“Dear diary, today nothing awful happened.”
Days we can say that are okay days. Days like today when the worst that happened was the squabbling of ravens in the treetops. Unlike yesterday when a sound from behind Wolf Mountain momentarily quickened your heart beat. The sensation of something staggering to its feet… and selecting. Targeting. Glitching.
Your mother, boarding, grips your hand, like she knows.
You recall all this, the world’s contrasts:
Fruit stands in a scorched land where even the wasps curl up in defeat.
Cold malnourished things outside colder walls. Wanting in.
A sound, a shear, a lurch, the sudden change in pitch.
A hundred people breathe in, shakily. Oddly, no one screams. One small child cries out, in a dream. But for the hundred or so clutching their armrests, lawyers and loggers and lovers, this is no dream. Through windows like portholes, the world yaws and rolls and comes blistering to greet them. To greet you.
Your mother, in a pale and godless voice, says, “Now it’s all over.”
***
So sing for me.
***
Play songs of road trips, don’t let me
Take only sips, but yeah let me
Grasp your snake hips, you can’t fault me,
Lick your full lips, uh, they’re salty.
Dreaming of this, almost telling me,
Belief in two slips ain’t no felony.
***
Hey, hey, stop. Enough. You knew this day was coming. Shhh. Don’t fret. Isn’t it better to lose the cowl of anxiety and know your fate is no longer conjecture?
The man with the haircut and cattle bolt, the cannibal shrink, the dancing albino giant with the tiny hands, these and more were not me but my emissaries. Oh, how they wished.
But I’m here now.
You have the look of spit smeared on a sidewalk. Once shiny, now drying, like a life begun yet still unlived. Take this chance, your very last. Take it.
Your scars are relief maps of your past. Retrace them.
Make of the world’s tender fury your art; capture it, let it breathe.
***
Once we gathered in the city, and we attended the opening of the gallery, the book in my jacket pocket heavier than heaven. Kurt would have laughed his scrawny ass off. I tried to explain myself, but alcohol had lashed my lips to my teeth. I don’t remember how we lost each other, but I do recall wandering the early hours in arterial rows and faking my own death. When the sun began to tease its rebirth, dim grey peach over the mainland, I could hear children in boxlike homes chewing on Frosted Flakes and wishing they had wings.