stomach. I could feel her wetness on my hip. Her fingers traced along the length of my scars.
“I want to tell you a story of when I was younger. About my grandfather.”
I was drowsy and my lids were heavy. I wanted nothing more than to fall asleep as we were, sprawled upon a forest floor, on a piece of headland that jutted out into the vast Pacific. I knew it right then, her hot breath on my neck, that she was everything I had up until this point been missing. The world began to spin in a wholly different and fantastic way. I could sense a change in the air, a sparkling, a glow. Some how I just knew that I had to stay awake. The tone of Alice's voice was unfamiliar. I could not place the mood, it was something I had heretofore never known to exist. This was special. This was big.
“Oh, sure, sure. I always like stories about being a kid. Greatest times is when you're a kid.”
Alice grasped my hand and pressed her cheek against my heart. After clearing her throat, she spoke.
“I turned six the year my grandfather, Papu, began to die. It was July. A more agreeable summer I have never experienced. We had a garden out back that was absolutely filled with flowers. When my grandfather could still walk, he would stoop down and grasp my hand with his own, to led me on the most fantastic of journeys, through the marigolds and white petaled rose bushes.
After his death, my mother told me Papu was not as big as I remembered him to be. That does not change the fact that he is the largest construction of human flesh I have ever seen. Papu was enormous. I remember the way he'd block out the light of a doorway and you could not even see his chin. There would only be the V of a sloped white t-shirt covering a knotted chest, skin a deep brown from decades in the sun.
My grandfather was the silent hulk brooding in the shadow corners talking to nobody. Nobody, but me.
Papu spoke in a low whisper. So low that from a distance of three strides it would sound like the wind, rustling among brittle leaves in late autumn. I would sit on his lap and he would tell me stories for hours. Of course, the stories were quite often magical in nature. At least, that is what I can remember. They seem to have been filled with fairies and giants, good and evil, golden mornings filled with songbirds and bleak winter days when the storm clouds stretched real low.
Sadly the years of geography and arithmetic have replaced the real meaning behind those stories, so all I am left with is a feeling, attached to a general idea, like a tail.
The only story I remember in detail was the one grandfather told me just before he died. It was early morning on a beautiful day and we were all in the room talking in hushed voices. Papu was lying out like a fallen tree, on a bed of white linen. My mother and father were talking to a few aunts and uncles by the doorway.
I was standing beside Papu's bed, holding his bear paw of a hand. Beneath the heavy lids, Papu's eyes flitted about and his mouth murmured inaudible splinters of some ancient memory.
A youthful breeze picked up and flirted playfully with my hair when he opened his eyes. One minute he was daydreaming and the next he was staring, eyes wider than tea plates. Papu's cheeks flushed with color and a great smile stretched across his wizened face. He grasped both my hands in his and squeezed them gently.

“It's you,” he said, as if in disbelief. I remember smiling and looking down at my feet, rocking side to side, trying not to make eye contact.
“I knew you didn't forget me,” Papu's soft voice seemed tinged with the a new youth and he looked to be almost bouncing from out his bed.
“I knew the instant I opened my eyes it was you,” Papu closed his eyes and giggled, deep in his chest.
“You think I wouldn't recognize you? The most beautiful princess in all the world? Made of supple marble... set with emeralds... your golden hair dancing. We were always dancing...” Papu's deep set eyes filled up and ran over, tears streaming down the cliffs of his cheek. He sobbed silently and took a deep breath. Arresting my sight with his, my grandfather began to tell me the story of a lifetime, though I did not know it then. I was just scared and confused and I had never seen a grown up cry. I will never forget his words, for they have been impressed upon me as would speech to a toddler, or walking to a babe.
"You were the first person I fell in love with. Not in the usual sort of way, not in the way people fall in love when they are older. You and I fell in love in that effortless way. We were like two stones stumbling simultaneously into a tiny stream, swept off body to body on the river bottom. Ours was the kind of love that fought off dark skies capped by thunder. Ours was the love of rainbows: brilliant and delicate as the air after a storm.
The very first memory I have is of us, sitting together on the cabin floor, alone because my parents were out.
You knew the meaning of ashes. You drew intricate patterns with the dark dust - flowers, birds and oak leaves- all across my bare chest and face.
When momma and poppa returned I was asleep. At least, I was pretending I was asleep because you had run out as if something was wrong, when you heard the lifting latch. Momma and poppa peered at me with their brows raised, eyes wide. They covered their mouths and muttered to each other, eyes darting about the room. 

