Ten Sixty Six

The land’s all gone, the bears are out, and a campfire builds itself. This land. Stragglers gather and reminisce about raisins and avocados. Some of our kind went down to Geneva but were never heard from again. Bless all of you, says the man on the hill, under an ominous sky that looks like a victim. You will be saved, he says. You will love each other. 

Those in the caravan to Helsinki laugh quietly and chew on their nails to the rhythm of the wheels on a belligerent road.

“Was that Jesus?” someone asks in Swedish. 

A quiet voice answers in English. “Makes sense Jesus would be a hitchhiker.” 

“I got a whole story about that.” No one recalls who said that or in what language they said it (but I know, and they weren’t from Scandinavia).

How is it no one warned us, no one told us a guitar is not a penis but a womb? How born are we if we yet don’t know what bore us? How dark are our dreams, how cherished, and how black is our metal?

That honeywoman struts her asymmetric gait, and we all wait, in case her flavour’s bleeding over the tops of everyone’s shoes. Normandy, you think. Alright. These pebble beaches under weighty skies, stale remnants of baguettes, jettisoned recyclables, and cooled moist condoms pushed forgotten into clefts. From here a fleet launched once and changed the world. Tapestries and arrows; the uneasy gyre of tongues. A millennium since, I still can’t let that Gallic swagger eclipse my Saxon stance. I can’t tell the stubble in the field from the stubble you sometimes grow in the sultry valley of your love. You are widespread. And you know, while your grace may be saintlike, the spark of your ardor remains ghostlike. 

“Quick! There’s no line for the Ferris wheel.” 

Our time is now, it’s only now. Soon these frames will sway, broken and rusted, like limbs once bled by ancient butchers. The boardwalk will splinter and rot, foamy spumes reclaiming each kindled plank. A candy apple stick sucked dry and thrust in the eye of a life-size molded Elvis.

The last gull wheeling on a gust, sent by a waning sky over a lifeless swell.

“You totally should.”

“What if I half did instead?”

“Yeah, one of these days you might even manage funny.”

“Ha ha!”

The kindest we can ever do is tell someone we see their pain. Represent. I’ve never seen anyone not break down when someone speaks their suffering aloud. Tells them they are heard. 

Here, though, the last things to leave are deaf. Silent. Empty of applause. No one to remember or proclaim, the unheard flap and ache of a ragged banner the brief and only actual accolade.

Song in Neon

Alone now in a motel, sitting not so pretty.

How come all the girls I ever loved are named after cities?

Geneva, come back to me. Adelaide, are you there?

Madison and Phoenix, Savannah down in Georgia,

You ain’t so bothered now, but did you ever really care?

This animal in my throat, you better hope

It never breaks out. Go home, go home,

Go home now, dance and eat yourself sober. 

I ain’t guilty of this impending crime, I won’t

Admit that any damn thing is ever really over.

Things and people come, more often they go,

But all of that’s some half-digested ego. 

Red light through blinds like rays of blood,

Walls green with sixteen thousand hangovers.

Was anything we laughed or cried at ever any good?

Were we not even friends when I thought we were lovers?

A fool back then, more foolish now. I’ll leave in

The quiet hours under night’s impartial cover,

Slip away, not even someone’s memory or even

Credibly alive, though maybe I was never. 

Trash Latitudes

“Come here,” she says, her voice a raw husk, the echoes corvid dreams cast like corn-fed larvae over panoramic fields.

Sullen, you think. 

Bitch, you decide. 

She’s forgotten who she is, but she knows the river churns below, a cascading foam of milk, of frothing milk, of chocolate incursions. How is she able to sit, to let this unfold, while the angry faraway men gather in Armani to strike? 

“Is my presence in your life becoming oppressive?” That’s Roxy. She’s from Dumfries. Her words never err. She once considered escape but now prefers the yanking of chains. 

“It always was. And for that your glimmering skin will fetch top dollar.” 

I can never match her.

“You’re funny.”

Dutifully I nod, but I’m not that funny. 

The sun sets on a season, leaves like brittle cuticles crunched underfoot. Parched unread cataracted pages.

Another turn of the creaking world, another and another. 

The wintry scrape of a dry bow across catgut. The sound of a glacier withdrawing into its own tears. A full-on retreat. A place so cold your eyelashes think they’re weapons. Serious men on a serious stage, you seriously might think. But this isn’t serious. It’s the final laugh of the last good girl stationed on a headland over the last tumescent tide. It’s a hankering. An ache. A flash of loss. A bafflement. 

Roxy knows most things, she thinks. 

But how does she trawl the world? Her mouth must be wider than all the oceans on this overstated earth.

She reads the vast indecipherable room and wonders briefly about tears. 

“You wished I’d gone away?” she asks.

“I wished you’d stayed.”

Jaquinta

You clamber down the embankment, under a squeal of rail. A blaring assemblage sparks and screams above. How soon until your ears bleed?

Jaquinta knows your story. For a good price, she might even give it up.

