Friday, March 12, 2021

2 Minutes. Go!

Go ahead, son. Shimmy on out on that branch, way down to the end where the tippy tippets dance. Don't worry, son, I got a firm grip on your belt. Skin on out there, boy. You're gonna be fine. I'll just sit here with both fingers crossed behind my back, listen to the branch snap, listen to the sound on the ground when you SPLAT.

I got your back. I'll support you. I'll be back afterwards to report you.

Step on up to the counter, man. Buy three balls to throw at a can. If you can hit 'em, you can take home this embalmed child from a third world country. Don't get all up in arms Ma'am, the thing is rigged. The cans are glued down. The balls are weighted strange. There are mirrors and light tricks. Of course no one can actually win the little mummy, Dummy; that would be absurd. My word.

I told you what for, son, don't tell me I never said it. I've got something to sell you that you should buy on credit. And, here's the moral to the story, if you think you need it. There's nothing that can't be fixed by some happy-handed horseshit. 

Amen.

9 comments:

  1. I don't really know why, but I love half rhymes: back, snap, splat. Maybe it's because they feel less laboured, less in your face. I also loved (because it's so awful an image, lol) "you can take home this embalmed child from a third world country." I also feel the frustration behind this exposé of hucksterism and betrayal.

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  2. Part one
    __________

    My head is too heavy. No, that’s wrong. It’s too light. Okay, it’s both. The light is too big, yet nowhere near enough.

    I think I hear the way eyes sound when they move inside a skull, rubberlike, a quiet screech. Uh, that’s gross, I know, but I can also see it from outside, when a woman’s gaze sends love in the direction of her desire, how it all becomes elastic.

    I am seeing the everything stretched. Greens and reds and words like elastic especially.

    All, everything, all is eternally, relentlessly, ecstatically moving.

    What am I? If my entirety is this pulsing gel-like pudding in my skull, it might sit in the centre of a vast hall and nothing of that is real, except… I feel. I hear, I see, I touch and taste and smell. I think. It or I (because what is the difference, is my point) might be in a museum or a tube kept by other beings for their edification or in the interests of curation. But maybe I stumbled another step and invented my own mind from something less translatable? How could or would I know?

    What is the essential nature of green? Its silence encompasses me.

    I look at this keyboard on which I type, and the regiments of letters and symbols begin to look the same, marching into the past as well as the future—regulated, oppressive, ruinous to human creative need. Uh, whoa, I just swung in a hammock, over a pond in a jungle, so far from the edges of the trees, serenaded by monkey songs. Each keystroke is becoming softer, and more blunt, and more blurred, not visually but sonically, as if dulled.

    Can you see how everything lines up, as if agreed upon?

    The perfection of eggshells is suspicious.

    From nowhere, each repeated stroke of I is rendered blue. I is blue. Is written in blue. As if.

    My skull is balanced on some finely balanced, slick, supremely lubricated fulcrum. I feel each head tilt, how they might become catastrophes without some inner gyroscope. Some divinely fine-tuned balance that might suffuse the cosmos, working to prevent or temper random lurches toward calamity.

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    1. Part two
      _________

      Look how each sentence juts from the lefthand side of reality, suspended over an infinite white void.

      Like that one.

      And this.

      Oh, ha, did I just invent… God?

      Doesn’t matter. Go deeper.

      Sadness stretches the skin on either side of our mouths.

      Though I am fed, I feel starved. Though I am flesh, I feel skeletal.

      Was I naive when I believed the words stayed still upon the page?

      Was that in itself a tiny poem?

      Oh. Oh. There are sparkles in everything. All things chiming. How can this be? What is happening?

      It’s women. It’s always women. It’s forever women. Their gaze, their hallowed hearts, the swing of their wombs in the storm, the tear in their skin, the terrible lure of the wound of their need, the high silent aria of the impossible lark, the holy stentorian voice of the feminine, the heat and blink and reek of the feminine, the gape in the face of the endless howl, the how, the owl, the eternal shriek… that is woman. That is the essence of the feminine, and therefore of life, its mystery, its dark addictive blood-invaded ever-eternal courtship.

      A squalid corridor, yellowed by time and human grime, an array of recessed doors, all locked, all unknowable…

      Interlude

      An A-frame home near Sicamous. Where I don’t see the switch between quanta, that sliver of a fractal fraction when I see the flinch, the glitch, and wished I hadn’t. I can’t handle this drag, this thing that pulls us always. Clutching and sucking and dragging, so visceral, so awful. Is that gravity? It’s too draggy, druggy, sludgy, too wrong, too unfair. Please. Let us breathe.

