Little sea, you are red and full of light-
Little sea, you glow from Beijing, China,
Your hand is atop your head. Fixated on the
Chandelier in the living room, you glare at me instead.
Little sea, you rest on walls in pictures. You are here;
You are gone. Oh ancient heart, o still mind,
We walk here and come to Chinatown. In Illinois,
We are shy of movie posters; we are fond of people
Saying things. Back and forth, we grumble; we howl
Gruesome words atop our lungs. An author admires
A lowly writer. I walk down the street, swinging grocery
Bags, hum to myself. A famous actor dies in the streets of
Chicago; a wounded warrior bears the tattoo of a bartender
On his chest, not knowing why he has it-knowing he has
No direct age. The thoughts are of the flesh. The thoughts
Are rotten still. Stiller than a photograph, he breathes life
Into it-
Sadness permeates him, he is not aware.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Friday, February 19, 2010
Dreams Are Straight Lines.
My life is a straight line.
My life has changed.
From one day to the next.
Nothing is broken.
Nothing is faded.
We care about what is between trees.
We care about what is between water.
Water is faded from the mist.
We are mad hatters.
The mad hatters are this:
Turning like spinning wheels,
Turning like things are broken,
The hand is eschewed on broken
Lines.
We dream dreams.
We speak dreams when nothing
Is a dream.
We are not a dream that is not
Circumvented.
We are awake and nothing
Is sleeping.
Pour the water into the well.
Pour the water into the gravel.
We let men wear top hats.
We sing songs to sad rainforests.
I stick up for stick people.
I draw them on desks in classrooms.
People force us to speak to classrooms.
Men are drawing lines
On gravel roads.
My life is a straight line.
Don’t stick up for me.
Don’t draw stick people.
What it’s gotta be,
Is what we see after we see.
We dream dreams.
We walk on straight lines.
We are broken when things are mended.
We catapult into the air and onto
Dead grass.
The grass is dead at my feet.
The shoes are worn and faded.
I wake up tomorrow, and talk about the
Negative.
My life has changed.
From one day to the next.
Nothing is broken.
Nothing is faded.
We care about what is between trees.
We care about what is between water.
Water is faded from the mist.
We are mad hatters.
The mad hatters are this:
Turning like spinning wheels,
Turning like things are broken,
The hand is eschewed on broken
Lines.
We dream dreams.
We speak dreams when nothing
Is a dream.
We are not a dream that is not
Circumvented.
We are awake and nothing
Is sleeping.
Pour the water into the well.
Pour the water into the gravel.
We let men wear top hats.
We sing songs to sad rainforests.
I stick up for stick people.
I draw them on desks in classrooms.
People force us to speak to classrooms.
Men are drawing lines
On gravel roads.
My life is a straight line.
Don’t stick up for me.
Don’t draw stick people.
What it’s gotta be,
Is what we see after we see.
We dream dreams.
We walk on straight lines.
We are broken when things are mended.
We catapult into the air and onto
Dead grass.
The grass is dead at my feet.
The shoes are worn and faded.
I wake up tomorrow, and talk about the
Negative.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Making Us Go Nowhere, Finding Nothing.
Which shadow is strongest?
Which shadow mocks darker shades?
His eyes see inner worlds.
His eyes see cooks making things.
The sun clouds over; the sun clouds over
Bigger than anything. No time to get back
At people. No time to stop mourning the
Turning of the clock,
The turning of the time that has stilled.
In my deepest despair,
I linger here,
Forcing myself to gaze into the haze
Of a burning sunset.
Trying to stop myself from wandering down-
Down the streets, back to the basics,
Back to the turning of the clock,
The darkness has stilled, willed,
We speak in meadows and meadows
Are gone.
Which shadow is strongest?
Shadows are nothing compared to
The nothingness of time,
The fertility of what we are.
The banging of doors closing.
The banging of doors opening.
The silence. The loudness.
The moon overhanging a monsoon.
Too hard on me; too hard on you;
Mothers and daughters live near rivers.
The rivers run into the ocean.
Sometimes, the oceans go nowhere.
Which shadow mocks darker shades?
His eyes see inner worlds.
His eyes see cooks making things.
The sun clouds over; the sun clouds over
Bigger than anything. No time to get back
At people. No time to stop mourning the
Turning of the clock,
The turning of the time that has stilled.
In my deepest despair,
I linger here,
Forcing myself to gaze into the haze
Of a burning sunset.
Trying to stop myself from wandering down-
Down the streets, back to the basics,
Back to the turning of the clock,
The darkness has stilled, willed,
We speak in meadows and meadows
Are gone.
Which shadow is strongest?
Shadows are nothing compared to
The nothingness of time,
The fertility of what we are.
The banging of doors closing.
The banging of doors opening.
The silence. The loudness.
The moon overhanging a monsoon.
Too hard on me; too hard on you;
Mothers and daughters live near rivers.
The rivers run into the ocean.
Sometimes, the oceans go nowhere.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
The Little Volvo.
The little Volvo sits in the driveway.
My husband opens his newspaper.
It is Sunday. Time for him to see, to know,
To experience, the ways of the world.
Time for him to ponder the ways of things-
The ways of darkness;
The ways of reason. Without the us,
There is no void, there is no reason to speak in the void.
The color of his shirt changes from day to day.
He looks more handsome in a blue shirt,
He bought it at an Internet café.
My mind is caught between awake and sleeping.
He is me. He is the face within my soul,
The spirit that moves gracefully across the veil of stars.
The stars is the promised land,
Nelson Mandela wrote late one night in November,
While the wind crashed noisily outside the house.
My husband is like Mandela.
He knows. He speaks. He digs up graves.
He used to live in a house in Mississippi,
His mind torrential as waterfalls. He glistens when he sees.
The color of his shirt changes from day to day.
He speaks reason. There isn’t reason inside anything.
His mind is bitter waters-
He is cold, his mind is bitter,
He lives in cities that are bitter.
He tastes of salt.
I drink him down.
My husband opens his newspaper.
It is Sunday. Time for him to see, to know,
To experience, the ways of the world.
Time for him to ponder the ways of things-
The ways of darkness;
The ways of reason. Without the us,
There is no void, there is no reason to speak in the void.
The color of his shirt changes from day to day.
He looks more handsome in a blue shirt,
He bought it at an Internet café.
My mind is caught between awake and sleeping.
He is me. He is the face within my soul,
The spirit that moves gracefully across the veil of stars.
The stars is the promised land,
Nelson Mandela wrote late one night in November,
While the wind crashed noisily outside the house.
My husband is like Mandela.
He knows. He speaks. He digs up graves.
He used to live in a house in Mississippi,
His mind torrential as waterfalls. He glistens when he sees.
The color of his shirt changes from day to day.
He speaks reason. There isn’t reason inside anything.
His mind is bitter waters-
He is cold, his mind is bitter,
He lives in cities that are bitter.
He tastes of salt.
I drink him down.
Thoughts of the Human. Thoughts of the Bold.
I am human.
I am the thoughts of human.
I am the flesh. The warbled voice speaks.
Coocoo, coocoo,
Over and under,
Barren as folded lands.
Paper is rotten like flesh is rotten.
Over steel hands, his fingers wave and bend,
An array of colors.
In the distance, sky moves,
A voice-
In the stillness of us,
Nothing speaks,
Heartbroken, shadows spoken,
Of movement and time has stilled.
I speak to you.
You are the wind.
You are the wind that moves.
You listen. You see. You fold gently.
The trees. They bring me into it.
They bring me into the void.
The flesh is the void.
The sound is silence.
All wind moves in the silence.
The silence hears your voice.
It whispers, and speaks of shadows-
In the heart of silence,
The dusk of mildew.
We wave and bend. Time is translucent.
I am the thoughts of human.
I am the flesh. The warbled voice speaks.
Coocoo, coocoo,
Over and under,
Barren as folded lands.
Paper is rotten like flesh is rotten.
Over steel hands, his fingers wave and bend,
An array of colors.
In the distance, sky moves,
A voice-
In the stillness of us,
Nothing speaks,
Heartbroken, shadows spoken,
Of movement and time has stilled.
I speak to you.
You are the wind.
You are the wind that moves.
You listen. You see. You fold gently.
The trees. They bring me into it.
They bring me into the void.
The flesh is the void.
The sound is silence.
All wind moves in the silence.
The silence hears your voice.
It whispers, and speaks of shadows-
In the heart of silence,
The dusk of mildew.
We wave and bend. Time is translucent.
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
Incognito.
Incognito
You
You are
You are myself.
I am the ghost in the twilight forest.
I am the advice you seek for your job.
Desperately seeking resolution.
Desperately seeking the voice in the hills.
You seek temptation.
You are temptation.
You rise out of the temptation of it all.
The color of noise.
The rudeness, the awakening, on the back of old
Tampons,
The back of old wildflowers.
Goodness, you seek. Old sordid news.
Borrowed and faded.
Times will not bend.
My ears have been slammed against the window.
The window opens and shuts.
I am the opening and shutting of the window.
I am the sordid tears.
The widow who keeps forgetting nothing.
I am the forgetter.
I am insolent. A dumbwaiter.
We are the thinkers. We are the whisperers.
The wanderers of shadows becoming,
Unknowing-
The feeling of it. The righteousness. I am myself.
I am the hood of myself. Thoughts flood tender gates.
Gates move the wind. The wind is water. The ocean
Flows, flows-
Doesn’t know where it ends, its polar opposites.
My mother said not to take me back.
The boat flies out of the shore. The shore of the mouth.
He thinks he is not home.
His mind is somewhere else. He forgets. He is always forgetting.
His words are round and sheltered things,
He is an ocean of voice, of truth-
We are books and books live on forever.
Forever we speak. Forever we glean, sheen, disappear-
Fade forever from wandering dreams.
