The restless dead still wander the sites of old battles. Ironic to this misfit how much they still belong.
The thing squats on the arm of my chair. A sound like veins being knotted, unknotted, gurgles from its abraded throat, a spoiled creek.
"How gentle are you?"
Faraway dead moan their irony. It's a hammock, this world. Where, which places, is it anchored?
"Gentle as I have to be," I answer, and it is a good answer.
Something falls into an abyss and screams, dopplering to silence.
"Enjoy the silence."
How can something in such surly folds of grey make so firm a claim to whiteness when clearly they mean purity? Is anodyne a prize now?
"Funny. I refuse both silence and joy."
"Then you're a fool. As all your kind have proved."
So be it. It's not wrong. How normal is it to stand in your bathroom, your mouth unhasped, no sound emergent, while your fingers crawl amid the grainy air and the muffled drop of a cat stooping from a chaise longue onto a hardwood floor punctuates some mutant night that dreams of being a sentence? The cat a comma. Your silent scream an ellipsis. Your burlesque fingers quote marks emulating talk.
Is mimicry all we have left? Will this sultry air not move again? Or ever match this hankering?
The stench of the dying dead fills everything. Help me. Help.
***
And you don't even own a cat.
***
Yearning for a cloudburst.
Apples, blueberries, fresh basil, a pickled human finger, spring water, kidney beans, parmesan, labia minora.
Fungal uncle. Aching aunt. A dozen cousins, and portabella bella, under her umbrella. Ella, ella.
Cumulonimbus. Digital familial. Expertly packed, the things we need today. Riding the subway, a muted rollick under the fungible layers of love and tragedy. A rhythm section somewhat lower than the cacophony.
Wetness. Extra virgin truffles, and the staring, gutted eyes of a slaughtered baby.
Compare grocery lists?
No. Please, let's not.
***
Cry wolf and loose the battalions of ravens.
Coyote always had two syllables to me.
This is the West. The terminus. The place the world crawls to when its legs give out. When its heart wears thin. When all thoughts spiral out from certitude, recoil from discipline.
You hold a torch, guttering in the prairie wind, but your endgame, your raw sortie is clear. Nothing is happening in the gathering impasse in the sky; a skirmish of silence and spreading shameface. A pinto gelding sighs and looks askance, partway asleep on its sturdy legs, its long piebald face more sorrowful than genocide.
A hiccup. Something rustles. You cut the flap, ignite the walls, and eviscerate a child.
As you run, the keening starts and flows like some soon-to-be-discovered cloud form, and it follows you, a subdued post-rape scream as you stop to slake from a brittle canteen, the leather cracked and crackling, the lukewarmth of its bowels more jittery horror than quenchment, and it follows you and doesn't ever blink or quit, not even once. Not even in judgment.
***
"Time to wake up, baby boy."
A slow tide sucks itself back over pebbles. A harbour rocks its boats.
"I won't wake up. I won't ever wake up. All this is a lie. You lied to me. Goddamn it, you were supposed to be kind. Whatever happened to kind?"
"I won't ever answer that, my brother."
"You ain't my fucking brother."
***
Wild blueberries and whistler marmots bisect a sheer plane of scree. Fruits of the woman, of the delta. Contours the shade of American ordinance. Blue is the overtopping god above grey, above white. Great banks of snow in mid-August. Tourists braying like burros. This caldera, this cascadia, this hallelujah, shouted from a ruined throat into ink, chorused into unspooling light years of astonishing indifference.