Paradox bound

Sultry night. A pastiche of fulsome smells embroidering the air with a memory here, another there, all helter skelter. She left for work this afternoon asking me why I was sad, an acknowledgment rather than a question. My reply, I don't know. A heart can be heavy and light, I should have answered, a paradox generated by time-senses come alive from the awareness of movement, a brusque break with the routinization we use to tamp those senses and convince ourselves we're immortal. I see nothing but transience tonight. Excitement, apace last night with caution, lunges past it, fueled and foamy around the rippling mouth while the abandon the reward for a resigned course suffuses me. We're all frangible bits of flesh and dream, imagining that the former keeps us whole when the latter alone negotiates with no oblivion, leaving the work of decay to molecules.

Sultry night and I'm symbol and sign, kin to pollen and gnarled tree limb, unto myself beloved and lover. Vespers and I swirl as one. Wind is my transportation, reigns I grab at whim, disembarking the same. All I ever was resides as will in the motion of every particle, every orchard's burden, every peasant's sigh, every Cypress calmly defying paltrier expectations. Joy! The percussive past reassures me, Joy!

When left to fend for my soul's purchase as a child, how I became indebted to my parents for the independence granted from any one thing, enslavement to all. On the cusp of an old adventure in tress to appear new do I thank all for owing all. In purity, without solicitude or want, am I by a duty Absolute absolutely free.

And so, yes.

Carpentry (she smashes clocks)

Up, carried by a dream wiping clean the patina of chronological life to find myself where I had fallen asleep yet surprised at being in the midst of an existence having all the features of mine while foreign to me. The short-haired carpet underfoot; the smells bearing more of themselves from the coaxing heat that's recently arrived to remind of the grit and sex and tumult of life; the clock above the mantle like so many clocks above so many mantles, as if they were born to pair, the former an almost organic and symbiotic lover of the memories sitting upon the latter, tick-tock we lived and died; the humble rustling of a hamster cocooned in a little globe of shredded paper she'd lain there; her, adrift in her own ocean, lids like petals softly concealing wherever the dark or light played lambent in her eyes as the red plush chair already sold and nearly gone gave her solace a final time--all the same in a visual, sensual pattern of familiarity that somehow breeds caution, if not fear.

 Caution: this is not your life. How did you come here? Up and up not into clarity but amnesia or a return to an amniotic state of innocence compelled by our leaving here soon, compelled by wonder, a naked eye visiting a potential future unprotected by repetition, those physical motions we imagine locked into an invisible and unyielding choreography set by a rational and divine order. We relocate our lives soon, we enter a portal of creation, everything blank and black with only our mistakes and the blood they spill to paint whatever house we'll call home again.

The sorrow of imminent relocation cloys and crabs my heart moment to moment now, compounded by the same I sense in her. We leave together but also in a renewed and fierce isolation from each other as the uncertainty of an untested path forces us into ourselves to reexamine the fortresses inside, slap their walls to ensure their soundness, feel our armor, and by its purity also feel an intolerance towards those acts or duties still a part of this place we will abandon, an intolerance to the compromises made and dignity divested in making them to construct a house now proved vulnerable to the circumstances of others, wills not ours. The order we thought divine shows itself illusory and we weep like children watching death claim and disintegrate the bodies of their parents. We weep for what we do not know, as well.

From my selfexamination I emerge no more or less emboldened by the reserves of strength or weakness found than when born; and with the same impertinent joy do I hold in the realm where sky and earth kiss the hand of my partner, my best friend, the person in whose gaze I will always find my solace, my being, my dream, the only certainty, the house withstanding all winds.

The last thing

And there's a last thing that was the first thing and always emerges when the only truck you'll have with life is honesty. You know it though never the right word.

And the Jews say God's name is ineffable.

The thing sits in you as the legacy of your birth, enameled up over centuries in dramaturgy, a bemoaning both the beginning and purpose of language, the allcry of the newborn blasted with pain. This thing is not loneliness though loneliness articulates its earthly sense; and it's not sorrow though sorrow enrobes it. Nourished by absence and presence entwined, the thing opts for worldlessness, a thereness like sudden violence or the authority of a storm.

The wall-clock's metronome keeps apace with its digital counterpart on the screen, each tick signalling a terrible loss, the horror of irretrievability. The torment of man's ingenuity, the need to by calculus or statue or dumb gashing name this thing. Shamen reinventing themselves as doctors prescribe around it; houses of shouting men and women would with writ or verse would lash it to a pole, paper it into stillness for study. This thing that means you can't ever keep your child or a tear of outraged hurt or of the joy preceding it--the great benevolence, leveler, death for life and the reverse describing the quintessential moment. This thing, it defies nothing, embraces the imbecile, tolerates the wise, never lets go. Never in it is a tick forgotten or remembered. Paradox its subterfuge, our agony, all passion. This thing that hides the harder you seek is right around the corner, there, on that bend you know so well, there in a mirroring blade of grass from a morning sun thirty years ago you were sure the first and last, the enduring one.

