truthfront

Tag: literature

  • Who’s that man writing in the notebook?

    In the bright hall beyond the doorway a man just choked to death, he choked to death as the orderlies ran frantically to his aid, as shouts cascaded down the hall and up the walls to the ceiling and into this room, where I and the other four patients craned our necks and situated our bodies for a more advantageous view. Right outside my door, I looked in the man’s eyes as he was dying, the strong glare weighed down with every life experience flashing somewhere behind, the forced resignation and sadness. The four others I share the room with all watch me furtively, they glance from the chaos in the hall and then to me, as if I’m supposed to explain it all to them, not just the man who choked to death in the hall but life, all life, all the violence and chaos and love, they’re probably wondering who is the man writing in the notebook and what could he possibly be writing about, is it a journal, a book, is it important, why all the mystery, why is he writing at all, shouldn’t he be resting, lying down like us, watching the orderlies remove the man from the hallway, whoever he was? What could he possibly be writing about, is he a pamphlet writer, is he one of those subversive types, and are we in any danger being close to him like this?

    Or maybe they’re not thinking about me at all.

    But who was that dead man, really, and what was he choking on? Because we’re all people and we’re all curious, we think inquisitively, we ask ourselves questions and then answer them. Question and answer and then question and answer, continued ad nauseum. Or perhaps I’m underestimating the four I share the room with, perhaps they’re lying there glancing or glaring at me and thinking very profound and important things, for their life and their experience is just as difficult, just as unique as mine, and we are all equal, lying here wounded in our wounded world.

  • Dance

    When we dance the sky opens up virginal to our mountain of climbing flames and we beat drum skins, we sing primordial chants, reckless, born again and finally alive beneath our celestial cypher. Our bodies painted up reverently with the blood of today’s hunt and the women gyrate hips and shoulders, backs twisted beautifully, arms and legs pierced, braceleted, serpentine, both their bodies and ours primed for bestial contact, the fragrant spell of carnal delight. I am an animal. Mother moon culled us from the Earth or the spirit of the very Earth upon which we dance and now here we are, immersed in her elegant mystery and decay. Can we not live forever, O mother, at least for this one night?

  • Nietzsche at the door

    Nietzsche came to my door the other night. He approached it from the inside, all but drenched in darkness. I asked him, I said, Hey, man. From whence have you come?

    He walked slowly to the kitchen and the dim light there. I could see he was wet with sweat and his eyes were mad. Why, the mountain, of course, he said.

    I watched as he poured himself a glass of water from the tap and drank it.

    Please, I said. Will you show me the way?

    He placed the glass in the sink and turned to me, his eyes shining. He said, But you already know the way.

    Then I laughed, and he laughed.

  • Wasteland

    They roam this sogged landscape through heavy mist burdened with guns and swords and rods, many of them pushing or pulling carts laden with their lives or whatever remains. Some of them ride the backs of bloated horses, the eyes of both man and beast dulled by fatigue and sickness. You hear them before you see them rise up out of the fog like wraiths, clothes wasted and faces caked in mud. And maybe they are wraiths up from some unspeakable depth or maybe you’re the ghost they stare at walking slowly past, gun drawn. Women with long hair carrying alien babies hatched in some far off land and these people have seen hell, their eyes betray giant serpents and beheadings, rivers of blood. You feel guilty and damned just looking at them. A scream from far off and you can’t discern its direction nor its origin. The fog is a spider web on your skin, the ground warm vomit. Gray world without end.

  • Chain letter

     

    I’m writing a letter to you, grown woman, though I know I’ll never send it, I’m writing a letter to you and you’re so far away, you’ve always been so far away, you remind me of my father, just looking at you is like looking at my father, and I often look at you in my mind, I’ve no other option because you’re so far away, you’ve always been far away, and my father’s gone and you’ll soon be gone, too, and do you ever feel like you gain just as much as you lose? Perhaps as you get older you gain less than you lose and when you’re younger you gain far more than you lose, that’s why losing is such a painful revelation to the young, and that’s why I feel as if I gain exactly as much as I lose, for I’m halfway through this life wearing the smiles and scars to prove it, I’m thinking of you, grown woman, wondering how it’s all come to this, me writing you a letter I’ll never send, a letter I wouldn’t even think of sending, communicating with you is so peculiar. Maybe it’s just me, maybe I’m far away and you’re right where you need to be, I’m the far away one while you’re in the right place, so close to everything. I wouldn’t be surprised, remember when I was a child and you’d come to visit from far away and it was like vacation for me, we used to go to the park together and you told jokes and gave us your paintings but still I felt you were so far away, I never knew you and still don’t, you’re so far away, but despite the distance I still love you and don’t know why, we rarely interact and it’s just like with your mother, my grown grandmother, she’s always been entirely too far away for me to love her, and yet I do, very much, and can’t really say why. I live in a tower of my own inventions and the world continues to roll its odd course despite my protests and I find it heartbreaking that family members so far from one another can love and think of one another and not even know them, not even know why or how or even when the planet will cease its sleepy roll, thunderous vibration and concussive intimidation, this is my life up here in the tower and maybe one day you could visit, we’d have vacation and go to the park, I’d tell you jokes and give you my paintings and things would be like they’ve always been but somehow different, I’d see you as a grown woman instead of the teenager, the young woman I remember from my youth, and you’d listen to me as if I were an adult, independent and healthy, a thinking man in the digital age, we’d talk about my dead father and you could tell me lies about him, tell me lies about him. Meanwhile we’ll have plenty of time to sit and not say any words and grow closer as the days grow longer and the roll slows to a crawl so that soon the sea hisses and rocks and overtakes the land, the sea is all there is, and we’re already making progress up there in your tower of inventions, the airplanes and rockets and e-cards and I’ve never understood your hairy armpits, my mother and my sisters always told me it was strange for a woman to have hair under her arms, but I’m sure you’ll get to that in time, we’ll get to everything in time, I’m certain of it. In the tower we feel the sway of the Earth beneath us, and we’re no longer far away up here with all my books and the memories, do you remember when I was a child I would hate when you came to visit from far away because I had to sleep on the couch, I was displaced and now that we’re up here in my tower of books and memories I can tell you anything, this is how we minimize the distance between us, we shrink the miles from the west to the Midwest, which is where you are, or where you were before and after you’d travel from far away to visit, we’d go to the park and we’d tell each other jokes and we’d make paintings in the wet dirt and as we dug with sticks we’d find trash and once we’d even find bones, old bones from old hands from people our age who dug too long, but we won’t do that because we can’t even dig here, way up here in the tower of the world’s consequence, we’re here and yet so far from one another, and I’m sure you’re out there somewhere not reading this letter I will never send.

