truthfront

Category: literature

  • Ourselves

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    …as we proceed across fenced-in ghetto landscapes and through urban and suburban war zones infested with drugs and weapons designed to infiltrate homes like cockroaches; as we proceed through flooded wastelands comprised of failure—failure of the community, of elected officials, failures of mothers and fathers—a tangled mess of failed systems with THIS PLACE (and places like it) as the webbed epicenter; as we proceed through blighted examples of failed capitalism, failed cold-war policy, failed environmental and social policies, and failed educational infrastructures; as we proceed through desolate, insignificant prairies reserved for shattered generations of people, through packed penitentiaries full of history’s patsies; as we proceed we must look closely lest we overlook the mirrors of time, for EVERYWHERE we find ourselves.

     

  • Lights

     

    I stood in the doorway watching the lights in the night sky. It was hot for March. My daughter tugged at my leg. What’s that? she asked, pointing at the lights. I picked her up to hold her and we watched the lights together. The laundry machine churned in a room behind us. A neighbor pulled his crammed sedan into the street and exited the neighborhood in haste. Some of the lights in the sky hovered still while others slid slowly, almost imperceptibly, arbitrarily. My daughter wriggled uncomfortably and I set her down. Her mother darted determinedly about the house, asking questions and answering them. I watched the lights.

  • coincidence

    courtyard

    I wonder what he thought as he crossed the threshold from his house out to the bright day, knowing he’d never return, that his memories would remain within those walls and the vast majority of them would be forgotten and discarded, occupied by strangers. Everything he wondered about the end was just like he thought it would be and nothing like he thought it would be. He thought of his wife and five decades built in that house and other houses and he believed he was one step closer to joining her, and for that he was relieved. The house, how fiercely he clung to it and how easily the two medics lifted and carried him into the windy morning to their chariot. How confused he must have been, how eager to get it all over with. Maybe at the end he realized he’d fought so hard for all those years for nothing. All of it just a huge coincidence. When he finally let go, maybe he laughed.

  • study in repose

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    The young man looked at Desmond Paul, at his face, an expression grave and elsewhere, his eyes tense and electric. Paul walked with his head down, bent slightly forward, one hand stuffed tightly into a trouser pocket and the other clutching his notebook. This is the most intense human being I have ever met, the young man thought, and walked alongside him, following him and not, past another set of large lobby windows looking out upon the rote morning ascent toward noon, windows looking inward toward nothing familiar at once save the careful arrangement of mystery inside us all.

  • god’s country

    LionscrestDuskGod’s country, I wrote, is simple in its grandeur. Rolling landscapes of green and brown cut suddenly steep by jutting buttes a million feet tall, or so it seems, one foot for each year on this rock, a billion light years from nowhere. Clouds misshapen unfurling to the blue, leading nowhere, leading to us; the changing colors of everything we inhabit luminous beneath the star responsible. It’s difficult to breathe at this altitude, well over a mile above the Florida swamps, which don’t exist from here. They can’t exist. The Earth is a ruin, a controlled burn, a series of bloated mirrors. It’s difficult to look out over this expanse of beauty, this treasure for the senses, and not believe in some kind of god, in something greater than all of us, in the ability to traverse it all, forward and reverse, as the earth slides soundless in the void.

  • Excerpt from The Novel Paradox, author unnamed

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    It all started with the notes. Everything starts with notes. In the early days he was swept up so briskly by the preliminary ideas that it was almost like possession, as if he suddenly belonged to someone or something else. He was no longer an autonomous creature but forever subservient to the novel, that nefarious plaything between his ears. But even then it took him three months to fill an entire notebook with his first sketches of The Nerve of Time, the characters and their illustrations, the storylines, outlines of intersection, flow charts of time travel and its implications upon the narrative. He wrote as he’d never written before, in a frenzy of words and different inks, a pain in his hand and wrist that, when he wasn’t writing, he was rubbing.

    And now at the very end he writes through the pain, he sweats and grinds his teeth, he mumbles in tongues, and the pain rushes from his hand to his head in a zip line of white fire but he keeps writing, his little room stacked with notebooks, all used, the order of them long lost, with new words flooding new blank lined pages by the hundreds. Now he fills at least one of those notebooks each day, his handwriting coarse and illegible, his face a mask of terror.

  • Deconstructionist, pt. IV

    soledaddos

    Sunlight at my window wakes me. I sit then stand, feeling the blood bound through my body, familiar aches at my back, my shoulder. The floor is cold beneath me. I reach for a glass of water and see the notebook stark atop the white wood of the nightstand. I wonder why I remember the notebook but can’t remember my name.

