here’s what i know i don’t know:
The invariance of my Legrangian. The number of Tootsie Pops it takes to lick six bespectacled owls. And oh, gosh, think of the children. I don’t know a damn thing about them. Except being one once in a while. How do I get back there, anyway? All the maps end in fourth-dimensional acrobatics. All the guides look a bit too much like Alex Harrison, who I punched in the stomach for swearing on our pinkies that he could smell the future. I don’t know what happened to him, either. I dont. No, I don’t. I, no. I know, I don’t. Historically speaking, what wouldn’t I do for a Klondike Bar?
feral monks and quakers
Jupiter sinks away from Venus, dipping degrees nightly. I coast down Cortez on a ten-speed beater. Away from the city limits, my first cigarette in months charring the back of my throat. Lightless, no reflectors, plain stupid. The eight o’ clock sky more dense with diamond grizzle than any Toronto midnight. I have gone to be with the person I love.
My dad prods the balcony railing with his elbows. Always watchful. I think of his eyes when he goes over. The grunt of panicked realization, flailing desperate arms. Any moment now. When I least expect it. Before I master the filial shibboleth, the phrase that sews the things I feel for him into irrefutable word-sounds. We are mortar crumbling between bricks.
“I dreamt I was chased by masked men. I dreamt of your grandmother.” Mum warns with her fingers, miniature and crooked. Her blood pressure on the rise, her arteries sclerotic, or are they? Prevention supplies diagrams for cleaving excess. Nip poisoned lifelines in the bud, butcher heredity, strangle every undisciplined cell. What a stupid name for a magazine. She looks like fifty million bucks. She always blossoms. Bitter sap, sweet pesticide.
One parakeet bows to another. Bows again. Shimmies wire-wise cooing. When there are only a few inches between them the pursued alights in a splatter of primary colors. The cycle repeats, then something clicks and they fuck furiously for half the time it takes to shell a peanut. Afterwards the bird on the left stares coolly into infinity while the bird on the right primps, pecks, expunges evidence. We lease metaphors to terrorize, we cantaloupes.
I’ve been loathing you too long (to stop now)
Every morning, immediately after I wake up, my brain begins to cycle through a worn catalog of diseases, neuroses, and fatal accidents, grazing the annals of psychotic catastrophe, surveying esoteric debris in search of the disaster that will annihilate me before I make it back to bed that night.
Never mind the fact that I am ostensibly well-rested, well-fed, and able-bodied. These are delusions of good health. Childish excuses quickly disposed of by my hyper-active consciousness, acutely sensitized by a lifetime of research to the slightest deviations in performance.
The muscles in my neck that stiffen as I exit my bed: sudden onset bacterial meningitis. The vague, persistent dizziness that dogs me as I stumble to the bathroom for a morning piss: multiple sclerosis, intercranial neoplasm, ischemic attack, all of the above.
By the time I’ve brushed my teeth and tied my shoes, my mind is a fog of diagnoses. My ears ring, my lungs throb with each shallow breath, my fingers feel gelatinous, atrophied. It’s all I can do to crack the front door and step out into the world. And if I’m foolish enough to try, it’s only a matter of time before panic, quick and dirty brother of paranoia, checks in.
I might make it to the afternoon, mania held in check by a grueling bike ride or gripping novel, only to stop by the grocery store for dinner ingredients and feel reality slipping mercilessly away as I sample the choicest tomatoes.
Without warning, the amygdala dispatches gobs of adrenaline to every extremity. My vision narrows to a quarter-sized tear in infinity. The garish colors of genetically-enhanced produce smear into a pulsing blur. I feel the universe accelerating, frigid space streaking in every direction but mine. The thinking mind chants vengefully: See! See! This is the end I warned you about! This is your private apocalypse, happening in the vegetable aisle.
Before long my heart is a cataclysm, my legs tingling with sweat and neuroelectricity. Every fluctuation in light, color, sound, temperature rends another thread from the frayed vestiges of my sanity. I want to escape, to tear my fucking clothes off and claw through the bodies at the till, to get away from this terrible place. If I run far enough fast enough I’ll be safe. Not even a goddam aneurysm can match me at top speed.
But I can’t. I’m frozen. Stranded in timelessness, my body a distant dissolving speck. Unreality courses like a lukewarm bath, stale and only-almost-someplace. If it wouldn’t be too great an inconvenience, ma’am, I think I’ll just lie down beneath the Trident and Kit-Kat bars. Wrap myself in a burial shroud of lurid tabloids, let the muzak kill me softly. Are you my mother? This is it, I’m going to die, right? I am going to die, I can’t feel my hands I can’t feel my face I’m—
—still alive. And standing at the credit card machine. The cashier is snapping her gum, having asked me for the second time to press OK. I behold the bounty in my shoulder bag: eggs, milk, vittles for the cat, overpriced hippie cereal, fresh greens. How did all that get there? My short term memory is a confusion of mundane product selection and psychosomatic carnage. Blood and tissue, muscle and bone. Eyeing the rafters, I stumble through the sliding doors into the parking lot.
The drive home, I feel like a million bucks in marked bills. Thunderheads tower, grey bellies crackle. Preaching Huddie Ledbetter at the top of my lungs, I survey my brush with death as an ebb tide, relieved by its familiarity in retrospect, exhausted by the biological toll, confounded by the recurrence of a pattern that is so much a part of who I am and yet so fucking impenetrable to me.
As the hours pass, the enigma persists, begetting a frustration that mutates subtly into wariness, through which, as always, emerges the battered, indignant, tireless visage of the life-scorner, the hunter, brutal scholar of possibility.
He nags from the windowsill while I saute the grub, and later in the reflection of my empty dinner plate. He is the sweat that condenses on iced edges in heat, the bitter rind, the ferrous after-taste. I watch him in the bathroom mirror, terminally curious, like a child who studies the dictionary simply because it frightens his grasp on the meanings of things.
And when, finally, I crawl back under the sheets, threat-gnawed, adrift in incalculables, too tired to fight back anymore, he whispers to me in my voice, without pretense, because it is the only one he knows. We wonder together who is the parasite and who is the host.
krush
i see a scrap of weave
on the block
i wonder if
some richly pelicured
cindarelle paused here,
high on her beau’s cologne,
only to linger past
half-past twelve
and find her enchanted locks
abruptly uncoiled
i consider
the likelihood that
it caught in the door of a bus
or your girlfriend’s Honda and
you didn’t notice til
hours later
when you ran
fingers
through yr curled shag
and a chunk was missing;
i romance
the possibility of
a first date gone wrong, or
so right that
that shit simply got torn off
and tossed out the bedroom window
in fits of self-less pleasure.
i remember
the time i crossed a weft
that had been tumbling through the gutter
for months,
mistaken for
alleycat hair-balls or
somebody’s missing beard.
a daring seven-year-old dangled
it between two fingers and
tried it on
his sister
without asking.
She swore curses and
he howled just out of reach;
that hair
frayed the air with its
dignified insinuations.