You think you are lost.
You think the dark is lost. That I am nothing. That humans are nothing.
The race is nothing but splendid colors.
None sees. We do not see. Nothing sees anyone,
But ourselves wrapped in ourselves. We carry a package
Up the stairs and place it at the foot of the stairs.
You
You are
You are myself.
I am the ghost in the twilight forest.
I am the advice you seek for your job.
Desperately seeking resolution.
Desperately seeking the voice in the hills.
You seek temptation.
You are temptation.
You rise out of the temptation of it all.
The color of noise.
The rudeness, the awakening, on the back of old
Tampons,
The back of old wildflowers.
Goodness, you seek. Old sordid news.
Borrowed and faded.
Times will not bend.
My ears have been slammed against the window.
The window opens and shuts.
I am the opening and shutting of the window.
I am the sordid tears.
The widow who keeps forgetting nothing.
I am the forgetter.
I am insolent. A dumbwaiter.
We are the thinkers. We are the whisperers.
The wanderers of shadows becoming,
Unknowing-
The feeling of it. The righteousness. I am myself.
I am the hood of myself. Thoughts flood tender gates.
Gates move the wind. The wind is water. The ocean
Flows, flows-
Doesn’t know where it ends, its polar opposites.
My mother said not to take me back.
The boat flies out of the shore. The shore of the mouth.
He thinks he is not home.
His mind is somewhere else. He forgets. He is always forgetting.
His words are round and sheltered things,
He is an ocean of voice, of truth-
We are books and books live on forever.
Forever we speak. Forever we glean, sheen, disappear-
Fade forever from wandering dreams.
You think you are lost.
You think the dark is lost. That I am nothing. That humans are nothing.
The race is nothing but splendid colors.
None sees. We do not see. Nothing sees anyone,
But ourselves wrapped in ourselves. We carry a package
Up the stairs and place it at the foot of the stairs.
Stars
We see stars in the hills.
The hills are filled with snow.
We don’t know where they go.
They sing sad songs of daffodils.
We know of light where light doesn’t know.
The hills are filled with snow.
We don’t know where they go.
They sing sad songs of daffodils.
We know of light where light doesn’t know.
Monday, February 08, 2010
Where I Go
Where I Go
Zebras in Africa form triangles
And make movies and mountains
On different doors.
We are bright with
Colors, bright with the madness,
Bright with the darkness inside of me.
The words are a spark of brightness;
The wholeness inside of me bears
The fruit of redemption,
The fruit of colossal colors, we dream of beasts
Hidden inside of nothing.
We are the nothing.
We glare and the shadows move and fade
And time is not still. We are autumn leaves turning. We bear the fruit of
Goodness. Eve and Adam; barren of the world. We trip over polar
Bears, icebergs. We can go anywhere. Anywhere we go
Is fine.
Zebras in Africa form triangles
Over smooth lands.
The landscape is ever changing. The landscape is mine.
You are mine; forever, my love, you whisper sad songs
To the trees and the trees giggle and laugh and energy overflows
Me. The sadness inside of me is translucent;
The energy is whole. We take borrowed things.
We take movies
And place them on stone steps.
We force ourselves
To sit and stare and glare at the stars, burning fiercely in the heavens.
Our words are naked.
Our words are hollow.
You show me the world and the world is reborn;
Again and again,
You are reborn, love.
Zebras in Africa form triangles
And make movies and mountains
On different doors.
We are bright with
Colors, bright with the madness,
Bright with the darkness inside of me.
The words are a spark of brightness;
The wholeness inside of me bears
The fruit of redemption,
The fruit of colossal colors, we dream of beasts
Hidden inside of nothing.
We are the nothing.
We glare and the shadows move and fade
And time is not still. We are autumn leaves turning. We bear the fruit of
Goodness. Eve and Adam; barren of the world. We trip over polar
Bears, icebergs. We can go anywhere. Anywhere we go
Is fine.
Zebras in Africa form triangles
Over smooth lands.
The landscape is ever changing. The landscape is mine.
You are mine; forever, my love, you whisper sad songs
To the trees and the trees giggle and laugh and energy overflows
Me. The sadness inside of me is translucent;
The energy is whole. We take borrowed things.
We take movies
And place them on stone steps.
We force ourselves
To sit and stare and glare at the stars, burning fiercely in the heavens.
Our words are naked.
Our words are hollow.
You show me the world and the world is reborn;
Again and again,
You are reborn, love.
Hoping For.
Hoping For
He is the hint of love.
He is the hint of sacrifice.
The plainness of his eyes; the breathtaking beauty of them.
He is not here to make mistakes. His solid arms,
Protecting me, holding me against the stark brightness
Of the universe-the world is forever in flight.
I am hoping for a miracle.
I am praying for something transient like a motorbike.
I am hoping for darkness. The steeple jumps off
The platform. The learnness of it. The yearnness of it.
We are the tides of the clouds,
The shifts moving and folding-
The open of the doorway,
The light in the sky shoves forth in the night.
We are the. Nothing else moves.
You take my heart; fold it in two. I am emotional this,
Emotional that, nothing lasts forever.
He is silence. The silence of memory. The lost forever
Etched in time.
He is etched forever-
The sorrow of it. The sordid seats of the bus.
The blue, the green. Daffodils fold. I wrote for him.
On blackboards, on ancient works of stone.
He is the old one. The fabled one. The tired one.
His heart aches.
His heart moves. He moves.
The wind sighs, sad and lonely as thunderclouds.
He sighs.
The world sighs with it.
We sit on the world and look down at it and the gladness is wrapped;
His heart moves. The wind sighs, sad and lonely
As thunderclouds.
I say to him, “I don’t know much about those answering machines.”
He laughs and spews raspberry from poured lips.
His eyes like thunder. Thunder burns. He is bright as sunshine.
His mind whispers in the dark.
He is the hint of love.
He is the hint of sacrifice.
The plainness of his eyes; the breathtaking beauty of them.
He is not here to make mistakes. His solid arms,
Protecting me, holding me against the stark brightness
Of the universe-the world is forever in flight.
I am hoping for a miracle.
I am praying for something transient like a motorbike.
I am hoping for darkness. The steeple jumps off
The platform. The learnness of it. The yearnness of it.
We are the tides of the clouds,
The shifts moving and folding-
The open of the doorway,
The light in the sky shoves forth in the night.
We are the. Nothing else moves.
You take my heart; fold it in two. I am emotional this,
Emotional that, nothing lasts forever.
He is silence. The silence of memory. The lost forever
Etched in time.
He is etched forever-
The sorrow of it. The sordid seats of the bus.
The blue, the green. Daffodils fold. I wrote for him.
On blackboards, on ancient works of stone.
He is the old one. The fabled one. The tired one.
His heart aches.
His heart moves. He moves.
The wind sighs, sad and lonely as thunderclouds.
He sighs.
The world sighs with it.
We sit on the world and look down at it and the gladness is wrapped;
His heart moves. The wind sighs, sad and lonely
As thunderclouds.
I say to him, “I don’t know much about those answering machines.”
He laughs and spews raspberry from poured lips.
His eyes like thunder. Thunder burns. He is bright as sunshine.
His mind whispers in the dark.
Starship.
The city was a dome.
The last man on Earth lived in a dome in the ocean. The ocean was vast and wide. The man’s name was Wilderec Dandor and he was a Martian. He had flown over a million miles to land on a rock and found no one left alive. Wilderec’s starship crash-landed in Roswell, New Mexico. He had found their movies; their archives; had seen their last moments on Earth before the starship crumbled from exhaustion, the exhaustion of seeing far too many nights alone, afraid, and ashamed. The shame burned inside of him. It was the year 3000, according to a computer calendar on the wall in someone’s office in Roswell. He had seen their last moments and it was a sad, fiendish thing that rose up from the deepest darkest fears of the midnight sky and the midnight sky roared and flesh changed to gold and red as well as the sunsets. The man’s name was Wilderec and he was alone, tired and alone, tired and alone. He abandoned Roswell, and walked a long time. Sought refuge in an abandoned villa off the coast of Miami; Miami was one of the first to go; dust and dust had turned to rubble. Rubble turned to nothing, the flesh turned to fire and fire burned and the fire was of flesh and nothing was left. He was exhausted. The exhaustion came from gathering firewood to warm the house and he dropped the firewood by the front door and trooped inside, his mind pondering over what happened. He had gotten a message from Earth from a space station near Jupiter. His people had gone past Jupiter and Neptune and Terra Firma. They had gone past those planets and had never returned-Wilderec decided not to follow them. He sighed and rubbed his face warily. He was exhausted and the exhaustion was his alone. He puttered about the house, fixing things; made pottery from clay in the backyard. He had thought about making a garden-the garden would be full of radishes; carrots; onions; peppers. The peppers were the most difficult to hoe. The garden was going to be plentiful. It was spring. Wilderec had been living here for three weeks. End over end, he had lived here, walking up and down the streets, trying to find someone left alive. No one. The houses were abandoned. No dogs barked anywhere. The abandonment came from somewhere deep within the core of the earth and the core of the earth was bitter and filled with venom and the animals were gone except for the birds. The birds flew in the sky and it was a mystery they survived he didn’t understand how the birds survived and none of the other animals did. Wilderec pondered how he was going to survive. His starship was crashed. It was burned to smithereens after he went through the Earth’s atmosphere and was ejected from his starship and the starship was dead.
