Routines

The bed is much the same.  Like a coffin, or a cage.  The wooden bars have been traded for chrome ones; the chiming mobile has given way to a single tray on which there sits a television remote with wide, round buttons that belie the trembling of fat, stiff digits and the anxiety of being alone.  The beds are similar but the rooms are starkly different...

The florescent sun chases color from this room.  The sheets, the walls, my own bone china flesh have all become a transparent white.  This chamber, with its finality, is made of light and vapor.  The ceiling is a portal, up, out.  The nurses on either side of my shell are diaphanous creatures.  In the opulent polyester that hugs their flesh like blasphemy, they are no longer trying to constrain me.  They believe like Pegasus.  If they could do anything to assist me they would lift me up, extensions of me.  My wings, they should be grafted to the fruitless arbor I have become, sprouting out of my scapula and armpit, the future generation.

Then, at the terminus, I will feel the gentle tugging as my soul is pulled out of the body.  The angels paid by medicaid are lifting me up like wings.  They struggle to get me in a sitting position.  I am a little disoriented at first,  I have been impatient.  Tired, I will tell you a story.  A story will put me to sleep. 

My eyes roll open like an excitable doll.  The birds are cheeping, a sightless symptom of morning.  White doves are peopling the eaves and beams.  The ornithologists are gathered at a big table at one end of the library.  They are studying the stuffed remains of extinct species:  dodo, passenger pigeon, the rare vermillion swan.  I introduce them to my little bird, who hops and shivers and sings.  Two of the girls do not notice.  The boy jumps up and begins chasing the delicate creature through the crowded stacks.  "They are too wild for the library," I scold their parents.  I am a man more or less satisfied with the present but regretful for the past, and a bit scared--well, terrified--of the future.  The parakeet is an escapee.  My wings are broken.

Here the light comes and goes in intervals.  I have been persuaded (by the persistence of their accusations) that the cranking of the generators and the arrival of the light within the compound is the same thing as 8 o'clock a.m. used to be.  And the eggs are white on white plates served on long white tables wrapped in bright white table clothes.  The servers wear white, the the inmates wear white, and the honored guests wear the brilliant white that repels the humid summer days in Alabama and Mississippi.                                                                      

Breakfast.  Pills.  Lunch.
Pills. Dinner
Pills.  Bed.
Pills.

Time on Steroids

This acceleration--yourself watching yourself vaulting forward through decades, the permeable plasma of time--can be disorienting. The g force pulls.  It disfigures the clarity of your handsome face.  If it lasts...

A minute longer and you will faint, forgetting weeks and months and seasons.  You will wake up stumbling in a smeared hallway, recklessly hurling down  a highway paved with adrenaline where you careen.  But, keep breathing.  Check your pulse.  Check your baggage.  Take what you can...

With you, I feel what I would like to call calm but at this speed, this feeling (this love?) is more like stability than peace.  You steady me.  You hold together this aging spaceship, this rusting Toronado, this eroding body.  Growing old...

I am getting wiser.  I am retreating from my fears.  Vanquished, they lay where I left them.  The frontiers of me are torn and bloody, but those battles are done.  And I imagine futures that find miracles, and futures that find peace...

Death-bed conversions and catholic perversions, past aspersions by those begrudged against both my values and my character.  The unnecessary dramas of a fragmented dream depart from me--scraps of paper in the wind--the longer I am awake... 

I remember many things:  gravity and weightlessness.   One reminds the other.  Each assures the other of its validity.  And what are we but in between;  we are formlessness enclosed in form, the immaterial soul constrained by body, flesh and blood and water...

Time is fluid, at any speed.  Its just that evaporation occurs.  Velocity is, of course, a kind of heat...

The Cult of Life & The Cult of Death

The cult of life infects us with such
infectious
euphoria; and it adores
the cult of death
because.....


It is the cult
of death
who's dark canyons, whispering crevasses, sunless caves and pock-marked landscapes
serve well the purpose
of unearthing
all the gleaming treasure--
the gold, the sapphire, the amethyst--
that was once buried
by the setting sun (for kaleiding rimes
and reveries,
the moonless ravings)
here
in the midst of the living,
where the lovers
of life
in bright colors
and timeless smiles..