Poppa was away most of the time, off in the fields or building new cages in the barn. From then on, I hardly ever left momma's side. She would clutch me to her fat hips and lead me about the farm, forcing me to help her with the chores.
I did not much mind being around momma all the time. You, on the other hand, did mind. You got all sad and angry and I saw you sitting on the edge of the forest crying.
Momma always said to steer clear of the forest. She said the world was a terrible place for a small boy to be in alone. She said that the world began at the forest edge. Just inside the forest, the whole wide world is lying about in about a million hammocks, so never go in there' is what she would tell me.
On Sundays, she would walk me to the edge and we would pick wild onions and mushrooms that thrived in the cool shade. Once our bags were full, right before leaving, momma would tell me to stand still and listen. So I'd listen to the forest and hear the trees and look desperately for a sign of you. The leaves would rustle in the cool breeze and momma would say, hear that? That is the whole wide world snoring, sleeping, and rolling over in their lofted hammocks. And so I'd listen closer, and I'd hear great creaks as immense bodies adjusted in their hanging beds.
We only had a few hours alone together each day, and that was when momma and poppa ate lunch. I'd play catch with the patterns in the clouds until you came along and told me to get up. You would take me by the hand and lead me to the tiny pond behind the cow pasture. There the sunlight would dance like the tips of flames upon the water and we'd do somersaults in the grass. You liked the flowers that grew in the marshy earth, and the way honey bees drifted lazily through the undergrowth, content to buzz.
When I'd tell you the things momma said you would get real quiet. You seemed to forget I was even there. You said the world ended at the first step of my house. You never would go inside. You always ran at the sight of momma or poppa, and you always stayed home when I brought the dog to come play. On days like that, I'd miss you terribly, and the sun always seemed to be tired and the light would come down pale and cold.
The nights following those days would be sleepless. I'd dream of you flying out of the forest, a dark shape hurtling through the moonlight. Only you wouldn't be flying, you would be standing on a massive hand shrouded in shadow and that hand would be dropping you outside my window. And then the hand would stretch further, now seemingly miles long, with knuckles the size of cart wheels, and fingernails like a roof of fresh snow. The hand would open my window to stretch a gigantic finger through towards my head, where it would pause, waiting, to tap me on the forehead until I woke up.
I always did wake up in a cold sweat on the mornings after the days I'd forget to play with you, half expecting to see the porous underbelly of an extended index finger hovering inches above my nose.
When I turned twelve some men came from over the southern prairie and built three houses atop the little hills surrounding mine. There was a girl and she was the second person I ever fell in love with. We went for long walks along the horse paths between the tall stalks of corn. You always said you had other plans when I'd invite you to come on those walks with us. But I knew. I knew that there were some nights when you'd come anyways, secret, like I didn't know you were watching us. But I knew. I saw your milky round eyes more than once, blinking like two spotlights from between the green slats of corn.
We did not talk very often in those days. You did not hold my hand as often as before and we never did somersaults together in the grass. There were still those quiet afternoons, when the heat hung low and thick like some burning wool blanket. We would find a lonely cow pond tucked away somewhere and just sit, heads just barely poking from the water, not saying a damn thing eyes shut tight. I knew you would stare at me though, when you thought I was not paying attention. I could always tell when you looked at me with that fiercely intense gaze. My skin would tingle and I would get all cold, as if someone had dropped a bucket of snow down your nightshirt.
I soon grew taller than poppa, and you began to grow fearful of me. You were so much smaller than I and yet I kept growing. Soon I didn't fit inside the cabin, and they made me a room in the barn loft. My girl would sometimes spend the night, and she'd stay up half the night tracing shapes on my broad chest. It always reminded me of you.
Soon enough you stopped coming to see me, so I began looking for you. I'd leave every morning before work and walk towards the edge of the forest. There I would stick my head past a few of the smaller trees and whisper your name.
But the cow pasture, near the tiny pond was the last place I saw you. You stood on the topmost branch of a leafy poplar. Hands clasped behind your back, you rocked back and forth on your heels. A water thrush building a nest in the green limbs was the subject of your attention. The sun came out and cast its brilliant rays about the gentle scene. Staring at the sun, eyes bared and in pain saw me gasping, a silent witness. There you were, surrounded by what seemed to be heaven, gaping between the cloud break like a bed of sunflowers. Then the sun left and you were gone.
I grew angry with you for leaving me. Only later did I understand your reasons, but by then it was too late. I thought the world had stolen you so I fought back. I hefted my brilliant ax and went to the broad trees flanking my home. I don't know why, but I guess I was just doing what momma and poppa told me to do. I was just pushing the world back a little bit so mine could grow larger.
In a year's time the ground was heavy with the oaken weight of fallen majesty. My ax was dull, and tree stumps in their thousands lay naked and exposed across three hills in all directions. Soon I forgot about you, or at least, I tried to forget about you.
I started a family and had children of my own, two boys, then a girl. My first-born son fell down the well when he was five. He was missing for a week when I found him, pulling him up in a bucket of death soaked well water, his face swollen and the color of thistledown. My second son was kicked in the head by the plow horse when he was seven. My wife found him stumbling about the barnyard, holding white pieces of skull in his tiny hands, blood flowing down his back like a sick cape.
Oh, it was all I could do to stop my wife from killing herself. Even during the bright of day, while hanging the laundry or tending the garden, she would have nightmares. Those screams would pierce my ears like a sharpened spear, and I would rock her like a child in the great chair, beside the hearth. Life was painful and hard, at least, until my daughter came along. She was a life of kindled joy and she brought happiness to my wife and I. We knew no harm could befall this child, for she had the look of an angel or some other celestial being.
Something about my daughter seemed oddly familiar, but I couldn't quite place it until her sixth birthday. She looked exactly like you. She had the same twinkle, the same spark like someone had lit her wick and she was ready to explode.
Later that year, on a blustery autumn day in the late afternoon, I met someone peculiar.
She was the size of a small child, clad in an elegant gown that clung like dew-moss to her slight frame. Judging by her face, she appeared to be hovering on that thin line between middle and old age. Her auburn hair had flecks of whitish gray, and the tiniest sprinkling of wrinkles hugged her eyes and mouth. The eyes themselves- dark eyes- flashing like lightning in a midnight sky, offset her wise beauty. She introduced herself as your mother and I was speechless.
She told me you were dead. She told me you had killed yourself when you found out you could not have me for your own. She told me that you wept rainstorms for me, and your cries would split the earth in two. She told me that you had loved me more than the mountains love the sky and I was too blind to see.
Then she demanded my own daughter as payment. She said that was the only way the suffering would end. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a daughter for a daughter. It was the only way, she threatened, for my bloodline to ever exist in peace.
I grew furious at what your mother told me. Blood rushed to my temples and I felt like my ears would erupt in hot geysers. But my legs seemed rooted to the soil, and my arms hung loosely like old vines. She told me I had three days to deliver my daughter to her, at the new forest edge. If I did not return her on the fourth day then my family would be cursed for eternity. She left on the chilly north wind and I returned home, heavy of heart and mind.
For two days I wrestled with the reality of the past and the reality of the present. I would stare at my daughter playing amongst the butterflies and think of how I could never lose her. Then I would burst into tears, thinking of you dead and dying, all because of me. I couldn't figure out what to do, and it tore at me from within like weighted meat hooks hung from my stomach and spine.
On the third day I walked over three hills to the forest edge, my jaw set in defiant determination. Grasped firmly in my tense hands was the stout pole of a fresh ax. It was longer than a garden rake, with a blade the size of an ox-plow. I'd made my decision. I would drive the world back to a place where long arms could not reach my family.
With the regularity of a windmill, my blade struck deep, and for two years, I wielded the mammoth ax in my personal rebellion against the world. I chopped through out the day and long into the darkness. Once my ax got a taste for the blood of trees, it began to work on its own accord. Some nights I would wake to the tug of the ax, and I would keep hacking the dense timber in a sort of half sleep.
At the end of two years, the ax was just a dirtied slab of iron on the end of a stick, which I would bash against the towering trunks until they splintered and collapsed. Across the plains, stumps lay scattered in thick clumps like tiny mushrooms, filling out sad fields that stretched as far as the eye could see. My family was safe and I never saw the old woman, your mother again.
After those two years, I stopped talking. I couldn't seem to hold a conversation, there was so much pent up sadness welling within my chest, longing to burst free.
I raised my daughter to be a beautiful young woman and we moved into a great city full of houses built from the skeletons of dead trees. We lived far from the forest, where momma and poppa always told me the world began. There were days when I'd think of you, but they were coming fewer and farther between. My daughter soon got married and had a daughter of her own, but I wouldn't let them leave my sight. My own wife passed away, but still I hung on, sticking around to keep them from going near the forest, from going to where long arms could reach them.
Do you know what it means to me? To see you now as I lay here dying? Do you know what it means to feel life seeping out of me like warmth from a cold fire place? To think that for all these years I thought you dead. To think that I have the blood of so many, stained far deeper than the skin upon my hands and face. To think that my life has been a constant battle.
Oh you. If only you could feel what I have felt. Drinking absence for months at a time."
At this Papu fell back into his pillow and closed his eyes. His arms fell from mine and he whispered,
"It is late evening now, isn't it? Dusted in firelight, your golden eyes are glowing to the beat of an Indian drum, hummed softly by the resonance in my chest. Ohh night let me breathe you deep. Let my lungs know smoke scented sleep and make the sycamores lean away, just one last time. Those exposed star webs, glistening fresh and wet, we wondered just which one tomorrow would forget…”
Papu's tremendous frame gave a tiny sigh and he went limp and died. 
It took ten men to carry his coffin to the grave, and the air was a multitude of vibrations. My mother sobbed upon my father's shoulder and everyone kept their heads bowed and low. I never told anybody about those final minutes preceding my grandfather's death. It was wholly between Papu and me. Now, you know.”
“Let me get this straight, are you saying there is a bloodthirsty fairy queen after you for something your grandfather did, what, eighty years ago? Have you really thought about this? How can you allow yourself to fear the dying words of an old man whose lost his senses?”
Alice shot up and looked at me, making me flinch from the javelins thrown by her furious gaze.
“You never knew Papu. He- I, I thought, you. Thought you'd understand. I guess we're all wrong sometimes.”
Defiant, she collected her various things and walked away, Moving through the sleepy forest, brazen, naked.
I thought about catching up with her but decided against it. I was through chasing. I had learned a while back that everything moves like a pendulum or circle. The swing drifts away, then returns. I just had to stay put.
Life is all about permanency. I was simply acting the part of tree or mountain, a place for others to find refuge with and rest easy.
Then again, I could have been completely crazy.



Am I now?















