| Short Vignettes |
You no longer understand your own memories. They are fables that happened to the Other You. You reached in to the spice cabinet and found the ounce-bottle of cardamom, sticky and dusty, and sweet, but that was another life ago. You stuck your finger on the spiny home of a sea urchin- Happy and whiney, salty and free. Blood dripped in to the ocean, but it wasn’t me. Your fingers played out the desert wind. You flopped like a lily pad on to the shore and smiled at the moon, drenched to the core, sang. Such a child. You watch as the abscess grows stronger now. Love is a merciless disease. Fortissimo, stronger, lonesome dove! Jag out and roll away, a candle flame, a torch, stampede. Is this the dancing Devil? Once again you bleed. I crouch low and freeze, panicked and slow in the silky smooth. Saber-toothed dreams blanket me, my muscle, blood, bone, and my emptiness. One cannot stem the tide. They beckon to you, they demand your last respects. You must flee town as your dreams are drawn out to sea on the rip tide. You cannot escape this farewell. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Do you feel the sting? The sting of lime, of thin alpine air? The sour spark of being alive? It’s lurking under rotting stumps. It’s the dust in your hair. It falls in draughts out of attics. The taste is always in your mouth. It’s wick in the moss. We are all caught in the eddy, my friend. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It was a scorcher, but inside, the bus seats were small icebergs of plastic. She wasn’t used to conversations that began with alienation. There was dirt caked in the cracks in the flooring, and a hole in the seat cushion. She picked at the stuffing. He said suffering is something one just has to respect, and her hair fell across her eyes. Guilt rises like gray water in the drain, redundant and disgusting. It’s been many moons, many deaths, many perpetrators staring at their sandals on a summer day, wondering if they’ll ever repay the debt. She wondered if the cracks would be filled in, or the stuffing pulled out, leaving them both perching unsettled on the same historic precipice. His sleeve touched her shoulder and a grain of sand fell in to place, one grain in an empty mine. This world, it’s lit by a bare bulb swinging, wicked poltergeist’s plaything, impossible to ignore The bus door opens and the hot air rushes in. She rises stiffly and they climb off, the seat left with two identical imprints, one hole, and all its stuffing. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Quick, think of something to be! Once the trough comes out, comrades, all is lost, and it’s back to buffoonery. It’s one big festival of messy humanity, and the juice runs down your chin. Now is your last chance to be the hurricane wind, or the single tear of a wounded samurai. If you’ve ever wanted to be in anoxic heaven, the last chunk of rock on the top of the world, turn up your face and hold your breath. Be the bedraggled, the sodden sparrow, rusted chains in a prison cell. Be the pathos, the tragically beautiful, the forsaken landscape of the moon. Let your body feel the ether in the void, the incalculable secrets that I know you dream about. What is your deafness making you hear? Can you hear the clear voices, the pure streams of insanity? They’re telling you to slowly turn around. Mind the demons. Move slowly. They’re menacing and grimacing in blood-red over your back, slithering away as you turn, meek as drooping leaves. Tentacles coil back in to your chair. Only a shadow remains. Push your chair away, walk from your garden of fiends. It’s dinner time, and soon your glow of satisfaction will outshine their beady eyes. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You can’t see me mouthing the words as you speak them, squeezing my eyes shut and remembering how they go. You can’t hear me humming along to your mountain of pain. You can’t smell the rain, the thunder, the symphony of remorse. It’s your chair all alone in the dungeon cell, cement chipping away and steel teeth bared. There’s a filthy blanket on the floor but the icy chill is so familiar, you crave it. I’m a hot-blooded creature and you shy away. Misery hates company. My hands are gentle killers. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- My ankles are throbbing and the pulse of life has got me behind bars, but any way the wind blows I’ll follow along, dragging my chains behind me like Jacob Marley’s Ghost. The ceiling is shaking and the piano sounds through the floorboards. Upstairs the sugarplums are dancing late in to the night. Can Turtles Fly? I’m seeing purple plastic slippers and severed limbs and kerosene and I’m thinking the answer is yes. A shiver crawls across my skin. The numbers on the blackboard march on and on. I’m learning aromatic hydrocarbons, limonene and pinene, and the pricks of pain as I thumb through the pages aren’t neurons fusing in my brain. The walls of the room slink away and I’m looking over a misty ledge. No, it’s the acrid remembrance that burns. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- There was a dead whale on Crane Beach. It was a young pilot whale, 3 weeks gone and shriveled like a mummy. Its skin was a deep red and yellow, covered with dried salt. Its belly was gone, chewed away by sharks, flesh hanging in dry yellow strings around a gaping wound. No eye peering out of the shrunken socket. The tail curved awkwardly around its back, a last hint of grace. The smell wasn’t notice able upwind, but downwind it was unbearable. The mouth was frozen in to a smile, rounded nose tilted up, little baby teeth bared. |
She's the kind of girl who believes in never being caught without art supplies. She turns in her homework in technicolor with little notes to the TA that will clear away the clouds and cause pansies to sprout from every orifice. She's sure she can communicate with the rocks, the dead, the distant stranger - in fact, communion with all things visible and invisible settled in her vertebrae long ago, and therefore each wisp of breeze is another installment in the universal saga. She curls up, puts her head on your shoulder, and listens. Dirt doesn't bother her. It's just one more way a think can begin to grow. She'll maintain her radiance as she cleans out the sink or drags the garbage to the curb. She'll lead you to a mud flat in the river and leave colorful rocks in the riverbed to brighten the day of the most drab tadpole. She'll drift by you with a single feather and leave it by your breakfast bowl, and it means everything. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- this isn't the interstate man, it's the hot highway branding insanity in to us. the wind's cold and, yeah, it's getting mean, but the sun ain't giving up yet and we'll keep pace until we all give up and collapse in to a truck stop. we'll be eating peanuts on a concrete wall, the three of us. i remember when i was a little kid and the cruddy suspension rocked me to sleep in the back, all twisted up in the seatbelts and resting on my mom's sweater. how did we grow up so fast? did you ever imagine we'd be cranking this junk bucket through this suburban wasteland, loving the rush of the air and washing bugs off the windshield? i never thought it'd be like this, man. i thought when you grew up you and your buddies always knew what you were doing, and here we are, lost as hell and still staring at the sun, screw all the warnings, we're ready to go blind. |