And then it happens. Invincible, you feel this thing make an etch of you, an afterthought held in mimeograph. Artful at last, you are testament to streaming tears, you are the laugh ever echoing, you drink from Keats' urn, you wallow no more, becoming it.

But, oh, for one more first kiss.

Strategic Planning

The placental tides swing back, a wash in the throat-bile and its balm the same. You hold, and nothing’s sadder, to the walls containing the promise of a liberation you thought fated. You hold, tight, to perse dreams of walls wainscoted, life bled true. And there’s truth in that; and in that truth of selfholding held long enough, you believe. And believe the next step in believing. And something better than you and a bit less happens; and you call it evolution though you know it’s another name unnamed by the one rendering it.

We don't care of the plod sending billions of shamed children to drugged doom by parents split and spoiled and spooled by the curvature you haven't the courage to name, though you know it screams and claws ever neural impulse, sketching decay on screens and print and the universities declaiming us. 

The marrow of it came to me when I sat on a red couch asking myself how truth and everything heard might be one and the same and where they differ. Currency had nothing to do with it: it's a ponzi scam crumbling us all ten, fifteen years from now; the monetary system is the largest gull by gulled hurt, redblue bruised. I thought that sending one simple message, indiscreet, might have an impact. And with the simultaneous force a thousand ways by cells respiring, construed, owed, give something we'd by any consensus call better. 

The plan was............................... 

hungry again

Will these impressions endure? Rain blinking silver beads against the asphalt purlieu spreading beneath the balcony, lit by the swaying beams of trucklight parasitic in purchase of a night every Being's repose. Bodies skeltering up unshapely grass mounds to doors lacquered recently, gaudily masking the impertinent, rotting, stormlashed pinewood, a patina over death as deathly coating the souls passing through those thresholds. 

Some pause, pretending to remember and looking at nothing within or without before headfirst and down they trundle into the confines of these drably grey wainscoted rooms fit best for the plump bedbugs and grubs leeching the moisture and thin, unstaunched blood inside. Will the spindly tree in the northeast corner, hunkered limp under the cloying expanse of nightsky freeze as frieze in the minds of us lumbering, life-weighted people circling the warrens of timber erected here, neighbours neither wood nor man to any? 

Will it stay with me later how a minute ago this body rose vertically, a wraith, from its supine chair by a reflex reconvening after its own mysterious response to the chopping wind that gutters electric light as if appropriating for nature what man thought his? Will I remember my blind kinship with the silent quake of this night's urge?

No hunger after filaments of matter, yet how I now starve. Famished. Gnostic.

Tradition

The Mardi Gras festival gathers the emaciated destinies of the people around this region into a kind of weltering remembrance of the immortality of their cells, the stones steeped in the blood of their precedents and a precognitive alertness to the vector of life sure to follow and steep anew in whatever continuum of violence and of consequent regeneration describes the irreducible carnal reality some avow as under-girding the misdiagnosed realities of religion or society. The looming ritual meant as a bill of lading for our souls in exchange for a body long ago willingly forfeited, Easter, sparked off by this "fat Tuesday" parade, terrifies me the way all blind treks of routinized significance do--the unctuous release of hoarded joy into the commons of humanity remains hoarded in me and pulled at by the mob against my wishes; issues forth, squeezed out savagely like a ripe gourd in the fist of a manic angry child. What more mournful than the worm-bedecked comfort wrought by selflessness?

It struck me in this unfreezing and unexpected cold in Louisiana: whatever problems there are are not mine alone; the body clinging to mine knows as little as the body to which it clings.

The usual cluster of notables peopled my dreams and lifted me into consciousness on a fat red rug ably designed for rest. The twitter of my soul and a blink of light behind me that was no blink but where my imagination thought it brought me to a rousing desire to snuff more wine outside.  My wife--any other title would be inept--came into the room, twirling with the spangles of an angel's sleep, replete with a mouth upon whose motions calm and excite a sailor as do waves, and said the smoke polluted her. We respond:

When you burn a piece of paper over a campfire it alights to the wind, carrying it upwards in a rocking motion that reminds you of the seemingly arbitrariness of butterflies, of vultures circling the sky about to drop.  Lunging into the air as you dream a butterfly might, gratifying, you make your way. Detach, then, from myself, as you would the deft cut in the air left by the remonstrance of a butterfly following its instinct, and consider the unlikeliness in our care for smell and sound as matters to no less my soul than the next boy who dies today for lack of water.

My digits type frozen and every misstep a likely hazard. Send me in all ways but not onto a balcony because you, delicate smoker, couldn't take a whiff of the poison you work to buy.

Gao, to.