    Writing began as an exercise last winter but quickly developed into something much different, the nature of which eludes me still. I never wrote much of anything up to that day in January when I happened on an empty notebook in my library and began, at a colleague’s recommendation, to write down my fondest memory. Thus what I remembered of the Trankworth’s unveiling in L.A. unfurled from my consciousness with immediacy, as if water poured from a bucket, and my memories, granular in detail, inundated the pages of the notebook.

    I wrote as I remembered, adding and supplanting for clarity, precise and meticulous with details so as to insure them, immortalize them, never again worry about chasing them through the narrowing corridors of memory.

    Next I turned my attention to other memories and attacked them with equal zeal and attention, starting with the most powerful and lucid, using the notebook as collector, curator, friend. I cursed myself for not having thought to catalog my memories earlier. Emotions overwhelmed me. Details obsessed me. My attention gradually shifted to language as I beheld a newfound appreciation for and devotion to its nuances, its capabilities. I broke it down to fragments to better understand and utilize it for my memories, my notebook.

    The project inspired in me a renewed sense of purpose after all had once seemed lost. I wrote with energy, violent when necessary, using the pages as scratchboard, bandage. Never before had I known the intimacy possible between man and page.

    In the kitchen I forget how I like my coffee and drink it black, writing about a dream from last night: I’d been commissioned as a young man to design and build a clock tower in Sweden in collaboration with a pair of renowned Swedes hired to build the clock. Men were contracted and materials were purchased and the project proceeded on time and budget until the Swedes abruptly bailed near completion, leaving me to either complete the tower without the clock or try and build the clock myself.

    Rather than proceed sensibly I chose instead to try building the clock, attacking it with more passion than I placed in the tower, working all day and deep into nights with the gears and levers of the clock until a system emerged. The tower’s public unveiling approached and I wasn’t near completion, insisting the tower be opened without fanfare or celebration while I continued to solve the riddle of the clock. At dream’s end I’d become an old man still living on a small mattress in the top of the tower, working tirelessly at his obsession, and later, just a rumor or vapor on the neck of someone tasked with cleaning out the abandoned tower where that sad man once lived.

    Sunlight fades at the kitchen window and I rub the pain from my hand, scanning my mind for memories to transcribe. I contemplate everything I’ve forgotten and finish the coffee, ready to begin the day. In the library a meager wooden shelf supports the notebooks. I think of all the duplicated memories written inside them, wondering if it’s just the same few repeated over and over. Why continue this kaleidoscopic mockery of the past if not to lose myself deeper in the labyrinth?

    Days are casual. Dusk signals pensive marathons by candlelight. Time is the anti-rhythm of scratching on pages as if scratching at the earth, but to uncover what?

  • Convalescence

    Convalescence

    If you’re reading this, it’s February third, or at least the nurse told me it’s February third, and since I’ve got no other choice than to believe her, it must indeed be February third. I’ve been in a clinic for the past several hours, lying supine in an uncomfortable bed with fluorescent lights stitching the ceiling, casting the room in violent unnatural white. An electric glow washes over everything, casting out all darkness. They’ve removed a bullet from my right shoulder, or fragments of a bullet. I am not hurt badly. According to the nurse I am lucky to be alive, and perhaps she wasn’t speaking about the bullet but more or less life in a broader sense. You’re lucky to be alive, she said, but then again that’s a relative statement, something a person would say when they don’t know you. If I am lucky to be alive, then what does that say about luck?

    I’m leaving the clinic in two days, they say, which will make it February fifth. If you’re reading this. I feel fine, if a bit sore. Please don’t worry about me, I’ll recover and will be on the road again soon, delivering parcels and scratching in this notebook. The pain medication has me drowsy. I’m getting older, Jennifer. But then so are you. But you’re not reading this.

    *

    Through the battered rectangular doorway three security police walk the hall of the clinic with their authority on display. Hush precedes and lags behind them. The uniformed men have sidearms looped in their belts, standard-issue black hats snug atop heads shielding eyes that scan the halls and peer suspiciously into rooms. They’re looking for someone. The clinic seems at capacity. I lie watching and wonder what they know about me, if anything, what they’ve heard through the wire, because we’ve all had our name sung upon that current at one point or another. We have all been targeted at least once.

    I need to get back on the road. One of the bullet parts embedded an inch into my deltoid muscle. A deep, dull pain pulses through my right side as I move the pen across the page. The nurse has stated her displeasure at my insistence to write. I’m going to need to rebuild my strength, one word, one line at a time.