I. The Maw

She spotted him kicking the St. Jude statue installed outside the Melkite Church on the corner. It was the same dirty and desultory man who approached her the day before. 

The sky was a swirl of hazy cross-oceanic Saharan dust again. The humidity clung to her exposed skin like a hot anole’s tongue.

She wanted nothing more than to avoid him and his rants above all else. She cut down a little used access road between the two luxury bayside buildings. When she stopped and turned to insure he hadn’t seen and followed her, she fell into an underworld through the loose manhole cover she stepped on—the world ascended out of her sight into an absolute darkness which welcomed her with a jolting fetid thud. All was black and remained in oblivion for a full minute.

The smell hit her first and then the warmth of the liquid she sat in—she dry heaved and gripped her stomach until she recovered, and only then she saw the faint bioluminescence seemingly arrayed in perfect geometric shapes along the curved walls. She realized she was in the sewer. 

Then she heard his voice echoing from above and beyond her line of sight—the high key dust light streaming in from the gaping maw she fell through.

In an instant his face and torso filled that vacant space, and his cackle echoed down to her and filled the dark in the sewer.

“Ah, missy,” he said. “Welcome to my town. Welcome to my home.” 

He jumped into the darkness with her.

***

II. The Tug of Ghosts

It seemed to her she was always leaving, or someone was leaving her. Her father disappeared one day when she was ten. Her mother disappeared into a fog of alcohol and mental illness the next year—and now it was her turn to leave her hometown for the last time.

She vowed to never return to the southern city or the moribund southern state. She’d had enough of the oppressive memories, ghosts tugging at her, and retrograde autocrats. She was off.

In the rear view she spotted the rag and bone man kicking the St. Jude statue again, a fitting sight in the high-key sunrise that limned the horizon line in golden-red and turquoise. The bay, a vacant dying sea, would soon flood the shoreline. 

“This will all be underwater soon,” the man screamed at her exhaust.

“Good riddance,” she said to the strains of the Butthole Surfers “Moving to Florida.”

“Bye-bye,” she hissed, turned the stereo up and drove north.

What I’m Reading:

Bad things don’t just grow on one path, they’re everywhere. So don’t blame yourself when those things happen. Don’t let yesterday take up much of today. 

— Kim Stanley Robinson / Shaman

What are Fish Gills to Fishers of Men?

At a remove, in a gesture, a part of a thing
Representing the whole.

What are ambivalences of texts?
Polyvalencies in readings?

What flows from this desire
To macerate the pulp of life
Into a sodden discourse—
An echolalia?

The fishers of men as hirsute
Suitors unhinging Penelope’s loom—

What is that? An arrow?

I am arrow proof,
Soothsayer approved,
Trodden by legions of anonymous
Men with angular intent.

Note this now—

I pique in wolf-like rages
Deep into the night.
I aim at precision / incision—

Beware.

What I’m Reading:

I have not led a bad life but should I
like to do it better isn’t this what hell is for?
From a distance swaying with rake lifted. High
progress I give myself. Forgive me, myself.

— Jimin Seo / “In Memoriam [±That after all this I have still chosen life.]”

Interlude (redux)

It is recorded in some musty tome that in 1456 Pope Callixtus III excommunicated the comet to end all comets.

A heathen astral rock glowing white-hot as it streaked across the sky. The stars are signifiers. The popes are pontificators…

This is an interlude apropos of nothing.

What I’m Reading:

my muse wears contact lenses,
  maybe she’ll never see
    past suburbia
      with its walled-in, half-acre privacy
        and she eats too much
          so her diaphragm is choking her
            voice and breath

— Charlie Vermont / “Poem”

Life After

She woke up dumber in the new southern town than she had been in her northern home. The intellectual disparity over those few sleepless days was astounding, many folks would later say:

How could someone become so stupid in six short days?

Six days filled with the lurking of one imaginary great white shark that followed her around the world. The hallucinatory sequence ended in clear tropical waters. Even though she had no son, she ran out from the safety of the white sand beach to save him — into the clear, luminous, water (a water whose color was so entrancing it had no name, merely a color code number: #22BED9 — on that code everyone could agree).  

In she went after the son she didn’t have only to find herself at the bottom of an enormous darkening aquarium filled with rock outcroppings, and many great white sharks lying inert on the sand. All of them waiting for the monstrous shark that appeared from the left and swam between her and the shore — now inexplicably a half mile away.

She awoke when she heard a voice lamenting the late hour: 5:45 in the god-damned  morning! Then something about bagels… and crowds. But the voice belonged to her father—now dead five years, so this could not be.

She felt unalterably stupid — imbecilic — like the Stooge that couldn’t even make it past the first cattle call of tryouts for the “Curly Joe” spot that needed filling sometime in the late 1950’s.

My goodness, I’m a fucking dolt! She said to the popcorn on the ceiling.

She picked up her phone, went into the bathroom and composed this note while sitting on the cold toilet:

Happy so and so… madness so and so… I’ve drawn and quartered the last day of my old life. First, I set it in stocks and forced it to reflect on its insistence on the passage of time. I denounced it as a heretic and forced it to abjure from the heights of the glorious strappado. I singed it a bit on the pyre. I rolled it on the rack. I pilloried it, used the cudgel, prodded its eyes with a red hissing poker, beat it with the bastinado, used the Spanish boot, and finally pulled and impaled its tongue until nothing remained if it.

This will be my annus mirabilis (she had no idea what this meant anymore, but she wrote it automatically): the one by which I’ll measure the rest of my life. The pivot point. There is my life before today, and my life after — this should mean something to me.

***

People, die everyday… There is gothic organ music swelling and ebbing in the ether. There is someone muttering bummer in the next room.  The smell of acrid pot is wafting in on a warm eddy of air blowing under the hotel room door. There are ochres and yellows on the walls and an overall orange mood to the room. Next door someone is repeating: people, die everyday, die everyday… There is something important here, but I can’t decipher it — not yet — but I will.

It’s comfortably warm now and a woman is moving about, beyond my line of sight, by the bed, with pleasant food on a white tray. I sense it but I can’t see her. This is an inviting place, I feel comfortable here. But I don’t understand why it’s a bummer and why someone continues to repeat: people, die everyday, die everyday…

What I’m Reading:

An insane impatience for death was driving mankind to a second suicide, even before the full effect of the first had been felt.

— Anna Kavan / Ice

Wait. Weight.

The southern city was full of all manner of curvilinear impediments and drop-offs. It led to a vertiginous sensation she abhorred—it seemed as if the angry sky and sea wished to become one turbid space. She saw cloud arms descending from a fanged sky—the world was tooth and mettle and the kidney bingo would not wait. She heard the northern city beckoning her back—and she just arrived—but it would have to wait. Wait. Weight.

What I’m Reading:

Slow any song
and sorrow blooms

like blood
through a bandage.

Slow sorrow
and it darkens like dusk-

stained windows.

— Phillip Watts Brown / “If You Play “Jolene” at 33 RPM”