Cactus Medallions And An Open Window
~* 39 *~

Grasshoppers leaped about the room. Someone left the door open and the garden seems like it has always been a bloom with the white of dying azaleas.
I could not see my fingers and my hands had left the nest. I was trying to explain to Alice about how I had been having this repeated imagery flashing into my head, day and night, when I wake and when I sleep. It had to do with my hands, or at least, it had to do with someone's hands. I assumed they were mine, but I am not sure, I only see them in a specific setting.
A week earlier I dreamed I was falling out of a tree and the branches were whipping past me and all I could think was where were all the branches, all the hand holds for me to grasp and slow my downward, lazy feather fall. Dreams associated with not being able to gain a sense of comfort in this airy world. What startled me the most is that I could not seem to remember if the obsession with hands began in my subconscious, in my dreams, or if I came up with it while awake? The prior night the hands had come again.
It had been a wonderful evening and the breeze had washed warm over the half brittle leaves and cicada shells that clung to the side of the Kenneth's trailer, rattling them, making a sound like hollow bones knocking together. I talked aloud, to no one in particular, drunk and buttoned off peyote.
“My life seems to flip. And turn. In and out of focus. Paths open up before me then close and I am thrown about like a funnel of sand caught in a lonely upstream of warm air, somewhere deep in the desert plains of west central Asia.
It is always the way of things. We are thrust into the world with no knowledge of how to communicate and interact with our day to day surroundings. But we grow in size and in confidence and we begun to impose a backdrop of familiarity to our general surroundings, we learn to associate the everyday on an almost intellectual instinct.
The TV. hints at a realization to the stuff of our imaginations, until
we read newspapers and study geography, and find out about the beauty of mountain ranges at early dawn, or ice swept float lands of the upper steppes, where all is so bleak and the cold so penetrating it gives one a feeling, a holy feeling that penetrates the marrow within the hard bones, penetrates through guise of form and the fabric of here and now, setting up such a great conflagration within the head, trails of lit vapors swimming duly and pale behind the eyes. Or is it something else altogether, in that moment where
interconnectivity has tapped into the senses and all is abuzz and glowing...
I grow tired of the silly games structured towards reasoning and a belief in the overall hierarchy of newspapers delivered on my doorstep. I live in an apartment, on the second floor, the top, with my room mate and her cat. I order things from the store sometimes, like sushi or a dinner roll. Nothing much.”
Can you scream silently, inside your head, and if so, does it hurt your ears to listen?
I don't know who I am or where I am going in all of this. I have lost... sight of where I am headed, but then did I ever have any sight to begin with? Was it all this terrible, or am I imposing clouds to shadow what I already know to be true? But I cannot remember truth, at least not specific truth, or one sided truth, one dimensional... I can only remember the reality of a given situation.
Where are we going?
There is a spot that I visit and enjoy much. A ground squirrel found it and removed a tree from the sky and laid it low to the grass. I go to the spot whenever I can manage a jog across the bridge when a parade or something isn't going on, it’s a busy place this time of year you know what I mean?
My life is bracketed into tiny parcels of time and set on a slow move across a lazy conveyor belt. I sit on a velvet throne, in semblistic repose, as might a king or other such lord, and I pluck the parcels of time and delight in the experience found within, or I cry, or I fall asleep, or grow angry, or do any of the other things one is known to do when opening parcels of time containing experience. Sometimes I may hold an experience for longer than usual, I will try to make things last, and then the belt gets jammed, and the works get gummed up and stopped because I am trying to hold onto a specific experience and I wish they did not
always have to go away.
I open the packages and I uncoil the experience, setting its links straight and building its form into coherent limblast, something I can understand and benefit from, and then I use a unique process of double exposure before the film leaps onto my face and begins to melt into my brain. I can feel it pulsing through me, at waves and in rushes, my every cell getting a taste, a smell or a sound of the emotions and conditions found within the specific experiences core truth. I sometimes try to hold my breath and I close my eyes and shut fists to my ears and I grip my connections to the world up tight, because sometimes I don't want the colors coursing through my being to leave, I want to hold onto them forever.
“Where are my hands? My feet slip through glass and I cannot make out the stars. Forecast called for clear skies and a full moon. I do not see the moon. Where are my hands? Where are my hands? I remember flying, once, on the river bridge by the trestle, awkward running through the park. Someone was next to me and I think it was her, putting one shoe after my shoe, keeping me on, though wild fires spread from my chest to my thighs and into my sides. Light stopped or maybe it started as I but briefly set the first foot down upon faux marble bridge steps and on the straightaway my heart leapt as each step was four steps and then there were no steps, the ground flashing like the thundering brown river below, trees whipping by like blown slaps to the face. I cannot find the person on the bridge, but far below, in a sea of leaves suspended like golden clouds gone limp I think I see her waving idle gestures at me, or to herself and I am falling ever back. I stretch for fingers and I cannot remember where my hands have gone, it is September.
It is September. The green of last spring has begun to dry up, and unravel, into dolorous brown. A lone vine like a strip of rusty wire clings to the window screen. Tiny hands sprout along the main stem, dotted by tips that adhere to the metal frame like stones in wet cement. What has spurned the creation of these living grapples? As it grew and lost balance, the arms burst from the central body, forming by will and need alone, righting the ship before it toppled and fell? Just the right amount of hands, if you think about it, just enough to keep it where it wants to be, on my window, leaning outward to the sky. The thrush knows it is time for sleep, yet he weeps a warbling tune in the twilight, before moons and stars filter the sky from blackness. The pictures on the wall might be paintings or mirrors, something to capture beauty into. Where are my hands?”
The sun had rolled off the horizon like a marble off my coffee table, slow to start, as if unsure, then fast, and the sky was stripped of light, and all was torn into darkness. Where are the promises, so like hands, yet forgetful? Holes in my walls cry this isn't home. A sensation of loss. That I was lost. The blank walls pock marked with old tacks and ten penny nail heads.
But You Never Knew With Girls Like That Did You
~* 40 *~

In my dreams she is floating, as if on emerald clouds. Phosphorescent pillows growing out of a backdrop colored a brilliant grapefruit. The sky flexes and sweats cool beads of opalescent cerise, the melting liquid glow of a fast falling sun.
A wind blew in from the east. The moon hovered faint above the dark lined mountains in the deepening west and I felt like something was wrong.
I wiggled my toes in the sand. The particles fell smooth over the tops, brushing my ankles like rain on a shingled roof. It was probably nothing, the feeling I had. Just a bit of indigestion or the bodies subtle call for more sleep.
Dune grass framed the chopped waves in identical parallel. Pyramid tufts of green rose up and leaned, to the right, bending under an early spring zephyr that swam up out of the southwest. The sea waves are inlaid with switch grass and ridden by snow white ladies clad in primrose caps, dotted with heliotropes that glittered, as they twirl-danced, crashed into the powder beach.
My eye itched. My contacts. Long expired, they dried out my eyes something terrible and drops only caused my lids to swell. I pawed at the socket with the corner of my palm. Gently though, I could not afford to tear the gentle membrane, for I would be made blind. I do not have a spare set. The warmth of my hands eased an ache in my head that I had not really noticed was there. I rest my palm gently over the socket on the other side.
Down the shadow curtains came. The sea roar and screaming gulls appeared to grow ever so slightly hushed.
She hadn't been herself that evening. Alice. Something was indeed wrong. I could hear her shift in her sandy seat some twenty feet up the beach. Perhaps she had something to tell me, but did not know how to voice it, how to press pure emotion into the corded restraints of verbose speech. But you never knew with girls like her.
I find that whatever I may believe the cause of a psychologically imposed silence to be, it is most generally the exact opposite.
I decided that she was not talking because she did not want to be the one doing all the talking, the sharing of secrets. She wanted me to offer my own up to her, out of my own free will. A test of sorts.
Her hands slid under my tee, wrapping up and around my chest. Her fingers sifted through the wedge shaped lawn of wispy curls. I had not heard her get up or approach. She pulled herself tight against my back, her head laid sideways in the cradle between my shoulder blades. Without removing my palms from their warm socket nests I blurted out the plan.
I told her everything. The need for money. The wealthy uncle. The inheritance I would receive. All of it. It was sort of therapeutic, telling it all to her. Just getting it out created an unexpected soaring deep within. Something that rose and fell as her fingers drew gentle trails across my stomach.
I told her about my reasons for visiting the library. The research I put in during my quest for a method of body disposal that would not be discovered. I felt her tense up as more and more of the story unfolded. But I could not stop. The words just flowed out of me, slipping in a never ending rush like schools of fish, from a bottlenecked river mouth. She did not let me finish.
Her fingers were at this time clenched, sections of my torso gripped within hands now grown taut, as with the arms, the body, her head. All tense, waiting. Her grip tightened as more was explained, culminating when I relayed the method of disposal ultimately decided upon, that of mixing the ground remains with the potting soil of a certain species of office plant. A kind that was, in fact, located at the place where she worked. The library. At the word library she tore herself away from me, knocking me off balance as she frantically disentangled her arms.
The muffled sounds of her footfalls evaporated as she disappeared into the now dark field separating the sea from the parking lot and the city. The sun was nothing but a flat stretched disc of hot fire. For some reason I did not get up. I just lay, prostrate, staring out into a fading light. Both of my eyes began to itch but I did not move. I fell asleep in that position wondering why I had not seen Timothy in days.










