Drunken Ancestral Memory

A car, discordant in its abstruse, rash beep compared to the rhythmic mewling of the cat we heard earlier, tells me for the umpteenth time...

The lot bustled earlier, Love. They wove in and out in pathways determined by the glint in the eyes of an ancestor so very long dead, an afflicted moment petrified while searching for water by its clash with sun and rock. With sun and rock, inspired and sated, he moved on and then into her and then they begat and so the begatting went until a slew of people unknowingly seeking the same glint in the eyes sought it from bulbs posted in geometrically-defined intervals between parking spaces. Amen, can I hear a halleleujah.

Galeno, all sprite tonight, you know proved the torment of my day. Were it only the memory of him rather than his here and now, somewhere I can imagine (were I unable to imagine!). Loving you and him are not at odds in me. The two twine in my alchemy of need in a way lovely, innocent, far more a flower found wedged unexpectedly in cement than what rank economic cunts such as myself construe.

If we went away when ourselves and found at the end of a dock in glowing, simple sun the remembrance and remedy of our long lives from when blue flowers at the foot of your windowsill stood, representing all of dad's love and escape from the horror of a neighour; or at the edge of my home's path, near the hedges, a ladybug landing on my tiny arm sending the same message from a blue flower its own ancestor's had once known; if we, you and I, walked sturdy, arms linked, and defied fear for just one minute, do you think our hearts on the other side of a wall find ourselves? do you think if we, with your precise turn of head intrinsic to nature's gentle order, said we know no discontinuity and accept; if we believed we met in a moment and recognized its perils in the palms of children squeezing balls of mud for laughs and to live; if we believed, you and me and I, that the rules only matter where we are, do you think..

Do you think from the grey, cobalt ash of your eyes when alight with a judgement you never squander and never know if yours, do you think: a bridge lain or a forest debunked of beauty? Did you know that I stood one day fourteen years ago near a bay after having drunk Bacchus' fill, wretched in marriage and loving it all the same, that a bit of colour spat into the clouds for no longer than a blink held, except that mine eyes did retain it; and that it made me stolid and strong in a second when to the waters I'd have thrown myself; and that seeing it I knew to walk at least one more step, one more is all, and that it was and is the colour of your face in the morning when you putter to the washroom incredibly believing yourself no more than a tired faun exposed to a life not quite your own?

People reenter the complex. They annoy. A cigarette hangs from my lips. The single sentence between mother to daughter as they leave their car enter our downstairs, sags my spirit for as long as it takes the insect scratching at my shoulders to remind me of my priorities, attention-wise. I think of you, know you're arriving soon, wonder how I'll speak to you when you've disavowed me for the night, in your mind, conceiving only of a drunkard who'll be the person you love again in the morning, mourning that loss uninspired by my will. Defiant of the implications, the mollifying platitudes of who and when and what, I'll wonder, perhaps self-indulgently, how you can wonder when and how and what when you know who I am.

Weird creature, the clue is this, the key, simple: [the post was concluded, Love]

Remember that

Remember the swirling grey smoke aloft yet slashing thin running limbs, a lapse of symmetry defying our notions of truth and lines, a rhombus equating nicely to how he hurt her; she, him; a small clutch of shifting kids sliding with whoops and making sense of it.

Remember when my father's name was Jose Aguiar Sousa, Titan of the Azores, indefatigable pacifier of woes, a verbal giant, physical, robust levee against the peevish fears of men his size or more, better dressed, or worse. Remember when he calmed Colonels shitting their pants and crying for their mommies while he learned the language of a lizard's worth on the market versus what it might cost him to fuck the Colonels' wives. Remember he was materialistic, but never call him petty: he roared for the lot of them, and no one ever lost a woman they wouldn't have gladly sacrificed for his spiritual buff. Remember, pewling backstabber, that he took off where you had left. Not a soul departed on his watch in Angola. And all he did was know how to smile, cut teeth, soft jagged hurt and salve, when all anyone else could do was frown. Remember that that's all it took and that it took everything.

Remember the little chattering child in the attic of his house, wondering at the bats and headless horseman prowling; and far worse; he knew the inclinations of storytellers already. Remember how he grew and took on the sky, a personal challenge, a villain or friend, equally put on the pedestal he'd laid when she sauntered past as if it were nothing to walk in pink past leaves falling, he knew, for her (Remember that he knew they were falling for her while acorns fell on them both in separate spots but uniting them; remember that he took that night an oath that called for the head of a cat whose throat he blurred from blood tickled rather than cut).

Remember the Sargeant's blood running through a new channel, less stoic now, more versatile, hearing the gentle thump of her heart pinned to bristle boards alit with images culled by minds he'd protect her from if she'd only listened--remember that he tried to have her listen. Remember the consequences of  the nervous energy of a hurt heart wedding the master of ceremonies. Remember how the child followed the little girl throughout the day, shielding her from a stray wind if he could, or a ball let loose. He hid her in his heart; remember that.

At least a million drops have hit the saturated greens near this place; remember that, and that the one I grew to protect protects me now.

Remember that.

Bestiality, in other words

had me check your blog. Aghast you'd omitted me from the short-list of past paramours influencing your hyper-nuanced being, I then thought, "Omitting me is more of a statement than if she had not."

