Joycean death, realistically interpreted

The suspense surges, unlike drums from Africa, much like the pruned Celtic misstep of their communique, that fatal hiccup rounding the Isle of Man and beaches near Kent when squinting at the slate-melt of sky and bay had nothing to do with the sun and everything with the rain pelting out a message assuring you you meant to be rhythmic, once were, knew how two-stepping stones beading a creek was an homage to bestiality, knew how distance and literacy had converted the primal into "spirit," another homage, paling, nodding to the home of old with the keenest eye for the one ahead, for that old lady peering through storefronts, your death, your sure death.

I'm sure you understand almost nothing that I'm saying, Brandi and any happenstancer happening on this post and most of those preceding it. I haven't earned the privilege of Joyce to write the most intimate dreck and be heard, a la Finnegan's Wake.  An irony surfaces about Joycean disdain for lesser wordsmiths: for all his hollering at nation and identity and order, how he bent for it like the greatest whore as he decried it, for that next potato, for the five shillings that would make his day, for the tool he became in rejoicing self-loathing. The hapless, poorly spent, beguiling fuck. Had Stephen lain the blade against the sun and soapy suds near my porch, a fifth of my homicidal self-awareness and a third of my reasoning, would have ended the tome before it began, the only fit abortion. Stomaching the purest self-defeat is hard; watching it lauded by reviewers rejoicing in the self-defeatism for the ease it grants their own victory is harder yet. How any Irish person could think with pride on Joyce disturbs me. If ever a trojan horse...

A moment in the life of

You reckless, feckless pustule of slag and drool, try! Jus' try! Say your name gravely. Don't wait for that faraway bell promised to signal the cavalry of you into battle; it was a lie you ought to stop tripping over before you break more than a hip or head or relationship. The brugh you thought never spent has emptied and another has to be fashioned from the drawn filaments of will left you, unnamed inheritance, bundled in fist to pull yourself out and over for something else.............the holy place is spent...................

A boy named Joey or Jimmy decided one day he should leave his house, never deliberating a goal except the one of leaving. He emptied his father's suitcase, packed a whitebread sandwich of peanut butter, a can of pop and a few curios that he'd once imagined magical, though for all the world they were the cheapest trinkets: a piece of copper wire, one smooth stone sized the center of his palm, a sheet of paper he had found three days before, wet and yellowed and smelling of dung. Fingers curled around the suitcase's handle, dressed in his Sunday school clothes, he flung open the door to his first floor apartment, felt the burst of sudden sunlight, smelled the smell of nearby bushes, gasoline city air, things unknown, and briskly marched out onto the street.

A car knocked him down, squashed his head into a crunchy mulch, and Joey or Jimmy died. The car drove on to meet the intersection, rolling to a slow stop at the red light,  the driver wondering if he should go right and then left on the next street, or wait out the light and continue north. He had an appointment with his dentist.

Colgate traded three points above expectations that morning. The driver's dentist read this and smiled. His teeth were white. People said "pearly."

The dentist's wife came. Joey or Jimmy's father sighed, spent. She smiled. Her teeth, too, were pearly.

Innocence pursues

The night idles. A mellifluous harmony between soft gusts of wind and colluding leaves makes everything pensive. Even hiccuping engines flow rather than castigate. Why the sense of danger, then? What is this thing that is upon me? It looks like death but death's not its name. Though it shares the same property of eternal suspension, death is not its name and what is this thing upon me? What is this thing like death but not that always courts me while I, reluctant lover, court by rote, dragging my soul behind me like a sack filled with food that never rots, Sisyphean chore, bloodying feet that heal only to bleed again, what is this thing upon me that is not death though death will vanquish its power? what is this thing that is upon me, incorruptible, mute, blind, stoic, carrying the sickly sweet smell of decaying pomegranate? Don't say dasein or yahweh. Say it's personal and intended. But what is this thing that is upon me that is not death but like it that gags and nourishes in bewildering equilibrium and has no name though I call it, nightly, with all the futile bleating of rage and love wrought from quartered dreams no longer as strong as once though somehow stronger still, what is this thing that is upon me?

A page once brisk with creation, made limp by rain, grown brittle by sun, palsied now by wind, balances on the edge of the squat green plastic table to my right. While I transfer it to the floor on my left, I am stultified, unblemished, unfed, never hungry, summarized as the last smile to be had, wondering when it was I first lied, and why.

Bridges

You lurch and stumble into a place, blink, and recognize everything. Relief subsumes you. Had a year passed? three? was it as little as the last rainfall? as much as when you stood exposed for the first time in front of your house, the sith pulled from the heart of the eternal tree to be lain out for consumption?

Across from me she sits, sat. Struggling from confusion to articulate the time-travel of waking up to oneself at 41 no more grown than the nervous child, the tinny squawk of music reverberating through speakers in someone's car or house not far off graciously gives me another venue for establishing clarity and normalcy to the morning; I tell her how the sound depresses me, downplaying the vital experience you feel when music is intimate, near, heard by you alone. You can't share your essence without losing it; the soul suffers no external scrutiny and recedes when drawn out for public display. Could we ever tell each other something, I wonder. The bridge, do we construct it together or cross it to get to the other?

The Convalescent

You sleep, the motions of your synapses always energized by the current of playful compassion best defining you and animating that listless, expressive mouth, the little suckling and nuzzling creature upon where I read all of your character and misgivings, the tut-tut puckering of disapproval or innocent consternation as well as Pan's sensuality.  

The morning cools my fingertips, winds carry the memory of many like it, where I threw my unwilling body onto a broken chair to fasten my eyes on a name that had remembered mine while I slept, said "Good morning, Love," a few words with all of my future's meaning, pulling me further away from my spiritual torpor. 

By will urged and love encouraged, I sit here now, convalescing after the frantic race to repair a body self-flagellated when, keenly aware of my servitude, I meant to make the chains visible. The scars tell a story, you said. 

The scars knitting now tell a new story, told by effort and hope inspired to pull and push and strengthen rather than degrade, slice, pummel. Told in a whispered good morning launched in the dark, confident in its humanity and by its godliness with equal humility. Told in our intimacy, alone together in the world yet representing altogether that world. 

In the cocoon of the space we have carved for each, my bones crack back into their original form, my mind looks for streaks of blood and finds only a white canvas that is ours, I smile and smile and smile with the old lust now better informed, and I wait with anticipation for that small perfect visage to peep out from between the slid glass door to say, "Good morning, Love."