truthfront

There’s a man writing in a notebook and his hands are scarred and discolored from years of sun allergies and intentional damage, the scratching and kneading and pulling and tearing at the skin while in slumber. There are times when his hands don’t resemble his own but his father’s, or more like the memory he has of his father’s hands, so large and commanding, so devastating, a landscape of skin dominated by long, winding wrinkles and impossibly large veins that as a child, the writer thought were fat blue worms sleeping just beneath his father’s skin. The back of the writer’s hands have a spatter of light brown hairs beneath the pinkie knuckle, and this too he remembers as a characteristic of his father’s hands, a farmer’s hands, a ball player’s hands, a god’s hands. His cuticles, the writer’s, are dry and white with hardly any pale crescent lunula at the bottom, and the nails, carefully and frequently shorn so that very little white exists at the free edge beyond the fingertip, are deeply ridged in parallel vertical lines. He works with his mind but his hands are responsible for the effects of his work: elucidation, translation, illustration. The insides of his hands (the palms), are deeply seamed with wrinkles (age, use) and hard, gelatinous callouses like yellow patches at the base of each finger. It amazes him, his hand. He wonders what his hands say to others about him. There is a purpose for everything on this planet, he thinks, and thus writes. He feels that he is a failure, this man, and that he is forever damned to failure. Perhaps his hands will save him, they’ll claw their way up from the premature grave of the writer’s design, they’ll brush the clumps and grains of moist earth from his body.

I wake thrashing in the night, bedclothes soaked through and enfouled. Something is wrong, there is an intruder in the darkness. I don’t remember having dreamed but there is fear and panic and I cannot waste time, for I must arm myself with whatever is close at hand to defend my body and defend my home and I reach for the bedside lamp to douse the room in light to find the intruder (monster) standing over me or my sleeping wife who’d never hurt anyone, not purposely, not ever, and as quickly as my mind seeks her out in the darkness it returns with impossibly horrific images of her corpse and with a flick of my hand the light snaps on and of course there is no one but the intruder of consciousness within pulling me back into dream and then I begin to remember. I look to my wife sleeping (ostensibly) peacefully and there’s a flashlight clutched tight in my hand raised to attack and I set it down gently, though the panic has not yet abated in full, for I know that the stranger lurks still in the room, it is I, the stalking assassin of my dreams.

I sat alone at the bar contemplating life and the bartender’s bare legs and everything else swept past without my knowledge, without my understanding, for I was lost on that current and was happily lost, pleased with myself and contented in thought without restraint and the world continued to pass me by for an hour, two hours, three or four drinks, I’d lost count, there is nothing so noble (nor elucidating) as losing count and yet not feeling the effects of the alcohol, not absorbed in anything save the self and rumination and the paths upon which the self propels me. Two years ago I sat in the same bar on the same day thinking different thoughts (drinking different drinks) and my appearance had changed and yet not. On that day I’d had four or five drinks (I forget now), I was still that person with the twitching eye and the black hat and the sore muscles and what the fuck. But the bartender was there just as she always is (just as she is now) and the lights in the place are dim enough for me to see clearly, without regard for my appearance, for all that matters is thought and contemplation and deep labored breaths and the thirst I always feel for a beer or two or perhaps three (I’d prefer to lose count) and those smooth legs beginning down at the soiled ground and rising to a place warm and unseen and no doubt soft and salty, but then again I should probably refrain from such thoughts, as I’m married, and I lied just now, there is no bartender, or there is a bartender but it’s a male bartender wearing pants rather than a female in shorts (as I’d imagined) and so I must come clean, I must admit my lie and restate the obvious fact that nothing is what it seems, either for a reader or a writer, nothing is ever what it seems. In the future I’ll discard such nonsense as it swirls about the canopy of my mind, I’ll write about something that matters, I’ll feel inspired and the inspiration will cast me to a place far and clean and clear and thus my mind will follow, I’ll write about important matters and I’ll explore the hardships that plague others or the hardships I’ve encountered through the years and the infinite whispers, the hardships and the methods I’ve discovered to combat them, and if not combat them then accept them, and if not the hardships then the malaise, the depression (though I despise that term), the melancholy. I appreciate music but only a select few types of music (whatever marks the soul of the listener with the scars of he or she who’s created the music, just as with all forms of art), and thankfully an example of those scars plays from the speakers overhead and it all reminds me of another winter in another time but at this same bar with a different bartender and someone else’s legs (different drinks) and I sit here thinking of that other time and how there have been so many other times in this particular bar, I’ve carried the torch for this place for a decade or better. My typewriter (wireless computer) is like an instrument, I weave chords and percussive rhythms in haste and one of these days I’ll write something meaningful again, I’ll have nothing to worry about and my words will immortalize me (different words). When the future arrives I’ll know it, it will be too stark and recognizable to pass me by, unlike the present, which flings past like so much molecular warfare, down there in the trenches, literal and figurative, and now I’m not entirely sure in which direction my destiny points. Words fling past and ricochet far too quickly for my taste or my comprehension of them (different words) and I try to capture the words before I can no longer, I do not want to be left behind by the words and perhaps my attempt at understanding fails me because I’m simply not capable, I don’t have the strength or intellect nor the fortitude and so I must refine my game, if I must call it that, refine my skills and sharpen my sword, so to speak. Nobody will read this, and that’s fine with me, perhaps it’s not meant to be read except only by a select few, just like my novels (different stories), or such is the fate the novels thus far, a select few prone to thought and fear and trembling and all attitudes of despair, no, give them a bit more credit, find a current for them to ride that doesn’t include me, for they are different and have paid their own fare on this route, they are perhaps more capable of living a life without self-disgust, self-disregard, capable of reading many things that inspire and provide sustenance of some kind, when the same should be said about my novels (different flavors), if only other people could read them, for I do not waste my time and I do not feel a need to justify my life via any means other than in the words, for it is always and only in the words, it is in the peculiar pattern of words on the page in which I exist, solely on the page where the breathing occurs (different breaths) and the dreams live and die and tomorrow will be a better day and the blood that courses finds reason to continue its course just as I continue to read to breathe to write to continue living this farcical dance. 

