My Favourite Abuser

“All things said and not said, you’ll likely wish you’d never met me on this or any other road.”

“But our meeting made a tale, at least.”

“A tale to be ashamed of.”

“For you, perhaps.”

“I was never looking for you at all. I was searching for someone I lost.”

“Way it goes sometimes.”

I met Nick Cave up in the clouds, and he spoke to me. The birds themselves paused to listen. He tried his very best to let us know how grief can be outrun, but I don’t think we or the birds fully heard. It’s a lifelong thing and honestly, honey, it’s a struggle. 

Another way to say it is the torch that through the blue dream fires the cosmos. Though at this point, that just feels like parody. Who doesn’t love a Dylan cover?

Look. You met me. Or maybe I met you. We were lone snake trails in the dust of other people’s befuddlement before they could admit we’d utterly fucked them. Our dry sinuous curves were never meant to meet. But they did, and here we are. You are the flashback on my stuttering film reel; I am the static on your sputtering radio. 

For as long as there was a stage, we danced. And did we ever dance.

Glimmering cauldron howls in the treetops, I cranked up Ulver for our eldritch frolic, gyrating to the slink of wolves, the glamor of witches, and the yowl of the wildest woods. Black, blacker, blackest metal.

Dreams: electric capillaries flash on a cobalt horizon. I think of X-rays and remember all of our last days. Hallucinogenic black spiders in a speakeasy. Aiming straight for the eyes. But dammit, at least you’ll open your hellacious eyes.

Then winter. Then the remains of winter. Then a guarded breath as we dared to dream of one more spring. Sporadic remnants of old snow, greyed by road dirt, the scattered bones of long absent giants.

And memories. We looked to windward as we traversed the canyon, and we saw the lone bison, the big old front-loaded fuck, snorting and steaming in the diminishing gold of the air, mucus streamers flung like molten flags. A giant knot of this dirty-sweet earth’s best fuckery and love. A shaggy fist given life. 

Life.

I’m near done with words; luckily this doesn’t need words.

I saw in you a tiny flickering beacon, and I went to you for warmth.

You are a woman looking for peace and endlessly, maddeningly doomed to stumble on trouble. Something has been coming for you all your life. Now it’s almost here. 

And me? My life is a rusted sword blunted on the cold diamonds of my damnable dreams.

We are—literally, tragically, hilariously—each other’s just deserts. 

____

Image © Daniel Freeman

Quiet Eternal Song

She showed up every afternoon in the town square, her guitar and amp ready to display her bona fides, ready to dazzle. She used to hear god’s whisper but no longer. 

She was an auburn beauty, which was incidental, but her gathered ponytail and her classical vulpine face were assets, however the music came.

Yes, pretty hurts, but goddamn, it still had such currency.

“Pretty lady, I won’t rain on your parade, but this isn’t the place for you.”

The wolf had appeared from shadows beneath the chapel roof and the market awnings, and he smiled through tumultuous teeth and tried to dam his drool. Oh, he was hungry.

“The skies are clear and this isn’t my parade, Mr. Wolf,” she said. “This is a way station, and I come from elsewhere, but here I sing my truth.”

“Don’t push me, woman.” 

“I won’t. Instead I’ll make my music.”

And she did that. Splashes of half or quarter melodies, staccato squalls merging into dreamscape, arpeggios traipsing on ramparts of crenelated chords, spiralling into the darkest of wells and spinning into meadowlark updrafts. Distortion like the most shattered of mirrors, hot liquid globules and elastic spans of glass, a glittering haze of misted diamond. Her thumb like a hammer conjuring bass notes, rhythmic and sundry as coitus, her arachnid fingers a blur as lacquered nails plucked and glissandoed reflected layers of overlapping melody. And above it soared her voice, like the great mountain condor, effortless and buoyed by thermals.

The townsfolk gathered and grew in numbers, and they sometimes sang snippets that only augmented her song, and children danced, and then their mothers, and then, looking sheepish between themselves, their fathers. 

The wolf was humbled, reduced, his snout a wilted thing, his ears flat, the luxuriance of his tail now tucked. 

“Mr. Wolf, I won’t stay. I’ve done what I came for, and it’s always time to move on. What will you do?”

Cupping the town in its rough hands was a landscape of clear streams and falls, forests dappled by light and deer, skies that paraded like blue and white and grey ticker tape, crags and flats and the quiet eternal song of the land.

The wolf, who recognized the good as well, knew all this and loved it, but he felt thwarted. Her cello nape, her downy hollows, her female scent itself a taunt, and though he knew he was wrong, he let himself down.

“I will eat you; it’s how I’m made. It’s what I am. And you, my chestnut fawn, were made for this too.”

She sighed while she packed her instruments. Something in the faraway hills echoed and crackled like an exhaled nightmare. She wished she could love the wolf and receive his love in turn.

“You will do what you were made to do, Mr. Wolf. But you are not emblematic of your kind.”

The wolf was puzzled. He didn’t know what emblematic meant. And while he crunched her words like marrow from the bones of a lover, spurned and sickly as the plague-struck, the townsfolk moved in silence with their clubs and knives and systematically dismembered him, and hearing his last furious yowl she cried as she left town, her hardware hunched like a stigma on her back, the neck of her guitar a phallus, her keening cry a screech of corvid grief in the spent and airless afternoon. 

