no title.

a snap of the fingers in the face of time brought the clocks to a halt brought the hour to its end brought the village bells toll an the flags at half mast they're a waving off his personal life I proclaim to know nothing. an unconscious comparison will sleep in my mind between the following ones an their daughters and sons with politics having nothing to do with it, an unconscious comparison now sleeps in my mind please if your not sure pray not for death on what you hear-- skills are cheap an men are mortal an the hills are steep for men who’re mortal an skills are cheap you curse fast when the odds are good an run your tongue as a dagger blade into the soul that needs no wound, rap RAP rap upon my door I skipped a rock across a pond an watched the water ripple once an the stone sank fast ... much too fast for such an arm as strong as mine heehaw haw aww man.

Chapter 1 - Box

“How do sovereign nations become socially, politically and economically relevant? That is, what is the common facet of society that makes them internationally relevant?”

Nobody answered. This was the first lecture and nobody, not even the stereotypical brownnosers with their hands normally waving about like Dutch windmills in gale force wind were about to offer up their opinions to have them rejected by this well renowned professor. Most of them still have months of incessant badgering to tackle, it would be imprudent to have their egos deflated this early in the semester. The lecture space sat approximately 300 and not one individual in the room had feigned, even vaguely, thought. It was quiet and a seemingly reverent atmosphere, so he continued the monologue, enjoying his deep sea-glass voice.

“Can anyone tell me? All relevant nations have constitutions. What is a constitution you ask?”

Looking around, one could tell that the students were shrewd enough to realize that the new faculty member wasn’t looking for a textbook glossary regurgitation but possibly a metaphorical account. The large lecture hall was again quiet. The only sound wafted lightly from the front of the room in the form of a squeaking stage, where Professor Maginot anxiously shifted his weight from left to right. Maginot was an average sized man, measuring a satisfactory 5’10” and a sufficient 175 pounds. His physician warranted that all that averageness made him above average physically, so he gave him an exceedingly clean bill of health. Maginot had a fairly normal hat size, in the 7 and ¾ range, with a length from chin to crown that would be considered by all but the most deluded, as conventional. Nearly 40 years old, Maginot was in his academic prime. He had the not-quite deep set wrinkles in his face to prove it along with shadowy brown hair that covered his ears to boot. The only thing other than his bill of health that was at all irregular were his green lighthouse eyes that seemed even in dark rooms to gleam and reflect light. His father would’ve said he felt like a million bucks in his checked tweed suit, and Maginot could’ve let the pervasive silence continue to prompt a response from an audacious brownnoser, but the excitement of divulging his recently published theory, to naïve students, at his new university, proved too much.

“Constitutions are instruments established to ensure domestic tranquility through the well ordered pursuit of box!”

Most academics would’ve considered this giddy response juvenile, the watermark of a junior faculty member, especially considering the subject matter. But John Maginot’s study was groundbreaking, he had even been awarded numerous doctorates by prestigious online universities. This meant he had credence and could exude as much childish enthusiasm in his lectures as the brownnosing students had in their responses.

I want to sing you one song here, recognizing that there are goliaths now a-days, and uh, people dont realize just who the Goliaths are, but in olden days goliath was slayed and everybody nowadays looks back and sees how cruel Goliath was, nowadays there are crueler goliaths who do crueler things, but one day their gonna be slain too and people twothousand years from now can look back and say " remember when Goliath the second was slain?" -my main man bob.

What a day to be alive. There is something generally to be said when waking up, and usually this is all I can muster under the circumstance. Peeling my green plaid comforter from my body, I am blessed to see my scrawny hair infested legs are still appendages I can call my own. I give them a whirl, they are heavy and only vaguely responsive. My motor systems lack transcendence at this hour. Should I let them settle? A few minutes of will can unify the system.

I arise minutes later after integration. There is unfamiliar din echoing beneath my feet. Not strange enough to investigate at this hour. I approach the tiled sink, a selling point in the model, and peer across the basin. There I am, a hazy semblance. I paste the brush and open wide, my calcium is a fine bunch. Yadatahw.

"Madness is like gravity! All you need is a little bitty push.."