A Disease Called Forgetfulness Left Over On Linoleum Juice Planes On The Tarmac
~* 41 *~

Something about the phone call from the night before, made me not want to smile, made me wake up full of shower and cloud. How could I believe in love, when that continually seemed to happen?
I could not help but be a liver and taste the trickled sun. Lap the tallow drippings from the moon. Feel love and return the touch. How can any resist it, having tasted once? How do some find the pool rust flavored, sharp, enough so to never want another sip. I could not help but come back for more, again, again, despite the perpetuity of cycles. Those whirlwinds that at once bring souls together while simultaneously pulling them away.
I wanted to stay put. I wanted to find one who would stay put with me. But there was so much at stake. A conversation with Kenneth over coffee.
“Who among us is unlike a marionette, all thin wires pulled by hands high up in the shadows? So many responsibilities, loyalties, allegiances and attachments to the loomed figures of our pasts. It seems impossible that anyone can meet another and make room for their line. Leaving space for the tug and pull of their being and its corresponding essence.” Kenneth said.
“Beyond the difficulty of meeting another who is capable of loving as you love, there is the added obstacle of time and place, of availability, of slots in ones emotional schedule. Because there is such a thing as having no time for love. I have seen it, felt it, lost it-- once again I face another ending, because of it.” I said, stirring a bit of sugar into my double shot americano. “But does that make it any less a real love, or have we become cultured to no longer view love as the highest, the deepest, the most profound language in life?”
Kenneth thought for a moment before responding.
“How else could we act en mass, continually sacrificing pure beauty and loves laughter for jobs, parents, drinking buddies or a lifestyle lived in complete abandonment of the basic virtues concerning the universal power of a soul/body/mind connection. Meet the twenty-first century, Paul. The time when happiness is made out to be inconvenient.”
“I hate the ups and downs of a relationship. One minute the love simply flows, the next, you marvel at it having ever existed at all. At least, this how mine have always behaved, covering all ranges on the spectrum. Perhaps others share loves less fraught with storm, wind and breaker. Or is love, by its very nature as a chaotic embodiment of the cosmos, doomed towards the tempestuous?” I said.
“You can wonder and you can worry but it will only make you weary,” Kenneth said.
“I am determined to not let myself go down with out a fight this time, that much I know, clearly,” I said. So often did I crumple when the heart has grown dry. I sipped my drink and grimaced. It was still hot.
“Is it that love is so very seasonal? Are there droughts, blizzards, cold winds and hail stones?” I said. For surely there were times when petals alone floated on the breeze and all about me sifted the gleam lights of spring. Blue sky days and afternoon suns, sometimes warm, others hot, hot enough to burn, bake and by virtue of its intensity, dry choke that which its dancing had awoke. I wanted to know when it was okay to cut and run. When was I expected to stick it out, fight the good fight? How was one supposed to know?
“Is it based upon the obstacles faced? The love involved? Something else entirely? More so than any time in the past does this love look impossible to preserve. And yet, never have I been more eager to prevent such a loss. Oh love, what a chaotic cosmic conundrum,” I said, yelling. I died a little death every time my hands let slip golden dust.
“Love is tragic,” Kenneth said, matter of factly.
I thought about wanting a quieter existence, the way I was before Alice, in the breaks lived between those many high peaks silhouetting the horizon of my heart.
Mine was always the little hut, half in a rut, slack riding the hill side in slick style. Books lay open in meadows half read, dozing in a noonday sun. It was always noon on my moon, forever happy lunches and close friends with their close, convivial chatter.
The weather outside my home was often warm. Sometimes it grew so hot as to drive us all into the stream before laying upon the back porch shade with our eyes closed, spitting watermelon seeds into the air. There were days of wind when, in order to make it, you had to wear sweaters and have someone to hold when walking the paths at sundown. Most of all I knew when the weather would sour, when it would sweeten. I could emotionally prepare myself for the coming changes.
I strove for good news. I wanted to look at Alice in the eye and know that it was all real. Something fluttered in the corner of my eyes, a blinking like bicyclists whirring past a window. I was at my table in her bath robe drinking coffee because I had not had any sleep. I was staring at the phone because I had not seen her in a week, fingering her perfume, because the scent made me forget and feel high. Why shouldn't the moon believe me, when I blamed it all on her? The thickness of my scars was no way to gage the pain she had already presupposed me to have felt.

“Let's change the subject. I'm sick of hearing about you and Alice, no offense or anything. But I've been thinking about love and the domination aspect to it, how we are basically seeking out someone to master when we search for love,” Kenneth said.
“To master something is to become the god of it. To be master is to be god. To be god is to master,” I said.
“What then of those that seek mastery? How can it not be seen as self involved idolatry? Whether it is a mastery of an attitude, a sport, a past time, hobby, job, relationship, exercise, the fact that the leaden cowl of godhood is the end goal lumps these self seeing visionaries into a potentially identical category. They seek to dominate. To become the apex, the pinnacle of a wide pyramid called ability,” Kenneth said.
“God, by very nature, is a specific ideal. In this way, so is the concept of mastery. Humanity, by very nature, is an infinite ideal. We are everything and nothing. When it is all boiled down to molecular soup there is not one specific virtue or atom within us. We are universal, infinite beings. To seek mastery is to make a mockery of what we are. It is to place blinders on an all seeing and all penetrating glow,
shrouding a light with the false hope of intensifying the little that remains, into specificity; into mastery; into godhood,” Kenneth said.
“Yet, truly we cannot make ourselves into gods, for that would be the greedy lord placing the mantle of mastery on his own shoulders, though he wove that fine drapery from his own socks and trousers,” I said.
“We are gods, but not in the rigid definition we continue to demand. The object of Life Mastery, Enlightenment, those ultimately pure and holy ideals, is not done so that we might swim oceans, bend the wills of others or throw lightning bolts. The pure goal is to be the lightning and the lightning strike, to be the swimmer and the waves in which he swims, to be the bend and the will and the others.
“It is to be all. Never one. You must satisfy and nurture your infinity. Never peer overlong down one rabbit hole, Paul, for there are thousands in every field that is sunny and green,” Kenneth said.























The Godson
~* 42 *~

At the local bar on a Saturday night I met Bonzes, Kenneth's godfather, for the first time. It was a gourmet pizza joint called Piacci's. I celebrated my birthday there every year and had a funny relationship with the hostess, though twenty years my senior.
Bonzes was Native American-
“Of the Buffalo family,” he said, laughing with eyes that were gray tired but full of hidden spark.
He was from South Dakota. He was around fifty years old, with long black braids and gray hair curling down his forehead, falling like gray water from the black shifts in his cowboy hat. The hat was black and tasseled. It did not look particularly authentic, more like something purchased from a dollar store. He told stories of when he was in Vietnam, how he rescued a friend with only a forty-five, then fled through Noolong until he reached the Cambodian border. He told the story of how a whore saved his life. He told about how he was arrested once for disorderly conduct and then he cussed the cop out and told him, “I am going to shoot you in the head; I am going to kill you!” Here he paused, seeming to reflect, before continuing, “Actually, I take that back, first I am going to cut your fucking throat, then I am going to shoot you in the head!”
Bonze was a fascinating individual. I liked him immediately. He had lived a fantastic, colorful life, yet it was colored by his personality, more than instances brought upon by outside forces. He had gripped his life by the reins and was living it how he wanted. Now he worked installing shamanic sauna rooms in peoples basements, going from town to town, meeting old friends and making new ones.
Early the next morning we staggered out of the bar, splitting off at the intersection for our homes. Into the still night Bonze shouted,
“Tonight was far out, tomorrow should be a trip, lost in napsack wonderland, searching for the mystic yoga counselor, she of many tricks and errored poses.”
I hoped to meet him again.
Ever since that night, whenever I found myself in a sauna, be it at a spa or the home of an acquaintance, I thought of Bonze and wondered if he had blessed the wood with his Buffalo chants and tribal incantations. I wondered if he had fought with the owners and gotten drunk on the job, if he had been run out of town or if he had made off with a daughter and the pickup.
I pictured him forever walking down lamp lit sidewalks at three in the morning, braids askew, mouth full, spitting history, whiskey fire, sadness and purity.
