There is something else;
there is,
for example, the horror
when a hundred cameras
make contact
with the eye.  The pack
of infrared wolves is waiting
just there,
beyond
the dancing circle
formed by the light
of the laughing flames.

There have been controversies.
There will be  more.

And which is more timeless?
Death
or Life?  Is Life not
defined by time
and given weight, sweet gravitas,
by the secrets
rumored in the realm of death
or evidenced
in her disappearing stride
and strangled prose.

Patriot

They were so near
the surface of the Earth
before;
gravity unraveled
and the whole tapestry of stars,
galaxies, nebulae
conspired with the spinning
wheel of time.
A delicate thread
dyed red or lapis blue
or gilded
made of what is said,
of what is done
(and undone) until...

Spun, 
out, into
a thin, shimmering line,
this life chases
after
its own favorite needle,
now stitched
into constellations
that the restless cosmic wind
leaves ragged
like the flag
and its torn stars.

The Pool

In that latitude, the architecture--six stories of motel rooms ringing a pool and patio--was supposed to suggest the swinging freedoms of a mid-century California, promised land.  But in Montana, the blue astroturf of the outdoor walkways was too exposed, eroding under the seizures of winter while the railing overlooking the swimming area was shedding big flakes of matte-black, industrial paint.  Perhaps some one was being fingered, framed for some, as yet, unnamed crime.  A semi-permanent stain, paint stuck easily to the voyeurs' sweaty palms.  

And it was March when I stayed there, and some indigent animal in bleached carhardts and a baseball cap had peeled back the infected tissue.  He exposed the gangrenous green of the moss and the moldy blue toxins that were overwhelming the pool.  From the fourth floor it was like being in the observation balcony of some surgical theater.  He had cut away the flesh, the muscle, the breast plate of bone.  There were the organs slow-cooking in the stew that is life.  The stench was attractive, suggesting summer.  The stench was repellent, suggesting death.

As is always the case, this brief meditation on mortality made me horny.  In lieu of casting myself from this brave height onto the cement beside the pool, my body sloppily draped on the red brick wall, denting the navy blue trash bin, or tearing the silver vinyl roof of my rental car, I go online to find some remnant of living, some breathing being that would come give me a blow job.  He will revive me with the breath of life.

As if he had gotten lost, as if he had forgotten, he arrived much later.  He arrived with the rain.  And his hunger was greater than mine.  Dire.  He wants more than breath.  He wants more than blood.  Profoundly alienated from life itself, he wants to hold its code.  

Like the medieval man touching the Bible that the bishop offered him and feeling the fire of God, like the spaceman tracing a journey from his wrecked craft through a jungle teeming with an orgy of butterflies, like the farmer using both hands to reach in the furnace and turn a calf on a cold January night, this boy begs for life in its exaggerated purity.  He wants the distillation.  He begs me for my DNA; falling into his eyes and caught in the web of his moans and sighs, I oblige him.

Time

The momentum of days carries me, a wind, a river, a dream. The blur of faces, colors, the warped music as we pass...

In the beginning, there was a gleeful agitation, an excitement, the sheer thrill of the ride. Later came the motion sickness, the drunken stumbling; the earth and its undulating surface feels impossible to cross, the crumbling edges, the random crevasse.

Finally, less beguiled by fear, I am a man, at night, on a train, smiling to himself, as the lights of the the city begin to slide.

Children seethe with envy. Imagination pervades their idea of things, of adult lives, of the possibilities in the world. Words--rife with the vagaries of meaning--run wild in their heads and bloat with the sugary soda that fuels them. Freedom is a reckless abandonment of the scrutiny of others; maturity is the reckless abandonment of the scrutiny of self. Their impatience for their lives belies their naivete of the weight of breathing. Life is more complex than having the keys for the car.

And youth is cruel and smiles at things which it cannot see. -TSEliot

The Tropics

The effortless air,
its heaviness:
I am not lazy,
but gravity is
more ambitious
wrapping around,
trapping my ankles.
There is no escape. There is
the promiscuity of snakes,
an orgy of roots, tumors,
a cancerous kind of growing,
exponential decay.

Call it progress.