Turn your light down low, Im speaking to ya quiet to keep my words from sounding cold only to find my temptations on the verge of being lured out the door, so turn your light down low. Go out the front, its time we part for the night but our love is still soft enough to sink your teeth into and BITE but please be assured my love this night will not hurt you while you find some park bench built for the absentminded old and think about tying your hair in pigtail bows when you were still young enough to bundle and tumble in between your mothers bedsheet folds Whispering with cupped and folded little fingers touching your sisters ear and feeling the sense of kin so close and dear in the heavy summer night.. dry grass'll itch you into feeling so whole and awake now that you can talk and likewise hear whats said with a head ready to fill and a fellow heart to hold dear while leaning on the cold white windowsill waiting for the fear to realize you’ve escaped to have another dance with these bygone years.

I bet youve switched legs up there in the sky, over my head while i walk almost grown with my childhood still sitting in my mouth like a dead rat. And somewhere between here and my promised land looms the wilderness now and the seasons are changing and Im not ready. Can't I work for a handful of garbanzo beans, you can keep the electricity. Ill have a wooden table, grow my fruit and smoke my own meat! ill play fiddle on my porch with tired feet to lilt over the rail and drink whiskey free it will be too harsh but it will be mine. strong as boiling metal. wood fire will leak into the wood and smoke will ink my nights. I will come callused and lean with limbs of iron to country rambles and walk home whistling inside the winking dawn. With my skin dark, my eye furious, I shall be idle and brutal. The best thing of all is a very drunken sleep, in the grass outback. In the summer winds Ill bring my bed out on the porch and sleep deeply into Sunday to meet leaves in my sheets and boots strewn down the steps. ill be old and ride my bicycle everyday, get real redfaced drunk and fly down dirt hills and walk everywhere, trampling grasses and tapping sticks to fenceposts and slathered in the redleafed dusk, cobwebs will cling onto pines and old mules will clop plop in soft roads below my window and i'll feel better and at home i'll slowly gray and blindly amble down my own longroad of death and lie down slow and gladly between the hissing of silver lawns and ragged sycamores against the lambence of dreaming moonlight.

storioz

The whole of the next week was spent stumbling in my mind’s eye. Finally that following Friday I was overcome by an eclectic stew of supreme irrationality and reality. Friday night bore witness to what I call the last fresh dream I ever had.

As the curtain closed on my vision… I was borne suddenly and swiftly to a place unfamiliar to me, save in myths and novels. The sun was a wavering electric desiccant, emaciating the surrounding earth and depriving the living. I was standing upon the cusp; a sheer outcropping of resistant red rock, gazing over my dangling outstretched toes to the canyon floor seemingly jagged miles below. The wind was at my face and undecided, traversing the spectrum from tender lapping to treasonous gust. Much as angels have from above, I felt my equilibrium slipping and I feared plunging through unforgiving ledges to the ant people and their craggy rust.

She placed her giving palm on my shoulder and confidently removed me from the ledge’s suffocating embrace; guiding me to the place we were to begin our descent.

“Is this your first time to the valley of the lepers?”

“Yes.” I respond.

I put one unsure foot in front of the other and we slowly come to the trailhead marked by a tall wooden post and the falling away of the earth. Following the path with my eyes it cuts ominously down the canyon wall, it is well worn from the plodding of afflicted travelers whom retreat into the hostile canyon never to return. The passage leans profanely away from the jagged wall at an obtuse angle and is littered with course sand that slows and complicates navigation.

With a simple caress she assuages my doubt and starts me upon the trek… One hand upon the rising rugged canyon wall, the other outstretched pointing across the vast emptiness towards the singing carrion birds.