Ancient Head Ringer Legendary Glory Cowboy Famished With Nothing To Save
~* 43 *~

At breakfast I remembered a dream I had the night before that made me break down and cry. Alice had not gotten up yet. It was just me alone in her kitchen, morning sun coming in the balcony glass, bathing everything in the new days warm welcome. In my dream it was evening.
The whistling sun began to fade. Lonesome self kept solitary except for meals or a quick game of cards. Soon the children voted for increased supervision. “Involvement.” “Outside world.” A walk and walk with the dog, son nearby, big arm around my shoulders, toe tips twitching with claustrophobia. He speaks of love, thankfulness, cerulean eyes thinking only senility.
Colors retained shape with perfect movement. Sounds came through, crisp leaf disintegrating between clutched fist, clear crystal definition. Composure maintained, laugh loud and smile, furrowing brow only when needed, telling tall tales to the toddlers in a desperate attempt to tame their traditions.
But still they looked, awkward, sideways, corner eying. Thinking, “Grandpa sure is getting weird these days...”
Even in my dream did I cry. My old grandfather self broke down crying and the dream room seemed to freeze. They all looked up at me from their business and stared. No one spoke, no one moved, they just stared. I tried to smile at the gathering. I tried to make peace with the situation. I tried to let them forget that I always did that sort of thing at parties. I tried to let myself forget that I could not seem to help it.



















Falling Short You Leaf
~* 44 *~

What was it I saw, through shimmer veiled futures, the cloud swept seas, past the worn cobble winds of my pattern history. Only this, tiny hilltops close cropped by cloud mop. Green grassy stops on sun slopes filled with dandelion motes and butterfly hopes covered in soft squares of white cotton. My bluebell heart burst in longing for a summer glow The kind of mallow contentment found in the spreading of blankets for sandwich picnics and duffeled food. Packs close to burping with bottles of cool ginger brew, grapefruit and huge slabs of chocolate darker than hickory spit.
From sunshine's afterthought had my back been turned. A leaving of sorts, a shedding of skins and layers, whose permutations and granulations I still seemed to recognize, when I held a mirror to view my face anew. If nothing had changed, why then the changing, cohabitation of shadows, the embered charcoal fire imprints and collapsed tents, littering the enduring roadside promise of Far Off And Away.
What troubled me was consistency, of which life seemed to have an awful lot of. What happened before could not be looked at as a sort of proof against it ever happening again. Rather, it was an assurance that it had entered the so often referred to but never accepted realm of possibility.
While yesterdays spilled laughter waterfalled from the bowl of my heart this morning and on to the tucked lip kisses of another thousand tomorrows, so did the crow ever fly from one dark sky to the next. So did moons fall and tyrants rage, serpents crawled and the pillagers paved new cross streets for corporate slogans to emblazon, colors flying fuzzing neon blooms into a poisoned cobalt midnight.
The infinite promise of morning sun. The run of tears and melding of smiles, in fires cooked up beside limestone cliffs, crowding a wave crushed span of fancy pebbled sand and there were hands warming hands and fingers etching hieroglyphs or star routes between spine nubs clothed in the ebullience of skin scents, the crushed petals of peppermints, roses and clove. A light misting of myths is all this young sailor needs. A deft breeze to keep the wings taught and the nose clean. An expanse of sky that I might dip my ink needy quill and gain a sustenance by the sentinel assurance of diamond eyes.


The Time It Rained And You Were There
~* 45 *~

“How do we tell!?” These words I shouted to nobody in particular.
“What is this lamp I see, posting light in a rolling darkness?”
Words whispered as my voice gave way to thought. Dive come the shadows when electron spools spin silver in the air, knitting a circular street glow. At the far edge of town, on a sullen cul-de-sac, deserted save the single story house of red brick and ivy. Though I could not see it then, on overcast evenings when the sky kept its lids clamped shut, the house was there, standing on the far left side, framing a northwestern horizon for one entering on the south drive. The house was my uncles house. I continued to forget that it was, and always this forgetting came on deep nights when I stood in the round bed of tulips. An island of red within a sea of glistening asphalt. I stared at the empty silhouette where a part of me remembered an old home that spoke softly of youth.
Then the street light flickered on, sounding out in the still autumn dark, a buzzing. A constant vibration like a vision filled with airborne locusts. Most times I would go back to bed when the buzzing started. I would go back inside, grab a glass of home mixed Gatorade from the fridge, drink it, set it on the bathroom counter, use the toilet, don't flush, then sneak into the attic to the spare futon where I kept an old pillow and sleeping bag. Curl up and fall asleep.
But not that night. Just as I was lifting my leg to walk back into the house, I observed a new rumble somewhere above the buzzing street lamp. It was deeper, but growing louder, as it dripped down from high up in the atmosphere. It made made land fall as a gargantuan blasting explosion. Sonic distortions spread through out my body before culminating between my ear drums and cleansing me of thought. Thunder.
I had never known thunder to drip before, never thought of it like that, but that night, occurring when it did and where it did, it just came to me and made perfect sense. It was how sound appeared to me, the waves approaching from far off in the distance, traveling closer and picking up in power and intensity. A droplet of rain formed beside the thunder in a cloud forty thousand feet up, its song I wished to hear.

“Paul.”
Hearing her voice I whirled around, all thoughts of buzz and rumble thunder going the way of a startled raven. Alice. Seeing her again after choking on so much emotional distance crammed into three short days really shook me up. She was all tears and I felt on the verge as well.

"I missed you so much."
I wrapped my arms about her and lifted her up. She kissed me. I kissed back, then pulled away to look into her eyes. They sparkled wetly in the orange light of the lamp post.

"That was too long to be away from you."

"I don't think I can do that again."

"No-"

She kissed me again. This time all passion, all lips wet slipping with fresh rain.

***

We lay entwined on the tops of her sheets. The air was around was cold. I said as much.
"It is cold in here."

Alice looked up at me and blinked coyly.

"Is it?"
"I think I could make a good calendar about bad romantic lines."
"What did you just think of?"
"Well, I was thinking about saying, 'baby, I'd be happy to throw my back out for you when I'm eighty and your eighty three."
"What's so bad about that?"
"Well, I mean, it's all about the situation. Like for the one we are in, post coital, still merged, sweaty, then you bring up the image of wrinkly old bags of time going at it, flapping about, and it's just kind of gross. Total turn off. Unless you don't think so?"
"No, it's gross. You're right. That does disturb the glow."








A Communion Or Symbiosis Realized
~* 46 *~

A quick conversation with Kenneth and we were in my car, driving to his home by the beach. We were going to celebrate Alice and I's departure with a huge fiesta of sorts. We planned on taking good sized doses of hallucinogenic tea and dancing around a fire in the sand. Kenneth shared in our evidential excitement, laughing with us as we sipped at our mugs and trudged down his forest path to where the ocean lay sleeping. It was chilly out but we all wore plenty of layers and Alice's gentle guitar strumming distracted from physical needs, while soothing our spirits.
We had made a couple of torches, huge affairs with a complicated system of socks and paint thinner. But they looked and sounded very real, giving off a hollow whooshing sound when swung swiftly through the air. A tribal procession through ancestral woods gave me the idea to start chanting. It came as nonsense at first, but it slowly progressed into actual words, a slow low droned naming of the objects surrounding us, repeated and repeated until a new one cried out, demanding to hear its name.
“Tree,” said Alice.
“Pine needle,” said Kenneth.
On a fallen log we sat, drinking in the quiet darkness of a coastal forest late at night. I began to notice a presence, or more specifically, more than one. I could sense them on all sides and above me. I could not figure out what they were, or where their power was emanating from.
“Earth,” said Alice.
“Fern,” said Kenneth.
“Time,” said I.
At that word, Kenneth stopped short and hurled his torch deep into the woods. He ran towards the orange halo cast up by the torch from its bed in the pine and began to dance around it. Stocky of frame, I had never known Kenneth to be agile, let alone to have skills dancing. Even still, he wove a pleasant series of spirals in the air with his hands and he circled the light like a drunken, spinning top down to its last turns.
I remained on the fallen tree and began to notice something. All the trees were leaning away from the spot where the torch lay. All of them. I began to quietly mutter some holy phrases in Sanskrit, apologizing for out intrusion into the solace that these beings made their home. As I raised my head upon finishing my quiet prayer, a multitude of trees seemed to have leaned this way and that, still away from the flames, but making themselves visible, as if to respond thankfully in kind. I was in total awe and whispered to leave the torch. I explained what had just happened and Kenneth began to get creeped out. I calmed him down, saying that the trees were not mad, only slightly displeased.
“Well, should we put it out?” Kenneth asked, his tone full of worry.
I opened my mouth to respond but the torch instantaneously blinked out. The woods where it lay were once again relentlessly dark. Peace with nature, restored. I was jubilant, for I felt like I had, for the first time in as long as I could remember, done something right.
“Everything you ingest, be it nourishment of the physical sort, or the emotional, be it bread or sunshine, they all change the frequency that you operate and live your life on. Similar to audio frequencies, in that the human ear cannot pick up waves that cats and dogs can, there are mental frequencies that the human mind, in it's dormant state, cannot pick up on. But just now, with our ranges of perception broadened, we have, in a sense, tapped into the brain waves of trees and their lowly counterparts, bushes, grass, etcetera. Maybe not direct communication, but a connection just the same.”
The World Is A Mess There Is Garbage All Around Us
~* 47 *~