When it surprises you that most of your beliefs were a chimera, hanging slick and fork-tongued on the penumbra of your life, blink twice and then let it go.  I've taught you to trust, stand readied with one fist of text balled in one hand; in the other, a sword. Every father asks for his son to bleed for his beliefs exactly to the extent that he would for his own. If all things are equal between us, and they are, bleed only for the father you know as you; bleed for compassion or for cruelty in whatever measure your conscience tells you; and know that your conscience lies if you're not listening very closely. For that, go to where no one can hear you; you, anyone; and care not for the world then. Everyone will laugh and shake your hand; and shake theirs; and then look on the form and essence of life.

Sometime, circa. a couple of thousands of years past, they say someone died for you.

No one has died for you. Everyone has died for you. Decide what emphasis you'll choose to guide most of your life; but never, for anything, let your life be in vain, a passive mark of biological passing no more remarked than a slug's. Never that. Safeguard your life until you reproduce; your soul until you can stand it. If in conjunction with the love I feel for you, that will be forever.

Your tongue will never exceed your heart. Follow the latter with the former in faith. My legacy to you is you; my love, as truly  unbounded as the universe. Kiss all you see, if only in your mind, at least once. Kiss those things you love frequently and forever. Destroy the first hint that your kiss will be interrupted.

Wend wisely, Dearest and Truest Chum. My blood's yours. Remember that it is as powerful as the oldest of things.

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." 

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.

   

Deployment

A retinue of pompous moneylenders coalesce around rule-honourers, citizens, average joes and janes dutifully enduring the maddening maze of directing blips of lights, painted lines, squawks from televisions, looming grimaces of controlling consternation by the multifarious Uniformed, to reach spiritual spaces the dimensions of a tictac where more briskly ushered pretenses to consensual authority say when to eat and by which manner food shall be obtained. The moneylenders call them "jobs". They hire people to call them jobs (the job of telling people they have jobs or should and what they are). These jobs are bound by a web of contractual gobbledygook bound, in turn, to mystify; that is the point. Lobotomized by moneylenders, con-artists--they give themselves other names, ones usually requiring the breadth of a medium-sized mid-western library to pronounce; and that, too, is the point--warrens of domiciles, quaint and to the purpose of feedlotting the lot of us save those whose names demands the endless decimation of forests to pronounce, are erected in woe, with sweat, dreams bloodied and false to the blood dripping from them; and then in the small crescendos and declensions of life the lives of the swelling biomass of our species pulses forth, moneylenders riding the sludge of their decaying bodies like surfers on high.

Then something happens. Beginning from as simple a spark as a campfire brings, never guttering, accelerating, though in defiance of a moneylenders' natural law, never consuming, the bright and forever cordoned guff of one child renders forfeit the flabby deceit with the tiniest cry ejected voluntarily from its chest, a single act of causeless, non-contextualized sound shattering too many miles of historical edifices to the disjointed fragments they meant to deny themselves to be. The cry, the allborn wail of insistent justice, bears the unique meaning of the babe's own name, never squandered, economized ubiquitously only to itself, bereft of bequeathing and ending where it began. The mysterious sound echoes eternally, forming the reality of a world begun again. The moneylenders, trying to sequester, nurture and restore their dissolving bones, cry "no, eleutheria or fate cannot coincide!" Soft notes not unlike the gods nodding imperceptibly at dandelions or galaxies swirling, make piquant with meaning, by sound, the sound of the babe's, how to resolve with or without death, either state the same as the other, the confounding dissatisfaction of waking up while remaining asleep; that is, having a job.

Sunken libretto

Infernal Louisianan sun simmering my skin, I dropped two sacks of refuse into the industrial green bin receptacle, one of two tucked into corners of our building complex. Sentinels of sanitation, the waft of their stink barely touches your nose as you walk away. But enough to dispel any illusions.

Heading towards the mailbox in anticipation of finding therein a meagre symbol of coin designed to stave off physical insecurity another day for me and mine, a tiny lizard scrambled past my feet with that skittish, undulatory motion that reminds you of a frog's hop and snake's slither simultaneously. The gecko--I suppose--made towards the gate to the pool, pausing every few paces, stockstill, to assess whether my foot sought its spine. The sun was a molten ball concealed sufficiently by cumulus fluff to let me unblinkingly spot a hawk sweeping high to my left. The hawk circled;  the gecko held that ancient fearful pose.

Was the creature aware that its real threat lay high? Did that fleet whip of mottled green grow taut with adrenaline at the right danger? Lumbering, I could never catch it; inedible to me for all impractical purposes, it could have leap between my teeth without harm coming to it; yet standing there electrified by the feeling of deja vu over a scene that had been played endless times in every squirming cove of life; as certain of my own  heightened awareness at the timeless little episode was I that the small beast knew nothing of its position within the web of life; no telltale cue rendered its fear of me inert; the hawk could have snatched and swallowed it without its twitching a vertebrae.

Music, a murmur of strings, crazily struck the air from a nearby apartment for a half-beat, never concluded. My muscles slackened. I walked to the mailbox.

And I wondered: would the same myopia end me, too? Would I know, finally, that I had cannibalized myself?