The last man on Earth lived in a dome in the ocean. The ocean was vast and wide. The man’s name was Wilderec Dandor and he was a Martian. He had flown over a million miles to land on a rock and found no one left alive. Wilderec’s starship crash-landed in Roswell, New Mexico. He had found their movies; their archives; had seen their last moments on Earth before the starship crumbled from exhaustion, the exhaustion of seeing far too many nights alone, afraid, and ashamed. The shame burned inside of him. It was the year 3000, according to a computer calendar on the wall in someone’s office in Roswell. He had seen their last moments and it was a sad, fiendish thing that rose up from the deepest darkest fears of the midnight sky and the midnight sky roared and flesh changed to gold and red as well as the sunsets. The man’s name was Wilderec and he was alone, tired and alone, tired and alone. He abandoned Roswell, and walked a long time. Sought refuge in an abandoned villa off the coast of Miami; Miami was one of the first to go; dust and dust had turned to rubble. Rubble turned to nothing, the flesh turned to fire and fire burned and the fire was of flesh and nothing was left. He was exhausted. The exhaustion came from gathering firewood to warm the house and he dropped the firewood by the front door and trooped inside, his mind pondering over what happened. He had gotten a message from Earth from a space station near Jupiter. His people had gone past Jupiter and Neptune and Terra Firma. They had gone past those planets and had never returned-Wilderec decided not to follow them. He sighed and rubbed his face warily. He was exhausted and the exhaustion was his alone. He puttered about the house, fixing things; made pottery from clay in the backyard. He had thought about making a garden-the garden would be full of radishes; carrots; onions; peppers. The peppers were the most difficult to hoe. The garden was going to be plentiful. It was spring. Wilderec had been living here for three weeks. End over end, he had lived here, walking up and down the streets, trying to find someone left alive. No one. The houses were abandoned. No dogs barked anywhere. The abandonment came from somewhere deep within the core of the earth and the core of the earth was bitter and filled with venom and the animals were gone except for the birds. The birds flew in the sky and it was a mystery they survived he didn’t understand how the birds survived and none of the other animals did. Wilderec pondered how he was going to survive. His starship was crashed. It was burned to smithereens after he went through the Earth’s atmosphere and was ejected from his starship and the starship was dead.
Friday, February 05, 2010
Renaissance Man.
Renaissance Man
In the course of our history,
Nothing has ever been as remarkable as the
Feat of
Self-recognition. Self-reliance. At the foot,
At the top of it all,
The temptation of burdening clouds
Shines down upon the world.
Light is self-resilience.
The secret is life’s
Temptation,
The bitter feud,
The encumbrance of it.
The sore spot on the groin.
She went to the bottle house late one night.
Her eyes are fiercely burning.
They spin midnight oils in dark
Spaces;
They spin darkness in rags.
I cry solidly in stones.
I break myself.
I am broken. My heart is
Turned to stone.
We fear nothing.
Old as time.
Old as time in continuum.
Old as rivers that beat,
Supportive,
The heart and dusk of. Night.
We speak-
Turn dials on old clocks.
We jump docks. We steal clocks.
The music whispers from sad spinning tales,
Mood has turned sour.
The cheese.
Is.
Forever
Into it.
In the course of our history,
Nothing has ever been as remarkable as the
Feat of
Self-recognition. Self-reliance. At the foot,
At the top of it all,
The temptation of burdening clouds
Shines down upon the world.
Light is self-resilience.
The secret is life’s
Temptation,
The bitter feud,
The encumbrance of it.
The sore spot on the groin.
She went to the bottle house late one night.
Her eyes are fiercely burning.
They spin midnight oils in dark
Spaces;
They spin darkness in rags.
I cry solidly in stones.
I break myself.
I am broken. My heart is
Turned to stone.
We fear nothing.
Old as time.
Old as time in continuum.
Old as rivers that beat,
Supportive,
The heart and dusk of. Night.
We speak-
Turn dials on old clocks.
We jump docks. We steal clocks.
The music whispers from sad spinning tales,
Mood has turned sour.
The cheese.
Is.
Forever
Into it.
Monday, February 01, 2010
The Still of the Mountains.
The tall sycamore tree
Pierces through the veil of summer-winter months;
Exhausted out of old breathing sounds.
Sounds thrum. Hum. The wind moans;
It is my mother. The wind is a guest at my house.
Outside my house, the wind mutters and moans
And my baby sister enjoys baby-sitting,
Making me look bad in front of people my age.
I am better off alone.
I am better off not seeing anything. Not driving. Or climbing.
Better off not seeing anything but the river
Gurgling and chuckling to itself. The darkness permeates the world
And the world is whole with its noise,
The world is whole and ripe and the fruit are ripe and thoughts
Trickle like water, trickle through dark things and the darkness
Wans and the moon is bright and full and sometimes
I stare and think about wolves running through the woods,
Running naked and not being able to climb over walls.
The flowers open in spring.
The mood of the spring runs dry and the dryness runs
To the sun and the sun is a great, big ball of rock,
Fierce and hot,
And the sun is spit back out.
I am better off alone.
I am better than the stillest mountain.
I am better breathing what is deep inside of me,
Oxygen fills my lungs and I can see, see the dark things
That wave, move, bend-
Colors flock across the sad, sorry sky.
I am worthless.
The whole of the world is a coin that is tossed on
The bending note of all the oceans-and the oceans are bright
With noise and the noise of the wind moans, cries,
The world is exhausted of its breath.
I can’t see. I am better off alone. I am better
as an illiterate.
Pierces through the veil of summer-winter months;
Exhausted out of old breathing sounds.
Sounds thrum. Hum. The wind moans;
It is my mother. The wind is a guest at my house.
Outside my house, the wind mutters and moans
And my baby sister enjoys baby-sitting,
Making me look bad in front of people my age.
I am better off alone.
I am better off not seeing anything. Not driving. Or climbing.
Better off not seeing anything but the river
Gurgling and chuckling to itself. The darkness permeates the world
And the world is whole with its noise,
The world is whole and ripe and the fruit are ripe and thoughts
Trickle like water, trickle through dark things and the darkness
Wans and the moon is bright and full and sometimes
I stare and think about wolves running through the woods,
Running naked and not being able to climb over walls.
The flowers open in spring.
The mood of the spring runs dry and the dryness runs
To the sun and the sun is a great, big ball of rock,
Fierce and hot,
And the sun is spit back out.
I am better off alone.
I am better than the stillest mountain.
I am better breathing what is deep inside of me,
Oxygen fills my lungs and I can see, see the dark things
That wave, move, bend-
Colors flock across the sad, sorry sky.
I am worthless.
The whole of the world is a coin that is tossed on
The bending note of all the oceans-and the oceans are bright
With noise and the noise of the wind moans, cries,
The world is exhausted of its breath.
I can’t see. I am better off alone. I am better
as an illiterate.
DNA
DNA
It is the memory of the folding chair.
The lily bursting open in a song.
It is the memory of who you are.
It is the memory of myself.
I am not forgotten.
I have not been forgotten.
All of mankind holds grudges-
China, Germany, England, France,
Old women wear top hats and
Laugh uproariously at nothing.
We are not in Nottingham.
You speak when none speaks.
I glimmer down sad mountains.
The mountains is made up of water,
Water is the core of our DNA.
We speak truth.
We are truth.
Truth is etched, carved in the doorways of time.
Carved in the doorways of nothing.
Some people hate.
Dr. King, Malcolm X, Gandhi,
Except Gandhi roared at lions.
Hatred burns the flesh.
It tears the flesh in two.
Sometimes, the flowers are withered
And we can’t find ourselves without looking
Backwards, without glancing outside of time.
Sometimes, golden mountains rise out of nothing.
Sometimes, we are dead when we are alive.
I chose to be neither.
I am the neither.
We break bones over sad mountains.
The fir tree glistens in the sun.
The sun is a diamond.
Mommy, are we there yet?
Mommy, are we in cars?
Father this; Daddy that;
No time to ourselves.
I am sitting in a chair, reading the newspaper-
My teacher, Mr. Allen,
The man who breaks cars,
Stole Haiti and gave it back.
He is enraged his child is ill.
He is enraged about a lot of things.
Only a flower can calm him down.
Only the folding of a flower and the opening of it.
We are flowers folding inward and outward.
He feels he is forgotten.
I never spoke the word that lingers
In me, of stardust and words-
We speak of bones. We dream of bones. He can’t find me.
It tears him down like the moon is torn down.
His child is ill because she does not speak.
He is angry about a lot of things.
Haiti falls on his lips.
Here is the hatred of himself, the flower opening
And closing.
And the hatred of Haiti.
It is the memory of the folding chair.
The lily bursting open in a song.
It is the memory of who you are.
It is the memory of myself.
I am not forgotten.
I have not been forgotten.
All of mankind holds grudges-
China, Germany, England, France,
Old women wear top hats and
Laugh uproariously at nothing.
We are not in Nottingham.
You speak when none speaks.
I glimmer down sad mountains.
The mountains is made up of water,
Water is the core of our DNA.
We speak truth.
We are truth.
Truth is etched, carved in the doorways of time.
Carved in the doorways of nothing.
Some people hate.
Dr. King, Malcolm X, Gandhi,
Except Gandhi roared at lions.
Hatred burns the flesh.
It tears the flesh in two.
Sometimes, the flowers are withered
And we can’t find ourselves without looking
Backwards, without glancing outside of time.
Sometimes, golden mountains rise out of nothing.
Sometimes, we are dead when we are alive.
I chose to be neither.
I am the neither.
We break bones over sad mountains.
The fir tree glistens in the sun.
The sun is a diamond.
Mommy, are we there yet?
Mommy, are we in cars?
Father this; Daddy that;
No time to ourselves.
I am sitting in a chair, reading the newspaper-
My teacher, Mr. Allen,
The man who breaks cars,
Stole Haiti and gave it back.
He is enraged his child is ill.
He is enraged about a lot of things.
Only a flower can calm him down.
Only the folding of a flower and the opening of it.
We are flowers folding inward and outward.
He feels he is forgotten.
