Train be my feet

The round black olives, beetles sweating in their plastic. A green line tears through me, a sling shot stone, sounds like the flange of a bow when it hits square between the shoulders. In Salinas a man takes out the trash, waving waving waving at the passing train. Two girls with their fathers, in tutus, a car brimming with beaming ladies and a leathery grandpa. They take out their trash at this time every day. Watch this gleaming panopticon wink by. Be weightless, say the instructions, wave wave wave, say the instructions. 

Out the window I can see the plan of a house, a body in bed, dissatisfied lumps digging holes, filling holes, drilling wells for slick petrol. Power lines grin Cheshire into the horizon, a beam, a void, a hunch. The hills like the heads of bald men. The calves on their toothpick legs, swaying beside their mothers, their small eyes gleaming like little nails. Seeing all this, I am scifi and porous, 4,000 horsepower could get me there. Through the mountain pass I'll just need a mule. 

You can tell it's a floodplain. The houses have their Christmas lights still up, the land is gouged and tired, fish gutted under deep-rooted oaks. A tern turning in a widening gyre, eyeing the masses for her mate, courting in aerial dance. Four knighted lamp posts en garde in the Walmart parking lot, four shadows of blue, illuminating the flatness of a loss felt under 11pm fluorescence. Do they have a wife and children at home, do they return at sunrise?

I'm pointing at you out the window, yes, yes, look up.

The pyre of industrial cow holding pens burning into a distant night. Aluminum cans and silver strips hoisted like alien flags strike fear in small coal crow hearts. A strange fractal of palmed drug deals, toilet flush, song of a thrush, kick-back lounge chairs. It spirals into dry valley dust, California shining on the billboard overhead. At every prolonged stop figures glowing orange at a point step off, crush butts with their heels & nod in silent agreement. Cough. 

A vacuum of sound leaps bounds and is found under train car four. It's the rest of a stump, it's a little alone. I've wanted to be kind, to encompass some type of wisdom, of silence, of solace, of nice hairdos. 

Two headed three legged

The hound has been locked out there for a month now. I've written to them about the incessant baying, the earth shattering low hum that he sends into the night. "That's no dog, that's a satellite radio dish installed by the government to track us" my neighbor tells me while getting the mail.  I haven't been sleeping well. The fruit has been rotting, quickly, quietly, in the bowl and in the soft grass depression under the tree. I've been bowing my head nightly, praying for lemons, hard and bitter. The descent into madness is often quiet, the descent into madness on larger scales is much quieter. My back curls like a metal spring, laying sideways considering the alarm clock. Insanity is a spare word for entropy, the psychists nearly got it right. They say you'll notice it once the garden blooms in February or March, once the cherry blossoms stare you down, faces so unforgiving. A classmate asked "what would it take for you to leave". The only appropriate response is to lie, "when the leaves grow belly up". 

If you lay your head on the metal bar of the bus while idling at a light, you can watch the world buzz neon time signatures. Endlessly, things fall into a rightful place. This deep gutted feeling is a technicality, a foul ball, something that will ease with spring. Feel the pangs go bang bang in my stomach. Count in 4/4 the ripple of potholes and concrete seams under the bus wheels, listen to the intruder, he might have something nice to say. Listen to the dog, he's not trying to tell you anything important. 

The flank of the bus is plastered with advertisements for car insurance and personal injury lawyers. In The Promised Land all the bus passengers get a personal automobile, four wheel drive, air conditioning, stereo system, a dog with chain, and a personal injury lawyer business card. We're nearly there. See the cars go bang bang, slam and slide, flip and skid. The people inside the bowels of the bus are tugging at the stop request line. Violence: the yellow cord demands it. The driver is half dead in the fluorescent light. The headlights, triumphant and bovine, cut through evening traffic. 

At dusk the dog's 80 decibel howl intensifies, he's afraid of the dark. The poor animal sounds large, two headed, three legged. He's missing a molar. Come April, the screech of copulating sparrows will drown him out. Soon after, fledgling birds raise their young voices and hurl themselves out of the nest to join the ranks of spiraling flight. The dog is left speechless at this senseless aviary act, we both listen. The melody proceeds in pangs and bangs, bird whistles, forward in 4/4 time.  

Jenga

Who would win in a fight: Stalagmite vs Stalactite?

Once, I visited the serpents coil. Crack open the brain and sort all the things inside into neat piles. If you do so, it will pile high like poker chips, slotted evenly, pull the arm, triple sevens. Go take yourself (and take the poker chip piles, you might have to carry them in your pocket or a little bag) to a shore - a marsh, a puddle, something larger than the horizon. Watch how, at dusk, the landscape transforms into a yawning mouth, look for the blueish birds, they're migrating south. Maybe, you should kneel. Yes, actually, put your knees down. Think about what it would sound like if you could whistle the perfect song, or if you could poke your feet into the water like an egret, sunk to your hips, muddle the muck, choke down a fish whole. There is an ogre hiding under the rocky lip, yes right there, do you see it? Three riddles then you may pass it. It's a long distance type of thing, you can hear it shuffling around in there. It's bleak and sheeted, the sandstone, different from what you find further inland. This thing in my palm is a fossilized shell, looks like thin dough all curled in like that, Dad's AI google search says "forbidden cinnamon roll". Dad's shelves back in Germany lay heavy under fossils and cracked open rocks, ammonite next to the moon nightlight, gleaming at me in my bed when I couldn't sleep at night. The round cheeked face of a marble woman hangs on a nail on Oma's wall: 'dont tell the authorities he found this one.' Stalactites, I used to think they were named after me, stalagmites: me but very strong, a gladiator or champion of the joust. We used to drag ourselves to the mines and stare down the shaft. You never saw anything, really, just how the light poked through the tin in little dapples and threw itself as a beam into those depths. Courageous, those miners, courageous, the light. 