Things might escalate, although they might not. 

Love the aftermath. The silent hiss of conifers, under a windless sky. Why is it they still hiss, even in stillness? Their very tops somehow moving while the evening settles so quiet, a scattershot of dogs barking hollow in the throat of this dry valley. 

Back in my dream, Jaquinta, you told me something, and I heard it, and to this day I want that story spilled over eggshells crackling alive, overrun with raccoons ruining a coop.

“I don’t care where you bin,” you say, so quietly, and a cloud of bright parakeets flutter from a nearby roof, and you dream the same hoarse breath. “I just care where you at.”

Ain’t none of us one thing. 

These glittering cities. Emerald Seattle. Quicksilver Vancouver. The glistening infernal Bay. The bristling, stockpiled western edge of the continent. We rooted them in beauty. We sang their swollen choral praises. And they abandoned us. We, the workers, the dreamers, the pragmatists, the saints: you don’t get to hate a thing until you love it. 

The shriek of the train trails into a lingering tail, a dwindling lonesome coda echoing across the hallowed plain.

This is a story clinging to the coattails of another, and one day I’ll muster the cojones to tell that one too.

Lit By Fire

"If you must die, sweetheart, die knowing your life was my life's best part.” — Keaton Henson

They said it was Banksy. The last painting. The howling boy on the wall of the capitol. We’ll probably never know, but I saw it, and it sure looked like a Banksy. 

You can’t really miss a black bear. The dripping, flexing arms of the forest murmur their shades of green, some a pale jade whisper, some an emerald shout, some so abysmal they’re nearly black, and within those dark branches lie shadows, blacker still. Yet a black bear, once it crosses your visual field in front of or within those varied shades of green, is a piece cut out of the world, a stark absence, a patch of lonely void in the shape of a bear. At which point, is it even a bear?

We sit in a quiet corner, you with your floppy hat and me with my eighties obsession that I can barely articulate.

“Try my hat on,” you say.

“I’d prefer not to.” I realize this is a hat store, and I balk. 

“Ha ha, that’s why I love you! You let me down gently, like an escalator.”

“No idea what you’re talking about, but you’re my friend, and I love you too, of course. Why are we even saying any of this? It’s a given.”

“Nothing’s a given. We’re renewing our friendship vows.”

“Um, you can stop now. Stop talking, that is. For fuck’s sakes. My toes are cramping.”

“Which only makes me love you more.”

“Shut up. Uh. Please, shut up.”

“Let’s go see some sights.”

“Yes, the new Banksy. The one we literally dropped everything to come and see.”

She had a way about her, a mood, something impossible to say no to.

But yes, back to art and stuff. Life. Banksy or not. 

What matters? Stale toast and the late, lazy flap of corvids against a peach sunset. An avocado pit sending tendrils. A butter churn. Scaffolding arched above a sidewalk, mauve and crimson night leaking into the tubular screens of its graceless folded geometry. Umbilicals. A honeybee nudging petals, reticent as a new lover. “I can’t breathe.” Do unto others. Me too. Make me an instrument of thy peace. Do what thou wilt, though it harm none. Keep on truckin’. Just do it. The great oil canvas of Serengeti brushstroked by wildebeest. Boreal trails of the caribou. Helpless, tenacious Marlowe balanced on the unlikely ridge spanning love and cynicism. The shock of a black locust on the whitewashed farmhouse wall, droning stark on stucco. Slanted dusty rays of old gold across grocery scales. The micro worlds of toys, all those chimes and astonished faces. And she has gone to Carterhaugh. How long, baby, how long? Stripe of the Bengal tiger, the lion’s nasal folds, the cougar’s stern and diffident brow. Howling alien nowheres blazoning the arrant vacancy of forsaken love. Pissing your name in a snowbank, or better yet an obscenity. Reeking fresh leaves of basil torn and open as the Sacré-Coeur. Bats exploding from a granite mouth, hurtling like scorched sparks in the quiet fire of twilight. Reciprocity: mouthing a woman to orgasm and being sucked. Croissants warm in the slatemine morning beside the drifting river. Dreamed unearthly cathedrals. Black lives never not mattering. The hart of the wood, the heart of the would, a-bloom with grief and guilt. Kiln-baked pizzas assailed by artichokes. Rooks prattling in a copse, jackdaws likewise on ramparts. Blastocysts zapped by lasers. Terror cells cleansed by drones. Eyelashes shipped free by Amazon. Thirst, in all its forms. 

Smiles like an ocean horizon, faint, blue, where the sky is stitched. 

A baby crying on the floor, abandoned. Cold concrete and a massive ceiling. A bear seeking entry, quivering snout attuned. Junior’s alone and loud, his laments a looping echo of their own discordant song.

“Come back now. Did you hear me? Where did you go?”

My ears half-closed, my heart is like a cannonball, shock aroused by alcohol, patterns like a dream tattoo. 

Open my secular breast. These dripping fragrant delicacies I’ve saved for you.