Tag: prose

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.

Dreams with at least two or three separate but connected pornographic situations/episodes, or more like explicit masturbatory behavior on my part, publicly, in front of acquaintances or family members. Horrifying events. I remember one specific episode in which my brother and his wife sat watching a drama or more like an aircraft display while I lay supine behind them trying (and somehow succeeding) to masturbate with a common household item made of hard plastic. It was like an old camera or something and despite the discomfort I enjoyed it, working toward that familiar light behind the eyelids, intensely aware of my surroundings: a dim planetarium with real (but small) aircraft flying around the stadium (perhaps it was out of doors and the theatre was the world itself), and when I looked up or opened my eyes I saw my brother gazing down upon me over his seat with an expression of ridicule and intense enjoyment and his wife’s expression of satisfaction (not to be confused with nor meant as gratification) for she understood and could identify with perversity despite being wholly rational while I was obviously crazy, purely and openly crazy, and her expression also betrayed a tinge of respect for my having the balls to boldly masturbate around so many people with a foreign object not at all intended for sexual use. I felt extreme embarrassment and the realization that I was caught in the act, my deeds were irreversible and my legacy as a mad pervert firmly cemented, and also that I had painfully shredded some of the skin from my penis during the act and  lie there bleeding, mortified. The dream then shifted and I was part of an army and thus had to ensure the safety of the aircraft flying about the theatre, or something like that, which moved the dream into completely different emotional terrain. But for the purposes of this particular moment on this particular page I will adhere to the theme of sexuality, or subconscious masturbation, to be precise. Even aged four years I knew what sexuality was, though there was no word for it, and no words at all, at least those of the read and written varieties. I dreamed often of women three times my age, which made them about 20 or thereabouts, and I particularly dreamed of bare women’s asses. Nothing special about them, no strutting or tail-wagging or any of the other abundant desires wrought of man’s maturity and experience, just women’s asses, bare, by moonlight. Those are the most premature sexual thoughts I can remember having, and I remember they came from dreams and I’d wake up feeling an intense need to do something but not knowing exactly what. Instincts told me that an action had to follow the dream but the act eluded me until few years later. Perhaps those early dreams were a microcosm of or metaphor for all of my dreams, then and now, threatening or otherwise. All dreams force me into one action or another, whether it be choosing to protect a theatre full of airborne aggressors or mutilating my most intimate anatomic module.

I write letters to people and then forget that I wrote them, only to write them again, obviously in the same hand and with similar affect but with diverging themes and words. I write letters and send them via standard mail, paying twice, sometimes three times for postage and I send letters via electronic mail and forget all of it, as if it never happened. I re-write letters and read them just to ensure that what I’ve written is comprehensible and also to ensure that the words resemble the ideas I wished to portray. Two letters addressed to the same person sit before me and I worry if one of the letters isn’t perhaps mis-addressed. I open the letter and it’s addressed to the correct recipient so naturally I have to check the other letter as well, also addressed to the intended reader. I set the letters next to each other and read through them at the same time sentence by sentence. It’s remarkable, the slight change in ideas I sought to portray, a metamorphosis from inchoate to discernible, the relationship at first solely visual via the symbols on the page. Same hand, same voice, different writer. Different thinker in a different time. The eye and brain form a symbiosis and thus a narrative is traced and if not narrative then the expression of thought and perhaps emotion as illustrated carefully by the author of the letter specifically for its intended recipient. Non-formulaic salutations end in nearly the same fashion (though not quite) and the signatures are mismatched just enough for a shrewd reader to question that both letters were written by the same man, the same hand, the same writer. I fold the letters to re-seal them in envelopes and send them on their way so as to begin to focus on all the letters I still have to write.

Writers would quit writing if they wrote for the reader. Readers who sit or lie while reading to satisfy something inside, a voice that beckons in whisper (whimper). If the writer cared for the reader and wrote in the best interests of the reader, he/she would quit writing and instead pick up the pen as a weapon in defense of the reader, to subdue the approaching monsters, namely literature and other writers who have not yet surrendered the pen for the sword, because the writer who writes with the reader in mind writes (different from the previous verb but nonetheless a verb that shall heretofore be referred to as write) for capital gain and fame, which are both diametrically opposed to literature, except in extreme circumstances. Writers are most often broke and unwilling to write for the reader and instead cater to that obsession within, not a voice, not a whisper nor a whimper but a commanding shout with a throat hoarse and desperate and maligned. The writer (among the rest of the world) knows that writing is not lucrative, again, except in extreme circumstances, and the writer does not care, just as he/she does not care for whom, if anyone, ever, will read what they write. The words beckoned forth from caverns deep and resoundingly unique, the only true self, the unadorned self, the self wrapped tightly (safely) in the selfsame ideas that will ultimately destroy the self. This self obliges willingly, acutely aware of the danger and ecstasy involved.

Perhaps I should manage my time better, become a minimalist, an incrementalist, a fractalist, a post-modern deconstructionist, for there is always so much to accomplish in one day, and so the days adhere to form an unbreakable chain upon waking from the banality and the obligation and rote pattern of it all; when we re-immerse the self back into the ever-changing world we find new patterns that must be mastered, and soon, for there is no time to waste.

The moon is full and white and he watches it hang static and alone in the sky like a beacon to worlds ancient and afar. A breeze warm and comforting carries the cigar smoke away from his face and he breathes in the night air, floral, dense, fecund. Wade is at relative peace, adrift in the cosmos. Crickets and other night insects shriek in rhythm from the shadows. Direll jumps over the back fence and ambles toward Wade in the moonlight, his hand raised in greeting.

How’s your eye? Wade says.

Still cain’t see shit out of it.

Direll sits next to Wade and exhales deeply. He takes a plastic lighter from his shirt pocket and lights a joint. Wade puffs his cigar and the men sit silent listening to the crickets and also sounds they can’t hear.

Pretty moon tonight.

Reminds me of when I was a kid, Wade says.

How so?

Not sure. Stimulates something vestal, I think.

Vestal?

Maternal, maybe.

The men are silent.

Beautiful, though, Wade says.

Yeah.

Seen your Comanche pal tonight? Direll asks, smiling. He puffs long and deep on the joint and blows out what appears to Wade to be an impossible quantity of smoke, a long uninterrupted ribbon.

He’s Patwin. And no.

Insects resound in the thicket of brush to their left. The sky is open to everything. The sliding door slips open and the boy peeks out at them.

Can I play one more before bed? he asks.

Say hello to Direll.

Hi Direll.

Hello champ.

One more round of what? Wade asks.

Death Membrane.

Death Membrane, Direll repeats, looking out over the yard as if out at sea or as if he could see the words there in the half-light. As if the words or the game itself fashioned up from the underworld or vapor. The joint is tucked away out of the boy’s view.

One more round, Wade says, and the boy is back inside.

The men are silent and the moon glows as if from within and Direlle exhales sharply and says, You watch that game tonight?

Wade looks at him and puffs his cigar. No, he says. I was reading.

What you reading now.

Wade puffs on the cigar and says, Fukuyama.

Fukuyama, Direll repeats, nodding, staring at the yard again and the shadows therein.

Then they’re silent for many minutes, both of them chasing certain and uncertain thoughts. Direll tosses the roach into the grass and sighs. He says, Brother, I got to be going.

Wade watches his neighbor walk to the fence and climb over. He looks up at the moon and stares at it, wondering about it. He tamps out his cigar and stands and walks inside, the crickets announcing his departure.