I never spoke the word that lingers
In me, of stardust and words-
We speak of bones. We dream of bones. He can’t find me.
It tears him down like the moon is torn down.
His child is ill because she does not speak.
He is angry about a lot of things.
Haiti falls on his lips.
Here is the hatred of himself, the flower opening
And closing.
And the hatred of Haiti.
Night Soldiers.
Night drifts in from all sides.
Sounds pour from all sides.
Speakers are in the walls.
The sound of winter enters from all sides.
The sound of winter is in my veins.
I walk on prose. Prose is gray.
It drifts through a stormy day.
Frogs walk on goodbye sticks.
Stones move over solid mountains.
He is a stalworthy soldier,
A sentinel in sheep clothing-
He eats macaroni and cheese,
He sings songs to the ocean.
Night drifts from all sides.
I can’t speak reason without breaking
Reason. My heart, o glorious wind,
You dry your tears and the tears are still.
I perchance. I perchance miracles, perchance
The doorman, he sat on a foot stool,
Whispered melodies to sorry green rivers.
I am free.
My worries are bothersome. They make
My mother, my brother. They scout
Across deserted landscapes;
Wave crests drift, naked, on the desert floor.
The rose was left in a mudbank.
A man in a dark suit walks across the mudbank,
His eyes stare blindly into the flower.
He is the flower. The flower stills. Stiller than breath.
Sounds pour from all sides.
Speakers are in the walls.
The sound of winter enters from all sides.
The sound of winter is in my veins.
I walk on prose. Prose is gray.
It drifts through a stormy day.
Frogs walk on goodbye sticks.
Stones move over solid mountains.
He is a stalworthy soldier,
A sentinel in sheep clothing-
He eats macaroni and cheese,
He sings songs to the ocean.
Night drifts from all sides.
I can’t speak reason without breaking
Reason. My heart, o glorious wind,
You dry your tears and the tears are still.
I perchance. I perchance miracles, perchance
The doorman, he sat on a foot stool,
Whispered melodies to sorry green rivers.
I am free.
My worries are bothersome. They make
My mother, my brother. They scout
Across deserted landscapes;
Wave crests drift, naked, on the desert floor.
The rose was left in a mudbank.
A man in a dark suit walks across the mudbank,
His eyes stare blindly into the flower.
He is the flower. The flower stills. Stiller than breath.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
The Man In the Dark.
The man in the dark was a mysterious figure. He walked down a wide, dirt road as the sun was coming up and the wind was at his back and the air smelled of rain. His hair was brown and his nose was long and smudged and spread across his face like melted butter and his eyes were beady and brown and his mouth was twisted in a scowl and he couldn’t forgive his father. He wanted to find some place to stay. The trees were on either side of the road and the road was not a paved road; it was a dirt road. It had always been a dirt road and the dirt road would always remain a dirt road as long as God was alive and breathing and his father could not forsake him now. He walked down the dirt road and didn’t think about anything. He wasn’t a good thinker. His thoughts were slow and stepped one after another like building blocks or stones being thrust in the water and his eyes narrowed as he stared at the sun as it was beginning to rise to the start of a new day and the rays of the sun pierced through the shadows and fell upon everything and the sun was the only bright spot in his mind. He failed. He was supposed to have a new job and he failed and he wanted to watch football on television and he couldn’t because he didn’t have a home and he was homeless and the world was homeless because they wouldn’t help him, they were afraid of his brown hair and his big nose and his eyes that were too sharp to see. He thought his father would be disappointed wherever he was-God rest his soul-and he lifted his face and his eyes and he stared at the rising sun and thought he was a failure at life and life failed him. He was not born blind but he was born with a lame leg and he had the surgery when he was five to fix his leg and now he walked with a slight limp. The limp was noticeable and people didn’t like it. The wind was at his back now; the wind shrilled a high, pitched note and the note rang through the trees and the place beyond the horizon and he thought about taking a bath in a river. It was 1979 and the Vietnam War was ending or almost ended or had ended already; the road was a very long road and he had gone from one day to the next day and had walked in the dark. His thought was a thought of stepping stones and food, glorious food to fill his stomach, and he thought maybe he should be a soldier and join the war that couldn’t end. He thought all words were very much the same. Most wars killed the same kinds of people; good, hard-working people who had values and ideas that were unlike other people’s. He learned about Iraq and Vietnam and South Korea in high school and how some of the presidents thought maybe Hitler and Pol Pot were insane. The man couldn’t think about that now. He needed to find work. Or he had to steal food but he hoped he wouldn’t have to steal food from the farmers because he liked farmers who helped America grow strong and stay free. He wanted America to stay free and grow strong and proud and stand against the injustices of war and the freedom it pertained.
He was a man.
He took out a lighter and a cigarette from his pouch and lit a cigarette and his thinking was slow and he thought now about a wife and children of which he had none. The trees were like buildings. They didn’t have fruit.
He was a man and he smoked a cigarette and spit it out and soon he came to a road and at the end of the road was a sign.
“Jackson, Mississippi.”
He was in Mississippi.
He walked a little further and a building rose up out of the ground. It was a grocery store. He went into the grocery store and pulled a grubby twenty dollar bill out of his pocket and wandered down the aisles, looking for something to eat. He finally settled on a bag of hamburger buns and beef jerky and he purchased it at the cash register from a smiling woman with a big jaw and hair like a rat’s nest. The wind screamed outside and battered at anything within reach. The man was within reach. He swallowed hard and put the food in the sack on his back and he went out into the howling gale and looked up at the sky and realized it was going to rain.
Well.
He needed some place out of the rain.
He was a man.
He took out a lighter and a cigarette from his pouch and lit a cigarette and his thinking was slow and he thought now about a wife and children of which he had none. The trees were like buildings. They didn’t have fruit.
He was a man and he smoked a cigarette and spit it out and soon he came to a road and at the end of the road was a sign.
“Jackson, Mississippi.”
He was in Mississippi.
He walked a little further and a building rose up out of the ground. It was a grocery store. He went into the grocery store and pulled a grubby twenty dollar bill out of his pocket and wandered down the aisles, looking for something to eat. He finally settled on a bag of hamburger buns and beef jerky and he purchased it at the cash register from a smiling woman with a big jaw and hair like a rat’s nest. The wind screamed outside and battered at anything within reach. The man was within reach. He swallowed hard and put the food in the sack on his back and he went out into the howling gale and looked up at the sky and realized it was going to rain.
Well.
He needed some place out of the rain.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
A CITY.
A CITY
The city left me. In the deep of the dark, on the edge of the dawn, the city left my wife. The moon, the bright summer moon at noon, killed me and left me for dead. It was a joke, I guess. The moon couldn’t kill a person. Light crawled in my window and the city left me and it was a ghost town in the dark and the darkness sucked in the life all around it and the quietness, the stillness, was of autumn, of wind, of deceit. My wife was a ghost and her heart stopped beating after she was a ghost and deceased, a ghost of the good and the dead when they went to sleep, where they went to sleep and the dead slept in the deep blue ocean, the blueness of the ocean all around us. She had been a ghost long before she was ever with me and it was only when she was dead I realized she had never been living in my life in the first place. It was like a star slowly burning out from existence, it was like the dying of a star. We never got along about anything. She never had a nice thing to say about me and our sex was miniscule. We seemed to have the picture perfect life and didn’t. I found her lying dead and naked in the bathtub, the water dripping from the silver faucet, her hand dangled over the edge of the tub, her eyes closed. She wasn’t really sleeping. For a second, I thought maybe she was sleeping and the thought flitted away and she was alive in my mind one minute and dead the next. I looked down at her naked body, stark white naked in the bathtub, and didn’t feel anything except the cold, hard truth-the cold facts of truth. She died sometime during the night and her body was cold to the touch of my finger and it wasn’t my fault and I knew in my heart she was somewhere safe, in Heaven or wherever else people went when they kicked the bucket. I had a guilt trip like you wouldn’t believe. Anger. A deep, penetrating anger emitted from the core of my being and I wanted to tear up everything-tear at the posters hanging in the master bedroom; knock over the bookcase full of Agatha Christie and James Patterson novels; wreck havoc on entire cities like Adolf Hitler did once a upon a time before Vietnam swallowed the world and spit it back up again. I didn’t. I stood in the bathroom, my hands dangled at my sides, looking at the ghost of my wife and not really feeling anything at all, only a cold, hard truth and the swallowing anger and darkness and the wind shuddering outside the house. I did what any sane widow would do. I checked her pulse. She had none. I checked her breathing. No gasp of pain emitted from her lips or her nose. Her chest didn’t move. “God!” I wept. “Jessica!” She didn’t reply. I went to the hall closet, pulled out two towels, and covered them over her naked body. I dashed into the master bedroom, picked up my cell phone, and dialed 911.
Thank goodness they pick up on the first ring.
“Hello?” the operator chirped in my ear.
“Emergency,” I breathed heavily into the phone and hoped it reached the other end. Sometimes, things didn’t work right, especially appliances. “Emergency. Come. Now.” My voice was throaty and whispery and I sounded like a dumbass. It wasn’t my intention. I wanted to sound professional and not break down in front of a stranger over the phone. I didn’t want to break down about anything.
Her voice floated back to me: “Where?”
I gave her the address.
“Is she…still?” I thought maybe the last word was breathing but I couldn’t be sure. My phone crackled.