A Nice Coat of Blubber Would Be Nice When Winter Comes.

a strange man simply wakes up to find "what" scribbled in his garden. he washes himself with scrambled egg, puts his glasses in his pants & pulls up his trousers. there's a census taker knocking on his door & his orders for the day are nailed up on his mailbox reading that the route on junky monday is therefore as follows: two pints of jumpstart. a book of zulu sayings. citizen kane translated into dirty french. an orange television studio. three bibles each autographed by the hillbilly singer who can sing salty dog the fastest. the back page of a 1941 daily worker [for posterity]. a salty dog. any daughter of any district judge. a tablespoon of coke & sugar heated to 300 degrees. left ears. lots of left ears. seven pieces of some deadly passport. a corn on the cob. five wooden pillows. one boy scout resembling ted haggard & a stolen tightrope walker. "What" is in my garden, he says over the phone to his friend, wally the fireman. Wally replies "i dont know. i really couldn't say. i'm not there." The man says "what do you mean, you dont know! what is written in my garden" wally says "what?" the man says "that's right" . . . wally replies that he is on his way down a pole & asks the man if he sees any relationship between Katie couric & Tarzan? the man says "no, but i have some james baldwin & hemingway books" "not good enough" says wally, who again asks "what about a shrimp & an american flag? do you see any relationship between those two things?" the man says, "no, but I see Tarentino movies & i like Stravinsky quite a lot" wally tries again & says "could you tell me in a million words what the bill of rights has to do with a feather? " the man thinks for a minute & says "no i cant do that but i'm a great fan of henry miller" wally slams the phone & the man he gets back into bed & begins reading "The Meaning of an Orange" in german ... but by nightfall, he is bored. puts the book down & goes to shave while looking into a picture of thomas Edison. He decided over a bowl of milk to go out & have a good time & he opens the door & who's standing there but the census taker "i'm just a friend of the person who lives here" he says & goes back in the house & out the back door & down the street & into a bar with a moose head . . . the bartender gives him a double brandy, punches him in the groin & pushes him into a phone booth - obviously the man's crime is that he sees nothing resembling anything - he wipes the blood away from his groin with a hanky & decides to wait for a call. "What" is still written in his garden. the sun is still yellow. some people would say it's chicken ... wally's going down a pole, the census taker arrives to make a phone call & phone booths dont have back doors! junky monday driving, going down a one way street & turning into a friday the 13th ... Ah Wilderness! darkness! & he went five hours without a drink of water. “figure i'm ready for the desert. wanna come? I'll take along my dog.” he's always good for a laugh.

pick yuh up at seven
faithfully, piglet

It wasn’t long after the vegetable dream that things got odd. You might call it a morbid fascination or a macabre preoccupation I guess, but for me it’s much simpler. I like to think of it as an ebbing in the tide of purgatorial monotony, my long cooped whirling-dervish imagination carbureted. They were funny experiences and maybe Freud would’ve had some valuable insight, but it might not have even been his jurisdiction.

The brevity of those moments made ascertaining their occurrences all the more difficult; thank god for their lucidity. It’s the lucidity that really gave them away. A snap of the fingers that portraits.

On the verge of a stairwell was a common place for things to get treacherous. I could only conjure slapstick disaster, images of calamity projected insubstantially by a roguish optic nerve and conspiring sub-conscious. A ghost rendering of myself sent tumbling over the brink by misguided gait, a pebble down a well. Down I went and continually go, head following hands following ass, unraveling the red carpet with my person. Maybe a pop here; a crack there. Eventually friction wins and a quiet halt prevails, normally it’s a muffled affair. I find myself staring at myself from the vantage at the stair summit to base camp down below. The version at low altitude rocked back onto his calves, knees on the floor; if he was discontented I’d never know it, a toothless red sauce smile pasted on his giddy face acknowledges mine.

Bring what you got on to the man down there with his hand out the bars with a tin cup, he’s real scared. kept in the hole for many months for something like refusing to speak up, and while I cant sit still to save his soul, my pensions ringing jumps to remind me its not in my hand to play corrupt—by the way I don’t believe in bad luck. So I show you to him and don’t ask me to help, Ive made peace with it all now that I can play with my baby boys in the beach kelp, But inside I’ll always skitter some when I hear the pitter patter come down the hall from that poor boy leaning against the stone wall, but when it does, Ill hear my boys laugh and giggle some and sadly throw the man from my mind and let him slide out my ear terribly quietlike. There comes a time when calluses harden your insides, and when the day breaks you can turn your head and decide whether your insides will forgive your wretched kind. Either way Ill grow old and blind and without given the choice, except to open my eyes during this cold-shouldered piece of time, Ill find my self sulking through all the world’s unforgettable/ topfloor forgivable slime.