The atom is something I imagined once

A steady trickle such that a clear pool forms, is allowed to form, is given to form. 

Up there, the aqueduct, large wooden planks holding it all back. 

The savage hounds, the cliff side adler. 

I google: are zoo animals sad. 

I think, while walking: is a caved cliff sad. 

Sadness in the form of giraffe and tapir, long nosed and necked, naked and hanging low.   

The atom is something I imagined once. In a dream, the setting can only be described as "tall", expanding upwards exponentially. WOW the swallows scream as my dream landscape brushes their tail feathers. Here, I know they could swallow me whole. Twenty apple trees tower all along the lane leading up to a dovecot. They bear fruit only once, after a biting bitter winter, a winter where not even the bravest fox dared leave his den. Again, the savage hounds. Again, the cliff side adler. No doves, no loving pairs in their nests. 

I raise my left arm, much more muscular than I remember, sheathed in an oven mitt, up up up. 

Down down down the bird... until... claws scrabblegrasphold the sinewy perch. 

Inside my skull, a spoon scrapes along the upper curve, collecting mush and debris gathered there. 

///

I've been watching deadliest catch, listening to Life Without Buildings/John Cale/Coltrane, eating eggs, sending lots of emails. 

 

They have begun to excavate the Giant

They have begun to excavate the Giant ー

In the middle of/on the fringes of/ a city swollen and stripped by a populist politics, some pillars lay dug out and naked between two shot out highways. Shot out as in, pot holed and pot bellied drivers ー jumping down the asphalt. Driving by, you wouldn’t think, couldn’t tell that they are excavating the Giant. Stopped at a light, seen in passing, I make intimate eye contact with a woman sitting in the passenger seat of a red shoe box vehicle *. She holds my gaze as if cupping my face between her two hands. She realizes, as do I, that they have begun to excavate the Giant.

Peering through the windshield at her, I wish I was a pane of glass, sunlight pooling through me. The woman is slightly translucent **, sunlight pulling through her and illuminating a pattern almost seraphic in its organization. In the branching spirals I watch small beasts climb a mountain, furry creatures build a ship, mythic horses on an ancient plane. The Giant’s face, visible in some areas where the construction crew has chiseled away at the sandstone, is gold and shining. The Giant’s face, she thinks, looks like her grandmother. The Giant’s face, I think, looks like my neighborhood grocery clerk. Looking closely, it is clear that the face is covered with a fine fur, cowlicked in some places, like the flank of a buffalo. There is something uniquely bovine in the eye contact I hold with the woman, something idiotic and dumbfounded. 

The excavation work has not been easy. The excavation work has not been noticed. Local town halls discuss the filling of a swimming pool, construction of a housing development, crumbling infrastructure. Bloated participants at a cheap table, democratic processes subverted many years ago by a bloated faith in the strength of such a democracy, the belief that good work is being done ***.

 *  Wet cheeked, the woman presses her entire body into the wall of a boat, her nose and forehead round pressure points, joints of movement. She hears the ship hum and sigh, water pumps groan and the bow slapped by swell. Pushed, mercilessly back and forth. Here she is, prone inside the great beast, a round pressure point. Soon, she will be on land ー legs bowed and swaying, seated in a car on the highway, a joint of movement. 

**  Translucent, not as a ghost is, the woman is not a ghost, she is just slightly see through. The down feathers of a duckling ーgossamer, veined, palpable.

***  Really, the same holes are dug and filled a million times over, for the sake of the shovel, in the name of progress. 

 

/

Silver

I check my email 17 times a day, the five, six, and dash keys of my laptop are broken, I rarely pay attention, my body experiences sensations like an anemone. 

A couple days ago someone texted me that there is a praying mantis crouched inside of them. Once a day I notice a baseball sized rock crouched inside of me. 

Sometimes, at work, I go to the bathroom and make excruciating faces at the wall, open my mouth as big as possible, scrunch everything, curl my neck back and forth. I take my tips (doled out in cash) and buy ice cream sandwiches and beer at Derby Mart.

I feel serpentine and wicked moving through a crowd. 

I am noticeably bad at writing anything true. Thinking anything true. 

I am neurotic (at times) and completely exploding (at other times). 

The house is much too cold, the floors much too dirty, my circulation much too poor to play the piano. I have thought this for many years.

Tomorrow morning before noon I will play something new and shiny. I will grin grin grin, my teeth silverware, yes you can use them, yes I will wash them in the sink. 

I stare at videos and images and blinking lights and old photos of semi strangers and dig a deep hole and walk down into the hole and decide the hole is nice and not so bad maybe I’ll live there for a bit. 

I read palms and songs and weather patterns for proof, proof of something excellent and heartbreaking. 

I am an emotionally practical person.

Last night I dreamt of a symphony hall filled with dogs, silent.

I make vows of silence, usually on days like today where it rains sideways. I say nothing important, I listen to the rats fucking in my heater vent. I eavesdrop on all my roommates.

Later, I will wash my hands backwards and upside down. Take an asprin. Lay awake as silence pans through and around me.

I am a satellite dish on my bed, silver oh so silver