“No…dead. I checked her pulse. Again?” The statement was more of a question. She didn’t give a response. I sounded drunk. It wasn’t a good idea to sound drunk on the phone with a 911 operator. She hung up the phone. A minute later she called back and apologized for the inconvenience and said it was probably some crossed wires and she didn’t mean to hang up on me. The ambulance and the police were coming and I wouldn’t have to fear anything any longer. She asked me if anyone had broken into my home. I told her I didn’t know. I lived in a beach house-or, what old people would call a “condo.” The ambulance arrived and the medics burst through the front door and pounded into the bathroom and pronounced my wife dead at the scene. I wept. The police arrived next, and booby-taped the bathroom, I couldn’t even get my hairbrush or my toothpaste. A police officer introduced himself as Detective Kit Perry of the New Orleans Police Department. They queried me about what happened before her untimely death-she had gotten home kind of late and I heard her stomping around the guest bedroom until, I assumed, she fell asleep and woke up again and went to take a shit and fell in the bathtub and eventually drowned to death-except, the bathtub was half-full and the water was very cold and I didn’t have the whole facts. Only partial facts and opinions about what happened. I was upset. I had been asleep the whole time in the master bedroom and if my poor wife screamed, I had been asleep and don’t remember hearing anything unusual. It was horrible. They drew chalk on the white, linoleum floor next to the tub and waited for the medics to load her on the stretcher and carried her away, down the stairs and out the front door and into the dead of night. I followed down the stairs, babbling, unable to know exactly what it was I wanted to ask; a police officer followed behind me and patted me on the shoulder and assured me everything would be all right. The medics assured me the police would escort the ambulance to the medical examiner’s office and I would have to claim it the next morning. Kit asked me if I had anywhere to stay for the night. I shook my head and told them my sister was in Utah and she had two children and couldn’t leave them. They were in school and had to get good grades so they could get into a good college and take care of their mother when she was in the final stages of Alzheimer’s. Alzheimer’s was a disease a lot like cancer and destroyed the soul.
“Jessica,” I sobbed. “Jessica. Jessica.” I cried her name over and over again and a police officer came pounding up the stairs and handed me a tissue and I blew my nose in it and handed it back to him. He introduced himself. His name was Charley Stevens and he was one of the older police officers-he had been a police officer for fifteen years and had seen a lot of crimes in his day, but very few murders. He was puzzled by the murder and asked me a lot of questions and wrote them down in a yellow notepad.
“Were you home all day?” he asked me.
I nodded. “Yes. I was going to get pizza out and changed my mind and heated up leftovers instead-the cook leaves at six. We make food ourselves any time after six. Sometimes, I don’t want to cook and eat whatever’s in the fridge.” I took a deep breath. I was babbling. I had to stop. “Well.”
I didn’t say anything else. I swallowed and looked at them and I looked at the condo and I didn’t want any of it. I hated my wife, sure, but I didn’t want her to be dead. I wanted her to be alive. I wanted her to stand in front of me and tell me everything was going to be all right.
“I think,” Jasper Frenchman said. His shoulders fell. “I think the maid did it.” He frowned. I could see the little hamster wheel spinning around and around in his brain. He asked for my maid’s number. I recited it to him by heart. Jasper babbled on and on about nonsensicals-how she died; why; everything I didn’t want to have to deal with. I swallowed. Charley scowled at him. His expression was one of anger. “Stop!” He commanded. He glared daggers at him and the police officer shrank back, perturbed by the man’s resilience of having being demanding. The man’s resilience was something to be left undiscovered, unperturbed, undisturbed. The darkness was around them and was outside the house. The police officers had been at my house for over an hour. I glanced at the clock in the kitchen. My stomach rumbled. I didn’t tell them I was hungry. They didn’t need to know.
Jasper wandered back to the bathroom. He looked down at the yellow chalk. “It’s not in the right spot,” he muttered, and shook his head.
“That’s all right,” the police officer, Audrey Davis, came up behind him. “We did it on purpose. You can’t really draw the line of a human in a bathtub. It’s impossible.” He smiled. He didn’t think anything was funny about a dead woman. Her husband would surely take the blame. Things happened. They couldn’t be controlled.
He nodded. “Right.” He looked at me. “You all right?” He smiled. I wondered, What the hell was he smiling about, dumb fuck? I wanted to rip him a new Adam’s Apple. I wanted to buy a weapon and eat all of his friends. I wanted to…It was against the law. I held back. My hands clenched at their sides. I shook my head resolutely and stared hard at the man and tried to think of something mean to say and nothing came. In the name of the God Almighty, I will be firm, I will stand tall against the tides, I will be tall against the darkness and all things that wanted to tear me from sanity, tear me from the woman I loved, tear me from doing the right thing. The right thing and the wrong thing were two different things and I didn’t know how to solve it. The sanity kept me firm. Be still. The police officers told me I shouldn’t stay here. I looked at them. How could they say that to me? This was where my wife spent her last moments on Earth. My wife, the blonde woman who had the quirky smile and the big eyes and the soft, throaty voice. She spent them in the bathroom, the water slowly filling in the bathtub. This was where she died. I couldn’t leave. I told them so. Jasper shrugged nonchalantly. “Suit yourself,” he replied. “You crazy. Don’t want to deal with no crazies.” He gestured for the police officers to leave. They trooped out the door and down the stairs and I heard the outside front door open and closed. I stood in the living room. My breath came in large and laborious and I went to the bathroom and stared at the bathtub. The water was turned off. It wasn’t dripping. I put my hands on the bathroom sink and tried to think about what I was going to do. I had to go to the coroner’s office the next morning and claim the body. They said they were keeping it over night to examine it and make a decision about the cause of death. I thought it was suicide. My heart told me otherwise. My beautiful wife. Gone. Gone in a single minute. An instant. It was like making a cup of instant coffee.
The police officers were gone.
I was alone in the apartment.
The body was gone, too.
The body. I couldn’t understand how I could think of her in the manner I thought of her. I was in the dark. The living room light was off. I went to the tall shape of the lamp in the dark and flicked it on and the entire room emitted a yellow glow. Shadows fell off the walls and bounced on the floor. We had bouncy carpet. I went to the sliding glass doors and opened them-swish, swish-and walked out onto the balcony and looked down at the ocean. The purple-black mist swirled on the water and the water was black, too. The moon was full and bright and the brightness reflected on the water and the water shivered and moved. I didn’t see the whale again, the whale was my only friend. My only friend, the whale. I was sad. The sadness was in me and I couldn’t get it out for anything in the world. I couldn’t get it out for anyone, let alone the police officers who came to visit me in my hour of need, or the coroner who kept my wife’s body safe for the night before I had to say goodbye.
I cried for myself.
For my life. Not for my death. Because it didn’t happen yet. I rested my hands on the balcony and the tears bounced off my cheeks and down my skin and the wind whispered, delicate, across my eyelids and remained. The solitude was daunting. It daunted me. The wind echoed her voice: Raul, can we go? Raul, would you like this? Raul, strawberry wine from Paris. I enjoy our time together, Raul. And the strangeness at the back of my mind, maybe she was cheating on me, maybe she had cheated on me, maybe she was thinking about cheating on me and wasn’t going to go through with it, or she was going to cheat on me in the future. All the conversations fell in my mind, quick stepping stones and the wind was her, it became her. I was not by myself on the balcony. The wind kept me company. I could move to the city. I could move to the city and get away from the ocean and all its terrible secrets. Like the death of my wife or the whale with the glittering eye, or the moon that rose up over me and blanketed me in a thin silver of light. The thin silver of light permeated from the core of darkness and the darkness surrounded it and the wind spoke for my wife. I didn’t want to hear my wife’s words ever again. I wanted them to be buried forever. They would be buried when she was buried. They would be gone forever once she was dead. She was dead now. The words fell on my lips. I spoke them aloud, a whisper on the wind: My wife was dead. A spark from a cigarette lit the dark and it was my cigarette lighter lighting a thin, white cigarette. What would my wife do for me? I thought all of the things she had done for me. Every single little thing. She took out the garbage for me. She used her credit cards-her own credit cards, mind you-on me to purchase sweaters, sweaters with the logo “Shorts” on them in big, bold letters, or “Save the Earth, Nuke the Whales.” It made her laugh out loud. I thought of her laugh. I could see it in my memories. I could see it in the back of my mind and I tried to grasp the words and the sound didn’t come. The words didn’t come and I grasped them with two, firm hands, and the laugh came, clear as a bell-no, it was the wind again. Not the laugh of my wife. Why didn’t I record her laugh when I had the chance? I didn’t know. I didn’t understand anything that was going on. I thought about my wife’s eyes. They had been large and blue and reflected the sun. On the first day we met, I was lost in those eyes, lost in the endlessness of it. The endlessness of the eyes were one of the things I loved about her-from her eyes to her long, blonde hair and heart-shaped mouth. She wore red lipstick and had no eyeglasses. I was brown-haired and blue-eyed and she said I could have been a model, except I was working 24/7 at a job I hated. I was a contractor for a big-time contracting company. Everyone kissed my butt. Sometimes, I think even my wife kissed my ass. She thought her job was less than what it actually was and it wasn’t. I was glad she’d had the job. It helped out a lot. Now she was gone and I couldn’t get her back. The wind was my wife. If I didn’t know any better, if I wasn’t mistaken, the wind cried her name. I was the wind and the wind was my wife and we both cried and the stars came out and they cried, too. The stars were big and bright and reflected the sky and I was on the balcony and didn’t notice the shadow of a figure of someone in the beach house next to me come out on his own balcony and light a slim naked cigarette and stare out at the ocean. I didn’t know he was there until I heard the click of the lighter and a small flame sprang up in the darkness. The darkness of the sky was different from the darkness of the ocean and the land and the houses, the darkness of the sky was more purple, pale and translucent in the dark and I craned my neck to look for fish. Her ghost haunted me. She was behind me in the dark and I looked quickly and only saw my neighbor. His name was Lonnie Dracon. He was a forty-seven year old divorced man. I usually saw his car in the driveway and I only saw him twice in the whole life I was living at the beach house. I never talked to anyone anymore, and rarely conversed with my wife. My wife was gone and Lonnie was not and I craned my neck over the railing and blurted out one word: “Hi.” The words were soft-spoken. Quiet. I swallowed, hardly able to get the word out. I didn’t know what to say. Lonnie had a busy life. I didn’t want to bother him about my own. He would know tomorrow if I didn’t tell him now. The news would know. They always knew everything.