      Now I know. See the beauty in those three words, so balanced yet never symmetrical, but now I know the symphonic truth of colour, how all is spectral, our own tiny screen through which we see the seven-way spectrum we call a rainbow, supremely gay and filled with joy, how the cosmos perceives itself in myriad more astonishing ways, beyond the ultra or the infra, wheeling like some planetary golem drinking in the love and shining ecstatic death of trillions.

      Numbers beyond measure. I try to speak and only slur. Yet balanced on my tongue is an immensity of truth, if only I could birth it, let it come, allow it to be said.

      And how the dimming is also part of the quickening. For one to be, so must its amigo.

      Now I know. Now I know.

      In the end, all I know is this:

      Although it’s far too much, all is white sage. I wish I could give you more than that, my children. But all is the hot wild smell of the desert, I guess. All is the redolence of gathered leaves, grey-green quivering under moonlight on a single world in a single outflung arm of some galactic span entirely unfathomable. And sometimes we call it cosmos and other times are blissfully cuntstruck. Cuntstricken. Whatever. The sacred and the profane, it turns out, are inextricably the same. And my heart replies to that like an antic coyote thrill, like the twilight cough of a lynx, like a dream of someplace else’s sheer extravagances… fierce, unknowable, harsh and joyous both, and abundantly, wondrously indifferent to whether any of this either matters or is sane.

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    2. This is rad. Reminds me of the real good stuff the beats tried to continue. I love the introspective universal feel. Must find mescaline... ;)

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  3. In the conversation we never had, you didn’t say, “Life’s subjective. One person’s joy could trigger another’s despair. Like someone else’s woe could bring another cheer.”

    “We’ve lived each,” I would’ve said. “You, often, the latter,” my eyes would blink in code.

    But we weren’t really talking about Life (like I said, we weren’t really talking at all), unless you consider just getting out of bed Life. Really about living, opening those eyes, taking that big inhale, letting it go, sometimes with words strung thereto, just to get to the next gulp of existence.

    “You know, there was a time I didn’t care if my last exhalation, whether preceded by a sob or a snore, was indeed my last. Go to sleep. Wake not. I wouldn’t have considered that failure. THAT might’ve brought someone solace.” I could’ve revealed.

    “That’s what I’m saying,” you didn’t say.

    “I wish you would’ve talked to me about it,” I wish I’d said.

    “There was no point. I wanted to talk to very few people and you weren’t one of them.”

    Ergo, the non-conversation we weren’t having.

    “Would you like to come talk now?” I might say.

    “No. I’m not going anywhere with you.”

    “Yeah (or is it ‘No’), we’ve each made that clear,” I might whisper.

    “What didn’t you say?” You’d probably ask.

    There was so, so much.

    “I’m not going anywhere with you, either,” I’d say.

    It’d always been a one-step-toward-and-one-back thing with us, symbiotically going nowhere, needy dance partners with no sense of rhythm.

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    1. A great illustration of the idea of roads not taken. Also reminds me of a Larkin poem:

      "Nothing, like something, happens anywhere."

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  4. Maybe Someday

    I keep some shirts at the far end
    of my closet, shirts I’ve owned
    for decades (since back when they fit).
    I own some shoes with holes in the toe
    almost worn through; shoes I’ve kept
    in the dark corner of my closet floor.

    If you were to ask me why I’ve kept them,
    what with the shirt collars an inch
    too small and the shoes a few steps shy
    of perforated, I’d say, “Well, maybe
    someday…”
    But we know most somedays never come.

    I own a memory I keep safe at the far corner
    of my mind; a memory of …something… I’ve kept
    for a couple of decades (when I could remember).
    I hold this hope, one I’ve worried thin like a child
    would his button-eyed, floppy friend, now worn
    to almost gossamer thinness,

    And if you ask why I’ve kept them,
    what with the way most memory fades
    in each new day’s light and how gossamer hope
    doesn’t spring eternal I’d say, “Well, maybe
    someday…”
    That's because, if most somedays never come,
    that must mean some do.

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    1. I'm in this frame of mind where all art reminds me of other art, this great pollination of words and ideas, so I immediately went to the Cure song with this.

      But also, that deceptively simple five-word final line packs in a surprising amount of emotion. Onomatopoeically (wow, now that's a long word, lol), you can't read it quickly. It drags, which suggests reluctance and hesitation and even an unwillingness to risk hope.

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    2. This is beautiful in its simplicity. I agree with DA too

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