For the stone throwers and the sword wielders are as primitive as their ancestors and the ancestors of their ancestors, toiling in seas of blood and upon rolling hills of flesh to remain alive, to survive, which is their ultimate state-of-being, their highest conceivable honor, an achievement, but ultimately their most enduring failure. Man is a mortal creature; this is one of the few things we can attest to knowing. So while the stone throwers and the sword wielders ache and kill and burn the people of the world as well as the world itself, the thinking men resurrect the spirits that came before and also failed, the spirits with blood on their shadow-hands and in the ducts of their eyes, blood in the hair and caked upon their faces, blood forever adrift in their guts, for they as killers and hunters were largely unable to translate into language the narrative of those innumerable hunts and kills, their bloody and authentic histories, their failures, and so those spirits must now rely on a spare population of posterity to conjure them back into the realm of the living so as to pass on their bequests to equally indifferent hunters and killers and the few enlightened souls who must transcribe for them.

City soundscape, don’t pressure me into anything. I came here for peace and noise and that’s all I want. Relieve me of the silence. Cold wind burns through me. Lights on the fortieth floor and those at ground level coursing the city’s veins. What exactly is the color of night? People in coats walk swiftly, a man runs. Caterwaul of the light-rail train, chatter and laughter, tinned music. Wussup, my brother, my brother, can you spare some change, god bless. Idiopathic. A seam of brake lights weave about the steam and fog. Bass rhythms thunder from select establishments and beckon me inside, my hand at my wallet. Not now, not yet, there’s plenty of time. I was so wasted, a voice says, and I nod, a bus roars past. Men and women hold phones at their ears, more attentive to the sound on the wire than the world in front of them. Marijuana on the air, vehicle exhaust, perfume, spice, fragrant meats. The homeless bundled in the shadows, discarded. I hear the word church and I agree, this is it. Truck brakes screech and whine, a shout, bells. Are there no children in the city? Steam from the sewer grates, all that cliché shit. Jazz, but not enough of it, Pardon me, sir, pardon me, sir. Restaurants with candles lit on tables. A female cop on horseback, her radio hissing. People walking dogs, I never realized how many dogs. Lobby doors open and tenants emerge and I look up wondering what floor they live on. Desmond Paul, Desmond Paul, the name rings a bell, he said something once about cities but I forget. I smell shit somewhere nearby. A taxi van stops next to me, two pairs of shiny legs emerge then the women attached to them and everyone watches. People up ahead hold signs and instead of avoiding them I approach, THREE EVILS, one signs reads. GOVERNMENT BIGOTRY LaSALLE. Another sign: LaSALLE RUINED ME. The intersection holds me snug in a blanket of fumes. Flashing orange light shaped as a human hand, telling me not to stop yet but to prepare to stop. I count each flashing hand and imagine the centuries of dead buried beneath me, five, or perhaps who lives below, in the sewers, as old as the city itself, and the urge to smoke a cigarette overtakes me, a dog sniffs my pant cuff, four, what exactly is the color of night, cyclists charge past, breathing heavily, laughter, bad rap music from a parked car, three, teens across the way, shouting, always shouting, a bus downshifts, attenuates, turns right, two, dual sedans dash madly across, as if made of air, as if compelled by the city light and shadow, one, angles of action and repose, angles upon angles as if on a draftsman’s table somewhere, perhaps a suite high above, a hundred floors up, zero, green to yellow to red and brief quiescence endures just enough to push me onward with the flow of human heat and purpose, seeking howls and clamor and my own footfalls and the mystery of night.