“Hi,” he repeated. He flicked the cigarette off the balcony and it flew through the darkness and was gone, into the pit of blackness that made up the night. Vietnam swallowed the night. Vietnam was the night. The night was Vietnam. I didn’t know why I thought those things. I didn’t know what I was thinking. Or why I thought anything. The anger welled up inside of me again.
“You angry?” he said. “I saw the police cars leaving.”
I laughed bitterly. “My wife,” I explained. Laughter bubbled in my throat. I couldn’t keep it down.
He nodded in the dark. His head bobbed up and down. “Ah,” he sighed. The end of the cigarette burst full of light and faded again. It was a star winking out. The metaphor was clichéd, I knew, but I didn’t bother to make a better one. My wife was gone. “I saw the police cars,” he added. “The sirens. Woke me up.”
I nodded. “Sorry about that,” I apologized.
I felt guilty for lying. Lying wasn’t my thing. Unless it was to someone I didn’t like. “Lonnie.”
“Yeah?”
“My wife is dead.”
“She died from alcohol?” He sounded startled.
I shook my head. He couldn’t see me, but I did it anyway. “No,” I answered. “We don’t know what it is. They’re doing the autopsy tomorrow.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know.”
“She was pretty.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“Were you happy?”
I grasped the words in my mind. Grasped them and they rolled around my tongue and I felt them and heard the memories in the back of my mind: “Yes.”
“Why did she do it, then? If she did it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Suicide.”
The word was an ugly word.
I thought about it. I didn’t want to admit it to myself, but I thought about it. The words rolled in my mind with a lucidity that was horrifying. Terrifying. The darkness made it all the more prominent. The darkness made me scream inside my mind. Suicide was an ugly word. It had an ugly connotation attached to it. My heart hurt. The pain was fierce and sharp and it hit my gut and I wanted to run and never come back. Lonnie was the most terrifying idea to me at the moment and he was the only one who had never hurt me, had never left me. We were never close but he didn’t try to stick his nose in my business and I respected it for him. I respected him. I guess he did something with fishing and ran a restaurant on the side and he seemed to be happy with his wife-what was her name, Starla? Yeah, I think it was Starla. She was a Barbie-type person. She had a lot of tattoos and shoulders like a man. I didn’t really think the description was appropriate, but I guessed it was good enough. It was good enough for me.
“Tell,” he urged me. His voice was emotional. He was choking up. I was surprised. He didn’t seem to be the type to get emotionally attached to situations.
“What?”
“Talk about it. Tell me how it made you feel.”
I was startled. “How what feel?”
“Death,” he explained in a patient tone. “Her death.”
“I just wanted to see the whale.”
“That whale? I named him SnuggleBuns.”
I resisted the urge to snicker. “Dumb name,” I replied.
“What about your dumb name?”
“Oh, mine? Micah Heap.”
“It sounds Egyptian.”
“I haven’t even been to Mississippi.”
“Or Jackson, Tennessee.”
“No. Not that.”
“Her?”
“Jessica. Middle name is Elizabeth.” I don’t know why I told him her middle name. I wanted her to be alive for a few minutes longer. I thought about all the times we were together and the times we were apart. We were apart more than we were together. We had dinners. Dancing. Long walks on the beach, talking, and looking at the stars. Our sex grew less and less until I couldn’t stand the sight of her. We drifted apart. I thought about bringing it back but I had been working, trying to provide for her. Our beach house cost $43,000; she bought a $25,000 car last week and it sat in the garage like a great wooly mammoth. It sat in the garage, sullen and angry, and I mulled it over in my mind and the thoughts shaped in my mind and became firm and hard, without being bitter and angry about anything. The anger was raw. The hatred was raw and I wondered why Lonnie was angry. Myth had it only angry people smoked cigarettes. I was one of the angry ones. I didn’t know why. The anger was inside me and it roared like an angry lion. We danced around angry words. I didn’t want to talk about his home life. My home life was bad enough. I didn’t need to pry into his. We watched the moon. It was bright and full in the sky and the moon glared down on us and then a sound on the water and two whales came up, gasping, for air. They sang their song and my neighbor snorted and went back inside. I watched this with wary amusement. He came back out and a series of shrill, high whistles emitted into the darkness and I realized he was the one whistling. It was a sweet sound. A good note. The sound of the whales and the sound from my neighbor’s whistle was in the dark around us and we didn’t think anything for awhile, just listened to the whales, who had not been there when the wife died and I had to see her body all by myself, but they were here now and I was enjoying the moment, the moment of stillness, the moment of the water and the dark and the sky and the wind. Check that, it wasn’t windy. The sky was pitch black. Pitch black all around. The sky moaned and life breathed in the ocean and in the houses, my wife isn’t in that house or the other one or any other house on the black or the rest of the world. I was in mourning, mourning hard, and the mourning crashed my entire being, the entirety of it all, I was tired.
The city left me. In the deep of the dark, on the edge of the dawn, the city left my wife. The moon, the bright summer moon at noon, killed me and left me for dead. It was a joke, I guess. The moon couldn’t kill a person. Light crawled in my window and the city left me and it was a ghost town in the dark and the darkness sucked in the life all around it and the quietness, the stillness, was of autumn, of wind, of deceit. My wife was a ghost and her heart stopped beating after she was a ghost and deceased, a ghost of the good and the dead when they went to sleep, where they went to sleep and the dead slept in the deep blue ocean, the blueness of the ocean all around us. She had been a ghost long before she was ever with me and it was only when she was dead I realized she had never been living in my life in the first place. It was like a star slowly burning out from existence, it was like the dying of a star. We never got along about anything. She never had a nice thing to say about me and our sex was miniscule. We seemed to have the picture perfect life and didn’t. I found her lying dead and naked in the bathtub, the water dripping from the silver faucet, her hand dangled over the edge of the tub, her eyes closed. She wasn’t really sleeping. For a second, I thought maybe she was sleeping and the thought flitted away and she was alive in my mind one minute and dead the next. I looked down at her naked body, stark white naked in the bathtub, and didn’t feel anything except the cold, hard truth-the cold facts of truth. She died sometime during the night and her body was cold to the touch of my finger and it wasn’t my fault and I knew in my heart she was somewhere safe, in Heaven or wherever else people went when they kicked the bucket. I had a guilt trip like you wouldn’t believe. Anger. A deep, penetrating anger emitted from the core of my being and I wanted to tear up everything-tear at the posters hanging in the master bedroom; knock over the bookcase full of Agatha Christie and James Patterson novels; wreck havoc on entire cities like Adolf Hitler did once a upon a time before Vietnam swallowed the world and spit it back up again. I didn’t. I stood in the bathroom, my hands dangled at my sides, looking at the ghost of my wife and not really feeling anything at all, only a cold, hard truth and the swallowing anger and darkness and the wind shuddering outside the house. I did what any sane widow would do. I checked her pulse. She had none. I checked her breathing. No gasp of pain emitted from her lips or her nose. Her chest didn’t move. “God!” I wept. “Jessica!” She didn’t reply. I went to the hall closet, pulled out two towels, and covered them over her naked body. I dashed into the master bedroom, picked up my cell phone, and dialed 911.
Thank goodness they pick up on the first ring.
“Hello?” the operator chirped in my ear.
“Emergency,” I breathed heavily into the phone and hoped it reached the other end. Sometimes, things didn’t work right, especially appliances. “Emergency. Come. Now.” My voice was throaty and whispery and I sounded like a dumbass. It wasn’t my intention. I wanted to sound professional and not break down in front of a stranger over the phone. I didn’t want to break down about anything.
Her voice floated back to me: “Where?”
I gave her the address.
“Is she…still?” I thought maybe the last word was breathing but I couldn’t be sure. My phone crackled.
“No…dead. I checked her pulse. Again?” The statement was more of a question. She didn’t give a response. I sounded drunk. It wasn’t a good idea to sound drunk on the phone with a 911 operator. She hung up the phone. A minute later she called back and apologized for the inconvenience and said it was probably some crossed wires and she didn’t mean to hang up on me. The ambulance and the police were coming and I wouldn’t have to fear anything any longer. She asked me if anyone had broken into my home. I told her I didn’t know. I lived in a beach house-or, what old people would call a “condo.” The ambulance arrived and the medics burst through the front door and pounded into the bathroom and pronounced my wife dead at the scene. I wept. The police arrived next, and booby-taped the bathroom, I couldn’t even get my hairbrush or my toothpaste. A police officer introduced himself as Detective Kit Perry of the New Orleans Police Department. They queried me about what happened before her untimely death-she had gotten home kind of late and I heard her stomping around the guest bedroom until, I assumed, she fell asleep and woke up again and went to take a shit and fell in the bathtub and eventually drowned to death-except, the bathtub was half-full and the water was very cold and I didn’t have the whole facts. Only partial facts and opinions about what happened. I was upset. I had been asleep the whole time in the master bedroom and if my poor wife screamed, I had been asleep and don’t remember hearing anything unusual. It was horrible. They drew chalk on the white, linoleum floor next to the tub and waited for the medics to load her on the stretcher and carried her away, down the stairs and out the front door and into the dead of night. I followed down the stairs, babbling, unable to know exactly what it was I wanted to ask; a police officer followed behind me and patted me on the shoulder and assured me everything would be all right. The medics assured me the police would escort the ambulance to the medical examiner’s office and I would have to claim it the next morning. Kit asked me if I had anywhere to stay for the night. I shook my head and told them my sister was in Utah and she had two children and couldn’t leave them. They were in school and had to get good grades so they could get into a good college and take care of their mother when she was in the final stages of Alzheimer’s. Alzheimer’s was a disease a lot like cancer and destroyed the soul.