Yesterday I traveled with likely the most thoroughly decent person I've known--of the non-psychopathic genus "hotsweetsapien-- to a small glade post-modernistically ensconced in a casino hotel, smack dab in the middle of a town populated by no more than 4000 discombobulated souls, none of them lost to German sneezing fits. The pond/glade held crappie fish, nondescript turtles and a dozen of the alligators famed here, stitched into clothes, slapped as stickers onto the backs of cars, bottles of especially piquant cajun sauce, and so forth. At first I assured my very close companion that we'd been defrauded: we were looking at statues. N'est pas, Joseph, c'est vrai. Two minutes of staring at a specimen lounged on a faux-stone betrayed nothing of its living status until I finally discerned it breathing, a long soft intake of air almost imperceptibly swelling its stupid, vestigal body. I felt like piercing it, felt momentarily enraged at the staring eyes reflecting almost perfectly my own illimitable appetite for anything clear, clean, cold, uncompromising. Then my companion got me fumbling towards the entrance to "the Atrium," possibly the most misnamed bar on earth since it's composed of ice and has nothing to do with the sun except the absence of it.The Atrium, though, was not our destination. 

I once called you a jellyfish. Truer to the bone, you're a reptile, scaly and opportunistic. Is there a more pointlessly nuanced creature than the alligator? It moves only to lure and pounce, never exerting a truly artful calorie of energy towards creation for its own sake, which is to say, God's. Unwilling to bumble, it never chances upon the revelations Chance provides, becoming instead a marvel of tired evolution soon fit for the digital scrolls of extinguished species. You can't calculate without needing to dash it all to the wind because the wind came, and call yourself an artist. A salient lesson unlearned.  

This blog began with a post to you, Jessika, but will not end the same way. My own bumbling assent to visiting 

Lifelong thanks

Thank you for being the smile in my heart and for lifting its corner when no one else or thing can. 

Thank you for making my eyes well with touched tears when I thought they never again could; for the plenitude of spirit it imparts, thank you. 

When the rush of death blinds me; when pessimism and despair plunges my spirit under dark waters and I am drowning; when tossed on those currents where no purchase could be had, thank you for the godly gifts of thoughtfulness you throw into the vortex, those buoys, those gestures dispatched with telltale words and actions bespeaking profound care. 

Thank you for your gentle gaze, for your unflagging conscientiousness towards me and all things; for your uncomplicated, perfect decency. 

Thank you for making this morning, the gossamer thread fluttering from our balcony rail, in turns translucent and visible in the refracting sun, by your essence and the strength it has given me, an occasion for the greatest hope, the unerring awe for life, the answer to why. 

Thank you for being the surest redemption of the best I ever had in me and ever hoped this world was. 

Thank you for guiding me back to the life I was given.

Thank you, Brandi Dawn Ports. 

Jogging on the spot

I''m held hostage by nicotine and the need to segregate this primary addiction with a secondary one, the Balcony, where plumes of hundreds of chemicals can saturate my lungs with impunity. A game of mental tag has me oscillating between resentment at having to step out and an appreciation of the outdoor air the balcony provides. As with most compromises, I try to convince myself that this isn't an act of obsequity on my behalf but a participatory exercise in sound reasoning: smoking outside reduces indoor pollution; the clothes subsequently smell better; the offbeat, involuntary communion with nature--or at least with sod grass--adds serenity to my spirit. All good reasons. Then one reason adds to another and produces an irony.

The complaint by a neighbour of smoke seeping through the walls is the reason for this imposition. Chalk it up to the fear of carcinogens. But the sun bears its increasingly unfiltered, ultraviolet peeps full onto the balcony, scalding my skin. I find the word "melanoma" crabbing my mind while out here more and more often, and it sends a superstitious, sickening wave through me. My one dangerous habit has now lead to a second: sitting out in the sun for long periods of time.

And I guess I'm forced to accept that I needn't smoke and another needn't suffer for my own addiction; reason sides with complainant. And I guess I have to further concede that a doubling of carcinogenic risk is my fault. And I would, with a big, shit-eating grin on my face, if my awareness that the two gas-guzzlers driven by the complainants, their use of electrical devices, purchases of untold petrochemical products (from vitamins to handbags), and the multitude of linkages to coal-driven industry consequent to their participation in present society didn't mean that they severely, daily, with not a thought in their empty, troglodytic, blustering, minimized brains, contribute to the fact that sitting out on my balcony in the sun exposes me to a heightened risk of developing melanoma; for they have helped thin the ozone layer, replacing it with carcinogenic air. It's one of those ironies that's rich and maddening. Watching someone wag a self-righteous, condemnatory finger at another over some perceived transgression of morality always struck me as a filthy act, petty to the point of nauseating, redoubtable, a marker of why this species might not deserve to be around.

And saying that I note another irony: my own judgement rears its sermonizing head, finds an indignant roar swell and rise into a towering rage savagely desiring, needing, to raze their bones to dust, the complainants, the landlords, the media selecting which bit of information is capital-friend to prescribe, which not. Then I begin thinking of the colluding handlers of the media, see the web of mutually-generating influence, and know all of the impotent hate of the devil, all of Prometheus' woe, a blind and blissful eagerness to decapitate the head of an organism that unfortunately resembles the hydra in regenerative acumen.

But no Boethius, I, unless everyone is; and I refuse a recourse to calmer planes of thought. The tranquilizing affect of philosophical distancing and speculation, meant to perpetually defray a course of action, has no truck with me in my truer moments. It--and this worries me--might like these words be an attempt to convince myself that this isn't an act of obsequity on my behalf but a participatory exercise in sound reasoning.