“One of my favorite memories of my father is us doing haiku's together, when bike riding or walking along the edge of water, during my visits to him up at the asylum,” I said.
“Haiku with your pops? That sounds illin'. What a fun experience, exploring and spelunking around the caverns of our parents memories, experiences, knowledge. It is such a fascinating ride,” Kenneth said.
“Yes, because in doing that we are always connecting more threads and darkening in various colors that make up our mental portraits of “mom” and “dad.” Your haiku experience sounds like a really solid thread to answer some sort of lingering or trailing ideas that relate to your father,” Alice said.
“I never did understand. What made him lose it, your dad? Was it drugs? Acid maybe?” Kenneth said.
“LSD does not make people crazy. However, it makes the crazy ones crazy enough to get noticed. Like, Timothy is to crazy, he is front page nuts. I myself am behind the scenes crazy. As long as I don't dose or something and don't act too much a fool, I can keep being secretly crazy and no on will notice. Are you secretly crazy? Are we all?” I said.
“What is crazy anyway?” Kenneth said. “is crazy the inability to take care of oneself, to survive, to eat, shit and sleep? Is crazy losing the ability to interface with others, to learn, to teach, to exchange? Is that crazy?”
“I think it is impossible to pinpoint,” Alice interjected, “Like a snowflake, slightly different every time around, with a few base similarities and parallels, but over all different each time it manifests.”
“I was sent a video the other day in my email. It was from a friend who I would normally not associate with the grotesque. It was shot on a hand held personal camera, by some teenagers driving in a car. The footage showed one of the teenagers leaning out the door to throw something at a house. After throwing the item, the boy loses balance and falls out of the car door and hits the pavement, just as a car drives up from the opposite direction. The video then slows down the shot, showing how the boy fell out of the car, and before he even touched the ground, was hit head on by the front of the incoming sedan. Fucking clocked in the god damned head. What do you think of that?” Kenneth said.
“I think it's disgusting. That makes me sick.” I said.
“Don't be such a wanny Paul. Sure it's fucked up, but so is life, you just have to have a sense of humor.” Alice said.
“Sense of humor? Not about some shit like that. Think of the kids family. Think of his friends. How shitty must they feel?” I said.
“They had to of had a sense of humor, if you think about it. Why else would they put up that footage for all the world to see, unless they were willing to cope with their buddy's demise.” Kenneth said.
“Wait- he died?” Alice said.
“What, did you think he made it? How could you? Your brain would fucking explode. Taking a hit like that, it would burst open like a fresh pomegranate, bits of brain seed all over the grill. Now that's a car prolly needed a damn good wash.” Kenneth said.
“See? This is what pisses me off. I could talk about the awful things of this world but that will do nothing to help eradicate them. Telling maggots to eat maggots will only breed more maggots. I believe in fighting that which disgusts using a spin on the world that shades everything in blue. It is softer, easier to swallow, never quite dark as it is overtly melancholic. But this makes the sunny days easier to appreciate, without having the memory of hail storms and wet socks playing such an integral part on the future, as shadowed experiences tend to do, if only by virtue of their having stained so many facets of our recognizable perception. But still it seems we have this perverse fascination with the macabre, the villainous, the terrible.
“I mean, you guys give me shit about being a, what was it, wanny? But it is because I don't want to fill your ears with that kind of filth. It just isn't necessary. But I could. I can get real nasty if you like, because I have heard just as many fucked up stories about the world as you. And I'd wager I have an even more overactive imagination that you all. Gross out shit like the horror movies of today is cheap entertainment. Anyone can think of all that.”










Global Warming
~* 48 *~

“What are you thinking about?” Alice said.

“How much I miss- but there isn't any point in getting redundant. What I feel and miss and want and need are so convoluted and messy that I try and look at it and tell people what I see, but in truth it is all just a jumbled mess. For me to take any sort of rationality from the jumbled buffet dish of my desires would be a serious exercise in foolishness. I have learned that by now. I can only say that 'I feel' because for me to zero in on a whim or thought that may or may not be passing is not entirely correct, right, the good thing, what ever. I don't know what I feel or what I think, suffice to say I do both of and I do them regularly?” I said.
“What does that even mean? That you can't have specific feelings? That there is nothing you ever nail down, there is nothing you can rely on, emotionally? How can you live your life that way, if you do not have any road marks or points to stop along the way? Are you saying that you don't know if you miss me or not? What of discernment? What of vigilance? What of self-discovery? What of character? What of health? What of potential? What of navigation? What of honesty?What of education? What of sparkling? Sometimes I feel as though I am a snow-covered branch ~ allowing the warmth to melt some of the weight off. Lifting me to new heights.” Alice stopped and shook her head. “Drip, Paul. Drip.”

There we were, Alice and I, standing in an empty field full of thick grasses. The stars overhead. A breeze tossing our hair. It was fall. Overly hot, but cooling fast to a more comfortable temperature. We arrived before one another, the both of us breathless. We stopped, breathing heavily, hands on our knees, just looking at each other. “What are you doing here?” our parallel looks seemed to say. We were both equally shocked at seeing the other there, in the grassy meadow at the tail end of twilight, because we had so thoroughly thought we had begun the jog alone. And then I had stumbled through a thicket; and Alice a dense wood of fallen evergreens; popping out in an open space, running face to face with the very person we may or may not have been running from or for.



There Was A Girl For Her I Named The Sky
~* 49 *~

“A sleepy night in Denver--” I thought I might remember the rest but the suddenness of fall had gotten me, off guard and listless. Summer pleas turn three circles on their way to the ground. What then of autumns find, the memory found in lost behinds and green rewinds, to days of glass sharp smiles, a harmonica and all the friends one could ever hope to keep. A cathedral. Bells. Picnic blankets, Frisbees and foot balls in the air. Laughter. Sunshine. A magical sort of happiness meant to change a predisposed energy. It was the energy of a spook that snuck up on me and tried to get at my soul. I did not let it, because I knew when someone was trying for my throat and I knew how to get the bastards off. Knock them off my throat. Kick them in their throat. Rupture something vicious enough to cause them never to return. I felt like that was something I might enjoy. Hurting. Maiming. Injuring. But what then of repercussions, a reverse system of evolutionary growth? Who knew. All I understood was the sunset and the stars and the cold and the thought that I should call her, pounding again and again in restless waves like the surf and the clouds and the wind on the grass.
There was a girl. She walked blue paths wearing sandals and a sun hat. I can remember being beside her, tight roping a grass ledge, eyes glancing now and then darting, daring to catch the wry grins never ever seen, and I marveled. For her I built my bones
There was a girl. She bought me sweaters and wore them until I came, then slept, graceful and tummy tucked, sprawled upon the sand. Her head I cradled lovely like. Her hands, I treasured those. The rest to me was all a light, to which I fluttered, flew. The clouds with her seem like birds or men, dark vapors above the foam. The west always bleeds at sundown, but there are darker sins at home. I learn spare whispers from my hands and for her I lend my skin.
There was a girl. She ran on mornings still dim with night, thinking as she moved, about mountain tops, forget-me-nots and wine glasses full of mood. I have heard all of her fears, swift shapes within still dark. Should I have shared my own and more, damp wicks in need of spark. For her I gave my heart.