“Jessica,” I sobbed. “Jessica. Jessica.” I cried her name over and over again and a police officer came pounding up the stairs and handed me a tissue and I blew my nose in it and handed it back to him. He introduced himself. His name was Charley Stevens and he was one of the older police officers-he had been a police officer for fifteen years and had seen a lot of crimes in his day, but very few murders. He was puzzled by the murder and asked me a lot of questions and wrote them down in a yellow notepad.
“Were you home all day?” he asked me.
I nodded. “Yes. I was going to get pizza out and changed my mind and heated up leftovers instead-the cook leaves at six. We make food ourselves any time after six. Sometimes, I don’t want to cook and eat whatever’s in the fridge.” I took a deep breath. I was babbling. I had to stop. “Well.”
I didn’t say anything else. I swallowed and looked at them and I looked at the condo and I didn’t want any of it. I hated my wife, sure, but I didn’t want her to be dead. I wanted her to be alive. I wanted her to stand in front of me and tell me everything was going to be all right.
“I think,” Jasper Frenchman said. His shoulders fell. “I think the maid did it.” He frowned. I could see the little hamster wheel spinning around and around in his brain. He asked for my maid’s number. I recited it to him by heart. Jasper babbled on and on about nonsensicals-how she died; why; everything I didn’t want to have to deal with. I swallowed. Charley scowled at him. His expression was one of anger. “Stop!” He commanded. He glared daggers at him and the police officer shrank back, perturbed by the man’s resilience of having being demanding. The man’s resilience was something to be left undiscovered, unperturbed, undisturbed. The darkness was around them and was outside the house. The police officers had been at my house for over an hour. I glanced at the clock in the kitchen. My stomach rumbled. I didn’t tell them I was hungry. They didn’t need to know.
Jasper wandered back to the bathroom. He looked down at the yellow chalk. “It’s not in the right spot,” he muttered, and shook his head.
“That’s all right,” the police officer, Audrey Davis, came up behind him. “We did it on purpose. You can’t really draw the line of a human in a bathtub. It’s impossible.” He smiled. He didn’t think anything was funny about a dead woman. Her husband would surely take the blame. Things happened. They couldn’t be controlled.
He nodded. “Right.” He looked at me. “You all right?” He smiled. I wondered, What the hell was he smiling about, dumb fuck? I wanted to rip him a new Adam’s Apple. I wanted to buy a weapon and eat all of his friends. I wanted to…It was against the law. I held back. My hands clenched at their sides. I shook my head resolutely and stared hard at the man and tried to think of something mean to say and nothing came. In the name of the God Almighty, I will be firm, I will stand tall against the tides, I will be tall against the darkness and all things that wanted to tear me from sanity, tear me from the woman I loved, tear me from doing the right thing. The right thing and the wrong thing were two different things and I didn’t know how to solve it. The sanity kept me firm. Be still. The police officers told me I shouldn’t stay here. I looked at them. How could they say that to me? This was where my wife spent her last moments on Earth. My wife, the blonde woman who had the quirky smile and the big eyes and the soft, throaty voice. She spent them in the bathroom, the water slowly filling in the bathtub. This was where she died. I couldn’t leave. I told them so. Jasper shrugged nonchalantly. “Suit yourself,” he replied. “You crazy. Don’t want to deal with no crazies.” He gestured for the police officers to leave. They trooped out the door and down the stairs and I heard the outside front door open and closed. I stood in the living room. My breath came in large and laborious and I went to the bathroom and stared at the bathtub. The water was turned off. It wasn’t dripping. I put my hands on the bathroom sink and tried to think about what I was going to do. I had to go to the coroner’s office the next morning and claim the body. They said they were keeping it over night to examine it and make a decision about the cause of death. I thought it was suicide. My heart told me otherwise. My beautiful wife. Gone. Gone in a single minute. An instant. It was like making a cup of instant coffee.
The police officers were gone.
I was alone in the apartment.
The body was gone, too.
The body. I couldn’t understand how I could think of her in the manner I thought of her. I was in the dark. The living room light was off. I went to the tall shape of the lamp in the dark and flicked it on and the entire room emitted a yellow glow. Shadows fell off the walls and bounced on the floor. We had bouncy carpet. I went to the sliding glass doors and opened them-swish, swish-and walked out onto the balcony and looked down at the ocean. The purple-black mist swirled on the water and the water was black, too. The moon was full and bright and the brightness reflected on the water and the water shivered and moved. I didn’t see the whale again, the whale was my only friend. My only friend, the whale. I was sad. The sadness was in me and I couldn’t get it out for anything in the world. I couldn’t get it out for anyone, let alone the police officers who came to visit me in my hour of need, or the coroner who kept my wife’s body safe for the night before I had to say goodbye.
I cried for myself.
For my life. Not for my death. Because it didn’t happen yet. I rested my hands on the balcony and the tears bounced off my cheeks and down my skin and the wind whispered, delicate, across my eyelids and remained. The solitude was daunting. It daunted me. The wind echoed her voice: Raul, can we go? Raul, would you like this? Raul, strawberry wine from Paris. I enjoy our time together, Raul. And the strangeness at the back of my mind, maybe she was cheating on me, maybe she had cheated on me, maybe she was thinking about cheating on me and wasn’t going to go through with it, or she was going to cheat on me in the future. All the conversations fell in my mind, quick stepping stones and the wind was her, it became her. I was not by myself on the balcony. The wind kept me company. I could move to the city. I could move to the city and get away from the ocean and all its terrible secrets. Like the death of my wife or the whale with the glittering eye, or the moon that rose up over me and blanketed me in a thin silver of light. The thin silver of light permeated from the core of darkness and the darkness surrounded it and the wind spoke for my wife. I didn’t want to hear my wife’s words ever again. I wanted them to be buried forever. They would be buried when she was buried. They would be gone forever once she was dead. She was dead now. The words fell on my lips. I spoke them aloud, a whisper on the wind: My wife was dead. A spark from a cigarette lit the dark and it was my cigarette lighter lighting a thin, white cigarette. What would my wife do for me? I thought all of the things she had done for me. Every single little thing. She took out the garbage for me. She used her credit cards-her own credit cards, mind you-on me to purchase sweaters, sweaters with the logo “Shorts” on them in big, bold letters, or “Save the Earth, Nuke the Whales.” It made her laugh out loud. I thought of her laugh. I could see it in my memories. I could see it in the back of my mind and I tried to grasp the words and the sound didn’t come. The words didn’t come and I grasped them with two, firm hands, and the laugh came, clear as a bell-no, it was the wind again. Not the laugh of my wife. Why didn’t I record her laugh when I had the chance? I didn’t know. I didn’t understand anything that was going on. I thought about my wife’s eyes. They had been large and blue and reflected the sun. On the first day we met, I was lost in those eyes, lost in the endlessness of it. The endlessness of the eyes were one of the things I loved about her-from her eyes to her long, blonde hair and heart-shaped mouth. She wore red lipstick and had no eyeglasses. I was brown-haired and blue-eyed and she said I could have been a model, except I was working 24/7 at a job I hated. I was a contractor for a big-time contracting company. Everyone kissed my butt. Sometimes, I think even my wife kissed my ass. She thought her job was less than what it actually was and it wasn’t. I was glad she’d had the job. It helped out a lot. Now she was gone and I couldn’t get her back. The wind was my wife. If I didn’t know any better, if I wasn’t mistaken, the wind cried her name. I was the wind and the wind was my wife and we both cried and the stars came out and they cried, too. The stars were big and bright and reflected the sky and I was on the balcony and didn’t notice the shadow of a figure of someone in the beach house next to me come out on his own balcony and light a slim naked cigarette and stare out at the ocean. I didn’t know he was there until I heard the click of the lighter and a small flame sprang up in the darkness. The darkness of the sky was different from the darkness of the ocean and the land and the houses, the darkness of the sky was more purple, pale and translucent in the dark and I craned my neck to look for fish. Her ghost haunted me. She was behind me in the dark and I looked quickly and only saw my neighbor. His name was Lonnie Dracon. He was a forty-seven year old divorced man. I usually saw his car in the driveway and I only saw him twice in the whole life I was living at the beach house. I never talked to anyone anymore, and rarely conversed with my wife. My wife was gone and Lonnie was not and I craned my neck over the railing and blurted out one word: “Hi.” The words were soft-spoken. Quiet. I swallowed, hardly able to get the word out. I didn’t know what to say. Lonnie had a busy life. I didn’t want to bother him about my own. He would know tomorrow if I didn’t tell him now. The news would know. They always knew everything.
“Hi,” he repeated. He flicked the cigarette off the balcony and it flew through the darkness and was gone, into the pit of blackness that made up the night. Vietnam swallowed the night. Vietnam was the night. The night was Vietnam. I didn’t know why I thought those things. I didn’t know what I was thinking. Or why I thought anything. The anger welled up inside of me again.
“You angry?” he said. “I saw the police cars leaving.”
I laughed bitterly. “My wife,” I explained. Laughter bubbled in my throat. I couldn’t keep it down.
He nodded in the dark. His head bobbed up and down. “Ah,” he sighed. The end of the cigarette burst full of light and faded again. It was a star winking out. The metaphor was clichéd, I knew, but I didn’t bother to make a better one. My wife was gone. “I saw the police cars,” he added. “The sirens. Woke me up.”
I nodded. “Sorry about that,” I apologized.
I felt guilty for lying. Lying wasn’t my thing. Unless it was to someone I didn’t like. “Lonnie.”
“Yeah?”