  • Pandemic

    There are parts of me all over this city. A fingernail chewed and discarded furtively onto the carpet of a Cherry Creek department store. Snot blown into a paper towel now buried in a dumpster somewhere in LoDo. My spit on a sidewalk in the Tech Center, my spit in Boulder Creek, my spit floating upon the surface of the South Platte. Spit in the neighborhood streets of Aurora. My DNA lives bunched upon wasted cigarette butts on Capitol Hill, in Lakewood, in the Highlands. Hairs strewn about the foothills, hairs abandoned and sunk into the Earth somewhere on Colfax. Everywhere on Colfax. Dried piss in a men’s room somewhere in Highland’s Ranch, in Littleton. Eyelashes, dead skin cells in Fort Collins. Fragments of me transferred from money or my credit card and now embedded into cash registers across town, parts of me digitized and spent by others. McAvoy as legitimate trade. Parts of me cluttered upon the flesh and in the mouths of the wandering women of the world, all of whom I had met here or somewhere close-by, women who enchanted and puzzled the younger me, all of them now charted upon their own foreign paths. A tart drop from a nostril now dried and crusted to the bottom of someone else’s shoe, someone else’s pant cuff. Tracking my remains in all directions. McAvoy as pandemic. Somewhere, everywhere, all-where. Random registers of my being ride the wind across the icy plains, they carry their own deranged voices out to the frigid canting West Slope. Microscopic and profuse treasures, wasted and worthless traces. I think about all the parts of me dispersed across the world and I wonder where, truly where, is home.

  • Cords

    Cords, the world is a system or network of intertwined and braided cords, with each generation or era representing a new cord, every day or week or event a single thread in each cord. The threads themselves serve as the primary elements in the overall braided communion. The cord is two things, it has two distinct but wholly related purposes, the first of which is to support and sustain the overall sociability or compatibility of world cultures, and the second is to provide a narrative of this process, even when the threads become frayed and the cords unravel. For with each frayed thread the overall fallibility of the entire network of cords grows apparent and measures must be put in place to re-fortify the weakness, to support the entire system. This is where the narrative function can help sustain the cord’s health, it can help curtail the damage.

  • Kansas City

    We were in Kansas City five days when the skies turned.

    Lake Michigan rose up foaming as if from the underworld and it breached the Iowa state line washing out everything in its path, so we knew it was time to head elsewhere. My husband and I packed our twin girls into the van and knowing we wouldn’t ever return we headed west on I-80 out of Iowa City. With everyone else doing the same thing the road was soon clogged and impassible with parked or stalled-out vehicles by the time we arrived in Des Moines.

    There were hundreds of people walking on the highway shoulder. All of them out of the city and into the immense flatlands beneath the open blue sky and we too fell in line, carrying everything we could with us including two sidearms hidden in our waistbands, one for my husband and one for me. The girls were very frightened and on the verge of tears. Now and then I’d see a dead person in a ditch on the side of the road and I’d point in the other direction at nothing in particular and the girls would look over to where I pointed, their eyes straining past the endless fields and out to the circling birds and webs of clouds. A sky so high and neat and endless. I couldn’t tell if either of the girls had already seen the body. Everything was nothing. There were no airplanes in the air and without the roar of traffic the world was eerily quiet.

    We were always thirsty and we often talked with others on the road, exchanging information with the ones that seemed decent and had kids of their own. People told us they’d heard the day after the quake a nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania had failed and was contaminating the air. This besides the explosion we all knew about in Washington state. Or where Washington state used to be, now slipped entire into the ocean. Secretly I wondered about the plutonium plants, not to mention the nuke bombs and missiles, wherever they might be. The government wasn’t saying anything but there had to be serious problems. There had to be warheads nestled somewhere deep in the Earth’s mantle, just sitting there where the ground had swallowed them up.

    I asked my husband about it that first night on the road. Our legs were tired beyond belief and our nerves frayed. I missed home. The girls were asleep under the moonlight and with the stars brighter than I’d ever seen them I whispered to him, What would happen if there were nukes buried down in the Earth? What would happen if they went off?

    My husband had fought in Afghanistan and he said that I shouldn’t worry about such things. He said he’d walked through miles and miles of mine fields before and the worst thing you could do was think about the mines.

    The both of us slept badly and the sunshine woke the girls early in the morning. We set off again southbound on US-69 with a thin line of people both in front and behind us, a wasted group of ghosts. I felt as though we were the last wretched souls on Earth, slinking slowly from the damned. Or maybe we were the damned, walking into the mouth of our eternal anguish.

    This is an abbreviated chapter.