The day before I went by myself to Russian Gulch, a state park, with the intention of taking a solo stroll. The forecast called for ninety five percent chance of rain. When I had left my house it was overcast, gray and a storm was most definitely on the horizon. Disregarding the obvious implications held in the firmament of sky, I purchased certain items to aid me on my journey. Namely, a hemp pull over from the store Twist, a veggie sandwich, bottled water, a Reeds extra ginger brew and a little jar of hot porcini mushroom soup. I placed all of these things into my backpack, which already held my computer, headphones and a freshly rolled blueberry joint.
I drove to the park and stopped my car in a spot nearing the en trance to a system of trails that wound up and down the wooded coastal headlands. Vigilant of the impending showers I carried with me a long umbrella, striped with the colors of our nations flag. I thought of Alice. Was it because the umbrella was in some distant way hers? Or because I thought of her as some sort of metaphor, like some collection of colored canvas stretched over thin wire that protects me from the wet and the cold.
No matter.
A series of winding paths that twisted through a beautiful autumn forest, coming out on a series of bluffs overlooking the sea lay before me. One of these out crops of rock jutted just a little bit from the tree line. It was there I began to walk, setting off up the trail for a half mile until I popped out at the top of the path. Looking down, it was easy to visualize a time hundreds of years before, when no white man walked the hallowed paths and only the brown skinned natives crept through leafy byways, beneath sun stilled boughs, on hunts and for play. I imagined native youths, all skin and muscles, whooping and hollering as they flew the trails. Their goal would be the outlook of stone, off of which they would soar, arms spread wide as if in welcome to the rushing air and blinding sun, before touching palms above the head, diving immaculately into the ocean water a hundred feet below. I christened the spot, Indian Diving Board.
Sitting on the diving board felt like I had entered into a new dimension, one that was full of magic and serenity. The ocean lay fat and curled below me, wrapped about the various headlands. All was made gentle by mists borne of the liquid surface, giving everything a shrouded feel. The distant hills were softened and rounded, as were the lines of redwoods and pine; the far away beaches. I thought of pebbles that could not exist, ones that were at once both fuzzy and cloud like, yet permanent as forever. Looking back into the forest gave way to visions filled with tangled branches, criss crossed trees, jumbled confusion. Looking outward, in the direction of the sea, everything became delicate and tranquil. It was an amazing dichotomy of elements, chaos and innocence side by side, blending into a single breath of sublimity.























Kenneth Shares Hot Chocolate With Alice
~* 49 *~

A day of rain like any other. I am working on ads for the bottling company on my computer. The rain flicks and slides down the windows of Kenneth's home. The walls feel very thin and lacking protection. Kenneth and Alice are at the table, drinking hot chocolate. Kenneth is telling her his story.
“It was the winter I ran away from home,” He began.
“I remember thinking, back in the fall, before it got so dreadfully cold and oppressive, I remember saying to myself, “perhaps I really don’t like this old mess after all,” and so I packed my bags and split, for California, where old friends were within reach, a telephone call and a drive down the coast. Coming from the trailer spot I rented on the coast, friends would not even be far, a hundred miles, maybe less.
“But then again, what is five hundred miles if it is just you and your car, with the windows down, trees, ocean and sky whipping past in a flash of blue. The stereo is full of Jim Croce and your feeling real fine, just hollering your throat raw because there isn’t anyone to tell you otherwise, save the screaming wind and he seems to almost join you and Jim, in the choruses, all three of you singing about time and bottles and love.
“It was why I left, love. I had lost all the love I had. Maybe not reason enough for some, but it was plenty for me. The pots were still around, of course, but the gold was gone, and the iron shone dull and dark, and nothing in my heart held time for gleaming. But no one has time for grieving, they have all seen their leaves vanish, leaving the branches empty and bare, as many times as any, so what have they to do with broken hearts and lost loves? Never more will the saddle-pond cry tears in autumn for the shedding birch. It has already seen a thousand departures and knows it will see a thousand more. Thus is it so, for we whose chests are full of beating drums in a darkness, muffled.
“Likewise, I have chosen not to dwell on the details of my losing, suffice to say I chose to leave, rather than stay. I got cold feet. The wind shifted and I found myself searching for a different scent, a something less desolate; less apt to breed loneliness. So I came to quit my job and leave my house and family. I said goodbye to the barren plains and flannel skies, to the gray scraggled trees, thrust upward in grim determination, like the questing hands of some poor soul who had been buried alive, I said farewell to the place that seemed to amplify the inner vision of my soul. I packed my car up with all I had and drove west.
“California is everything I had been looking for and more. It was beautiful, free, and the ocean mirrored stars I had never known to sparkle. I met up with my godparents and got reacquainted with the man I used to call Bonzes when I was five. I hadn't seen or heard from him since he moved away from the Midwest and the cold, so many years before. He had simply faded away, a sorry connection to the wonderful woman who had brought me into the world. I met up with my old friends and began to take it easy, living off savings and social security.
“I spend most of my days by the beach, working on my music, drinking good wine and smoking. Life is near idyllic by comparison.”

Comparison, or contrast? Which is it one wants when providing a judgment or concern? What did I do to fill my days? Before Alice came along, I would sit in solitude for days. The television would always be on. Even in my dreams did the incessant flickering penetrate, casting my pocket moments in an eerie strobe. Acute delusions, a fragmented photograph of blurred imagery, colored a green gold, has to come from some summer outing to the hillside.
Somewhere in my wanderings I touched upon the very fringes of heaven and returned, trailing dim streams of the divine, the sensation of which, when contacted, creates feelings that are at first frightening, then lonesome, in an almost melancholy way, like the vision of an eagle, a solitary speck upon blue slate, playing unseen drafts and piping a kings shrill whistle, though the everything of else lay far below.

















Permanent Thought Oxymoronic
~* 50 *~

It was mid November. Just starting to get cold. The night before had found the ground covered in the stretched ice wrinkles of an early winter frost.
It was growing harder to feel things right, the weather seemed to clog and restrict the flow of warmth that normally emanated from the heart. Jackets could not keep out the chill, nor socks. What was needed was skin, skin that did not belong to you, someone else's. Only with skin could one wrap themselves up and feel secure when the weather turned as it had.
Which is why I was heading over to Alice's house, seeking out that which would serve to melt metals and meld them into something more coherent, something whole.
To begin I did laundry, two loads. I trimmed my beard. I gave myself an oil massage, then showered it off, preparing my skin for softness. That day I only ate oranges and mangoes. I wanted to be sweetness for her. Tropical with a citrus bite. My head was so full with whirl I found it difficult to focus at work. I could only picture her, so close, so close I found myself chewing my tongue over and over again, desperate to bite into something wet, delicious and alive.
We had not spoken in days due to incongruency of schedules. The curse of having lives that refused to parallel. Falling at alternate speeds, how is one supposed to reach out and calm a fast beating heart? Oh, to have the ability to stretch, across space, across time. To stick ones hand through the mess of tangled shock wires surrounding a soul, in order to grasp that which some go their whole lives searching out.
I was confident I could handle the electricity. The charge. I would grit my teeth, for times were when it was painful. Times where when I could smell the char of something burning inside. But it was worth it. It is worth it.
No matter how buried in telephone conversations and paperwork the day might make me, I knew that, through all of it, I would be looking at the clock, that window into a world of numbers counting down, counting down to sparks and fireflies and a night sky blooming phosphorescent from the glow of six weeks worth of dreaming, realized.