“My wife is dead.”
“She died from alcohol?” He sounded startled.
I shook my head. He couldn’t see me, but I did it anyway. “No,” I answered. “We don’t know what it is. They’re doing the autopsy tomorrow.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know.”
“She was pretty.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“Were you happy?”
I grasped the words in my mind. Grasped them and they rolled around my tongue and I felt them and heard the memories in the back of my mind: “Yes.”
“Why did she do it, then? If she did it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Suicide.”
The word was an ugly word.
I thought about it. I didn’t want to admit it to myself, but I thought about it. The words rolled in my mind with a lucidity that was horrifying. Terrifying. The darkness made it all the more prominent. The darkness made me scream inside my mind. Suicide was an ugly word. It had an ugly connotation attached to it. My heart hurt. The pain was fierce and sharp and it hit my gut and I wanted to run and never come back. Lonnie was the most terrifying idea to me at the moment and he was the only one who had never hurt me, had never left me. We were never close but he didn’t try to stick his nose in my business and I respected it for him. I respected him. I guess he did something with fishing and ran a restaurant on the side and he seemed to be happy with his wife-what was her name, Starla? Yeah, I think it was Starla. She was a Barbie-type person. She had a lot of tattoos and shoulders like a man. I didn’t really think the description was appropriate, but I guessed it was good enough. It was good enough for me.
“Tell,” he urged me. His voice was emotional. He was choking up. I was surprised. He didn’t seem to be the type to get emotionally attached to situations.
“What?”
“Talk about it. Tell me how it made you feel.”
I was startled. “How what feel?”
“Death,” he explained in a patient tone. “Her death.”
“I just wanted to see the whale.”
“That whale? I named him SnuggleBuns.”
I resisted the urge to snicker. “Dumb name,” I replied.
“What about your dumb name?”
“Oh, mine? Micah Heap.”
“It sounds Egyptian.”
“I haven’t even been to Mississippi.”
“Or Jackson, Tennessee.”
“No. Not that.”
“Her?”
“Jessica. Middle name is Elizabeth.” I don’t know why I told him her middle name. I wanted her to be alive for a few minutes longer. I thought about all the times we were together and the times we were apart. We were apart more than we were together. We had dinners. Dancing. Long walks on the beach, talking, and looking at the stars. Our sex grew less and less until I couldn’t stand the sight of her. We drifted apart. I thought about bringing it back but I had been working, trying to provide for her. Our beach house cost $43,000; she bought a $25,000 car last week and it sat in the garage like a great wooly mammoth. It sat in the garage, sullen and angry, and I mulled it over in my mind and the thoughts shaped in my mind and became firm and hard, without being bitter and angry about anything. The anger was raw. The hatred was raw and I wondered why Lonnie was angry. Myth had it only angry people smoked cigarettes. I was one of the angry ones. I didn’t know why. The anger was inside me and it roared like an angry lion. We danced around angry words. I didn’t want to talk about his home life. My home life was bad enough. I didn’t need to pry into his. We watched the moon. It was bright and full in the sky and the moon glared down on us and then a sound on the water and two whales came up, gasping, for air. They sang their song and my neighbor snorted and went back inside. I watched this with wary amusement. He came back out and a series of shrill, high whistles emitted into the darkness and I realized he was the one whistling. It was a sweet sound. A good note. The sound of the whales and the sound from my neighbor’s whistle was in the dark around us and we didn’t think anything for awhile, just listened to the whales, who had not been there when the wife died and I had to see her body all by myself, but they were here now and I was enjoying the moment, the moment of stillness, the moment of the water and the dark and the sky and the wind. Check that, it wasn’t windy. The sky was pitch black. Pitch black all around. The sky moaned and life breathed in the ocean and in the houses, my wife isn’t in that house or the other one or any other house on the black or the rest of the world. I was in mourning, mourning hard, and the mourning crashed my entire being, the entirety of it all, I was tired.
Longer The Eyes Stare.
She said she was afraid of death.
He said, “Julia! You no longer lonely, fool.”
Her eyes are backwards eyes.
She beats not with a steady heart.
He queries questions to The Big Guy Upstairs.
He eats food from old folks’ homes.
He is saddened by the death of a friend-
No, doubt, from AIDS,
This is The Time of Pretending.
We pretend.
All things pretend.
Dark
Has come.
Dark fades.
Socks.
Are on padded feet.
The skin is white. Words fall on cold linoleum floors.
Fruit is poured from the skin.
The ground fades in.
Snow has come down.
We will go home.
Sometimes, we rise out
Of stormy weather-
We wish darkness would turn to the stars,
Turn heavenward, gaze skyward,
The family is not my own.
I am.
Monkeys breathe.
DNA is scoured and brown.
The pot on the table
Is full of stains.
I pick up the garbage.
Throw it outside.
The river lies, naked, in the sun.
I am not enraged.
I am not anything.
Colors melt in old stones.
Flowers fade on the table.
We fade.
All will fade.
All fades. Withers.
The church bell chimes.
He said, “Julia! You no longer lonely, fool.”
Her eyes are backwards eyes.
She beats not with a steady heart.
He queries questions to The Big Guy Upstairs.
He eats food from old folks’ homes.
He is saddened by the death of a friend-
No, doubt, from AIDS,
This is The Time of Pretending.
We pretend.
All things pretend.
Dark
Has come.
Dark fades.
Socks.
Are on padded feet.
The skin is white. Words fall on cold linoleum floors.
Fruit is poured from the skin.
The ground fades in.
Snow has come down.
We will go home.
Sometimes, we rise out
Of stormy weather-
We wish darkness would turn to the stars,
Turn heavenward, gaze skyward,
The family is not my own.
I am.
Monkeys breathe.
DNA is scoured and brown.
The pot on the table
Is full of stains.
I pick up the garbage.
Throw it outside.
The river lies, naked, in the sun.
I am not enraged.
I am not anything.
Colors melt in old stones.
Flowers fade on the table.
We fade.
All will fade.
All fades. Withers.
The church bell chimes.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
First Names.
She wasn’t dreaming partial dreams.
Red leaves
Fell,
Glimmering,
Over a red valley.
Why?! The snow sticks
To the ground.
Stick people crowd
Downtown
Mardi Gras parades.
Faded jeans.
Blast through
Midnight air
Stare
Gently they go down
Gently they go sleeping.
Gently.
Fish swim.
Mourning doves flock to
Old church ceilings-
Why,
O cry me out of Jordan,
Cry me rivers,
Rushing waters, cold.
Sentences are proverbs-
John.
Red leaves
Fell,
Glimmering,
Over a red valley.
Why?! The snow sticks
To the ground.
Stick people crowd
Downtown
Mardi Gras parades.
Faded jeans.
Blast through
Midnight air
Stare
Gently they go down
Gently they go sleeping.
Gently.
Fish swim.
Mourning doves flock to
Old church ceilings-
Why,
O cry me out of Jordan,
Cry me rivers,
Rushing waters, cold.
Sentences are proverbs-
John.
The Day Folds At the Sistine Chapel, 1989.
I walk up a marble staircase to my new house,
And the dog follows me. Quick on my heels.
I drop the box I am carrying and glance upward-
Stares at the ceiling.
It is a white ceiling.
It is the same kind of ceiling that everyone else
Has.
It is not the Sistine Chapel.
It is not any kind of chapel at all.
Just like the Sistine Chapel,
It is made out of walls, of wood-
The steps are carved out of stone.
His eyes are bright.
They shine deeper than mountains.
A school teacher, he sings to lonely mountains
And stares down at the world.
His mind takes a sharp turn.
His body is art.
His art is his words,
Carved on old doors in pawn shops,
Carved in bed posts at furniture shops.
He keeps something from his children.
That he had a bad heart.
He keeps it to himself,
And hopes the world falls around his ears,
Hopes the world dies, lonely and afraid,
He is lonely and afraid.
He is madly in love.
She works at an art museum.
She works in the gift shop at the art store
And whispers A Capalla to herself,
Every single night before the museum
Closes and the art is hidden from the world.
Art is hidden from the world every single
Night after closing time.
Some people say that the paintings come to life
During the night.
The night guards say they have never seen them.
He is madly in love.
She sees him standing in the doorway,
Wearing a suit and tie,
Thinks about his future and the future
Fades away.
Replaces by lonely mountains.
The mountains are made out of glass.
Hash. Sash. Her grandmother wears a sash
And hangs it in her hall closet.
And the dog follows me. Quick on my heels.
I drop the box I am carrying and glance upward-
Stares at the ceiling.
It is a white ceiling.
It is the same kind of ceiling that everyone else
Has.
It is not the Sistine Chapel.
It is not any kind of chapel at all.
Just like the Sistine Chapel,
It is made out of walls, of wood-
The steps are carved out of stone.
His eyes are bright.
They shine deeper than mountains.
A school teacher, he sings to lonely mountains
And stares down at the world.
His mind takes a sharp turn.
His body is art.
His art is his words,
Carved on old doors in pawn shops,
Carved in bed posts at furniture shops.
He keeps something from his children.
That he had a bad heart.
He keeps it to himself,
And hopes the world falls around his ears,
Hopes the world dies, lonely and afraid,
He is lonely and afraid.
He is madly in love.
She works at an art museum.
She works in the gift shop at the art store
And whispers A Capalla to herself,
Every single night before the museum
Closes and the art is hidden from the world.
Art is hidden from the world every single
Night after closing time.
Some people say that the paintings come to life
During the night.
The night guards say they have never seen them.
He is madly in love.
She sees him standing in the doorway,
Wearing a suit and tie,
Thinks about his future and the future
Fades away.
Replaces by lonely mountains.
The mountains are made out of glass.
Hash. Sash. Her grandmother wears a sash
And hangs it in her hall closet.
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