What Is Like Love
~* 51 *~

We were in Alice's apartment, sifting through a trunk, pulled from her closet. It was late, nearly midnight. We were both drunk. She held up a valentines day card. It was lace with glitter and hearts glued to the front. She smiled and cocked her head. She dug through the trunk as she talked, stopping at certain photos for a brief smile and then it was on to the next tid bit, the next morsel of an ancient past.
“I love looking at old stuff, done by an old you, that was at one time you, but now there is so little resemblance remaining. Isn't that strange? Like, since I was five my cells have been remade and reformed two or three times. Even on a molecular level I am no longer the old myself, just a new myself. Very complicated eh? What really intrigues me is when my sister Grace tells some story about her childhood and I realize that she is actually telling a story from my child hood. She just heard it told so many times she began to actually think it had happened to her. And it got me thinking, at this point in time, she lived that experience just as much as I really did. Because we all both have available for us to “remember, are the “remembered” perceptions offered up by our brains and she has clearly created just as real of memories as the ones I know to actually be real. Are you following me? I am not sure I am. But either way, that is all I had to say really. Unless you want to talk more on the subject. I'd be fine with that. As long as you reined it in to something a bit more finite and understandable.” Alice said.
“Have you read much of Langston Hughes' work? I have come to a fork in the road with it. I am either all about it, or hesitating for reason. Any thoughts?” I said.
“While I cannot say I have any actual books by Hughes, I do love his movies. Ah, the joys of being young in the eighties... but I digress.” Alice said.
“Anything I have read in anthologies and what not I have always immensely enjoyed. I find the rhythm of his thoughts to be very strange, very alien, very unlike my own, yet wonderful and fluid all the same. He has a real trickle movement to his poetry, a slow lilting, dip dip dip dip daaa dip. And it sometimes switches from streams to waterfalls: sliiippppp whoooosh, bam.
“So when you say you are either all about it or hesitating for a reason, I sort of understand you. But that could be used to describe any poet, couldn't it? At least poets one enjoys or finds pleasurable to read.” I said.
“Definitely! Like, for some reason you really dig their voice, their wisdom, what they have to say about their perspective on reality, but when put upon to explain that reason for digging this author or that, it grows much harder. It would be so much simpler if we could all just say, “me gusta blank” and that would be it. We didn't have to explain the reason behind the me gusta, it was simply accepted as existing, no need to support its existence with some sort of self conjectured hypothesis.” Alice said.
“Yes, and that leads me to basic human interactions. Why isn't it as simple as just saying “I like this. I don't like that' or 'I like you. I don't like you.' There is always this damnable why. And the why isn't necessarily posited by outside forces. I tell myself, 'I like this person' and then something cries out in my head. “Yeah, but why?” And so I explain it to myself. “Well, they make me feel warm inside when I think about them. They make me smile. I feel more complete when they are around. The air doesn't seem so empty-”
“Nothing fills a room like being in the company of one you care about. Sorry, go on.” Alice said.
“And so I come away feeling more or less satisfied. But what irritates me is the need for this convincing. We have evolved into such untrusting creatures, even going so far as to question our instincts and the primal lightning that resides in the spine, the that that chooses to shoot out in sharp bursts when triggered by things in the world most usually associated with giving happiness.” I said. “but let's change the subject, huh? I get so worked up about these things. I am always trying new things, lately it is more popcorn. What about you?”
Alice screwed up her face and tapped her chin.
“Welll, I'd say grapefruit. Not that it is anything new in the standard sense. But I have taken appreciation of this fruit to a whole new level. It makes me feel so, so visceral to eat a grapefruit. I've been eating like, three a day. It is such a large fruit, so full of pulp, so... fleshy. I peel off the outer rind, then split it into fourths. From the fourths I try and find a place to tear at the inner skin, carefully dissecting the various sections so that the little chunks of red orange pulp are completely exposed, no bitter layer left. Then I nibble, suckle and devour the organ like pieces of orangutan, emitting tiny squeals of delight the whole while. Bet you don't get that into popcorn, huh?” Alice said, turning her head coyly.
“My god woman. That was the hottest thing I have ever heard. I must have you!” I said.
“Call me a grapefruit and I'll think about it.” Alice said, putting down the picture in her hand and pushing the box aside.
“I'll call you much more than grapefruit, honey.” I said, crawling towards her, knee by knee, even as she slinked back in retreat, pushing her near prone body with her feet, eyes locked on mine.
“You are juice. Dew juice. Cloud juice whose mere memory makes my throat gurgle with the wetness of and lust of the tropics, bottled for my personal consumption.”
She stopped at the wall and her lips curled like the tail of a tiger, hot breathing with anticipation. I crawled until my head with level with her own and placed my hands at the side of her head, leaning in. She shrunk away from my lips until her head hit ground and I kissed her lips, sideways like, softly.
“I love you,” Alice purred.
“I love my grapefruit,” I replied.
“I'm too drunk and tired to make love to you right now, though I desperately want to.” Alice said, whispering.
“Me too. We should go brush our teeth. I need to take my contacts out.” I said.
“No,” Alice feebly shook her head, “Here, let's sleep right here. I don't want to let go of you.”
I laid my head upon her shoulder and draped my leg over her body, my hand shoved underneath her t-shirt, resting on her stomach, gentle gripping the soft skin. I was so tired.
We fell asleep with the lights on.




















Feeling Berry Pacific
~* 52 *~

We drank vodka and Oregon berry juice out of long island glasses primped by green flex straws stacked with pumpkin heads. She drew inside a large book, finger painting. I sat against the book case, reading a book I had found, The Dictionary of Epigrams. Glancing up at me, Alice said,
“Let's get out of here.”
“Go where?” I said.
“Anywhere. Let's just get up and be gone. I've been here too long.” Alice pulled her hair back, wrapped it into a pony tail and tucked it over her shoulder. “This place is beginning to change me.”

I was silent. I knew it too though. I had long ago noticed a shift. A mutation.

“I don't like me right now Paul. I want to be good, feel good about me, but I just don't think- no, it's not working,” Alice said.
“When should we go?” I asked.
“Now.”

What else was there to do, other than worry over some other missed opportunity. If I left I knew I would miss something. Opportunity though? Nah. I would only be missing out on a murder. My drink seemed to have gotten stronger. Less juice. More liquor. I was perhaps drunk, even. As a snack, Alice laid out a dish of black olives, sliced pickles and a small pat of veganaise. Each olive was laid across a pickle slice, then spread with a dollop of the veganaise.
“Such an odd combination. Weird. You know how I know it's weird? Because I feel each part would taste better alone, rather than as such a convoluted amalgamation of fairly intense flavors,” I said, after sampling.
“Well, I like it,” Alice said.
“Fuck it! I'm seriously in. Let's go, now.” I said.
“Really? But what about my cat, our stuff?” Alice said.
“We'll buy new stuff. We'll figure out the cat.” I put down the dictionary of epigrams, leaned and kissed Alice.
“We really only need to bring that which is irreplaceable,” I said.




The Beginning
~* 53 *~

We drove down 101 to San Francisco. The landscape was flawless, the mountains seemingly computer generated, so crisp and molded were the contours.
“It's either fake, or proof of the existence of god,” Alice said, “And I'd prefer the former.”
Looking up at the sky made me think of a video taken by an exploration submarine to the arctic. The camera filmed from a thousand feet below the surface of the ocean, looking upward. Above and all around the submarine loomed the bases of icebergs, craggy and immense. So looked the clouds, for they swallowed up the hilltops in intervals and the sun broke through only in gaps, giving everything a hallowed feel. Alice began to tap the window with her knuckles. She would not stop. I cleared my throat.
“I just had a question, about, uhm, you killing your uncle,” Alice said, staring out the window.
“Yeah,” I said, guardedly. Alice had not mentioned the subject since the beach. This was the first time she had verbally given it relevance in reality, “Go on.”
“Are you sure that idea would have worked? With the plants? I mean, you seemed so sure,” Alice said.
“I did the research. I found out a special African plant whose roots secrete a digestive enzyme into the surrounding soil to break solids down into liquid form, so that the nutrients can then be absorbed. I am positive it never would have been found out. Why do you ask, been thinking of killing anyone?” I said.
“No,” Alice said, her eyes squinting to focus on something outside the window, off in the distance, “Or at least, not recently.”