Troubling Things

“A dream of dark and troubling things.” — David Lynch

When I’m dead you’ll find a scar on my left wrist and maybe you’ll follow it like topography and logic and think I tried much earlier, but no, it wasn’t what it looks like, and I’m a lefty, so no. It remains a mark of shame, I admit, the legacy of an instant of stunned outrage wrought in my skin, tracing through accidental glass with eerie precision a family providence and a full blue vein by a lonely millimetre. 

“Where are you, my love? Sister, oh sister, don’t fall. We keep going.”

You might discover one day that I was listening to “Situation: Relation” by Rainer Maria at the very end, and you might be correct in that (and even want to go find it and listen to it, which you really should), but the reality is we’re always absorbing, always broaching new things, and endings are often pale echoes of things that come before.

“Let’s head out, grasp our moment, live this thing.”

Florida and freedom, windshield smeared, we yelped our adrenalized excursion, never sparing a thought for how our return would look. Demoralized inside a pandemic, pelicans and perplexity vying until the panhandle, at least until then.

“Fuck your feelings.”

“Ugly folks in an unlovely place uttering ugly things.”

Did you keep it all to yourself? Head west? Unshackle yourself? Walk miles into canyons, hoping for a retort, to shake something loose from million-year sedimentary rock? You fucking dreamer. I swear to god I love you almost. 

You goddamned cougar ghost, you starfish tramp, you cephalopod tryst. Will you ever grasp the foaming stream, the seething flow, the knock-kneed rocks at the clear untarnished source? Is this our time at last? The quietus? The terminus, the ruined hissing valve of everything? 

“Well, hell, if it is, let’s at least give it some motherfucking dignity.”

__________________

Image © Rebecca Loranger

To Break the Light of the Sun

“That until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned; that until there are no longer first-class and second-class citizens of any nation; that until the colour of a man's skin is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes; that until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race; that until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained.” — Haile Selassie

Standing like the ancient poet, watching the clarity fill with vague, listening for the falconer, wondering when the gyre will widen or why it will, I shun the history of words. These thoughts so old they’ve stamped themselves as platitudes. This lurch so new its suddenness has staggered me from the surety of my wide-legged gait, tipped me slow-thighed into a dalliance with doom. Have they won? The worst, I mean? Are we on that darkling plain? Encountering fear within a handful of dust? Is the third who walks beside us visible at last?

Amandine. Delphine. My gemstone girls. Unfurl the red, gold, and green. Sing of Haile Selassie and dance with Marley’s ghost. Unleash the burning spear, let it set alight the world, whose boundless reservoirs of tears won’t even suffice. 

What impediments remain for the unfathomable? 

“But there are things which you have said to me which I do not like. They are not sweet like sugar but bitter like gourds. You said that you wanted to put us upon a reservation, to build us houses and make us medicine lodges. I do not want them. I was born upon the prairie, where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures and everything drew a free breath. I want to die there and not within walls.” — Ten Bears, of the Yamparika Comanches.

Do we yet wish to wish these things? The atrocities have returned in hordes and taken on human form. The lies of the elder skies have come as burnt ocher veils of choking ash. The children are betrayed. The great seas boil. 

Make my eyes unsee, excavate my tongue, and lance my ears with spikes; rend my garments then my limbs. But first obstruct all exits and compel me to be witness to this endgame, this dark unholy codicil—me, the last player on the stage when even the audience has exhaled its ghost into the great dome, and I alone am desiccated, woebegone, phantom-swollen with the stillbirth of this calamity, the dreadful pitiful scale of this crime.

“Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still.”  

Blood a hot torrent down my aching throat, I try yet cannot speak my final words. I will them to issue from the ruin of my gorge, but my ebbing wits, shorting and buzzing, only think them, sheer diaphanous wings buoyed by the last silken breath of a mind already passed:

“Shantih shantih shantih…”

________

[Image credit: © Todd Hido]

High Times

It’s high time we talked about the High Times.

“Closed mouth ain’t gonna get fed.” 

She was a mother and she knew some shit.

We experience all these intense things, second to second, minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year, decade to decade, all of them brimming with astonishment, wide-eyed and hoarse with love, yet we die with almost nothing, all these accumulations, dripped as stalactites, dropped like an old backpack, amounting to fucking what exactly?

The neighbors fit all of Eden into their front yard. Green tendrils spilled. Leaves of tubular red. I was with someone before the rainstorm, starting to make out, but she got spooked and left. After which I stood on the porch and thought long and hard about her, and Tom Waits growled a lament from crackling speakers wedged on some nearby sill. Jersey girl, my first and last, how much I cherished you. After the rainstorm, the waters braided like lovers, spiralling and twining, dreaming sclerotic dreams about how they might become partway manifest. A person got murdered that night, after the sun broke past the rainclouds and we gathered in the evening, but I never knew who. Someone played the opening bars of Zeppelin’s “No Quarter” on an electric organ, and we all chilled in the coming night, and someone got themselves slaughtered but we never knew who.

Wait. Let’s do this again, take another run at it. 

She was vehement. She told me she was prejudiced toward people whose shoulders aren’t horizontal. You get that, right? Weakling frames that slope downward, defeated before they start. Feeble half-assed primates, chinless and feckless, like the Trump spawn. And to a lesser degree, those whose earlobes don’t exist. That just join without a proper lobe. “Fuck those people too,” she said. I never could argue with that. She damn near had me on board.

“D’you put the seat down?” 

“I don’t recall.”

“Well, we’ll find out, won’t we?” she said.

Truth? She was terrifying. 

I heard the countervailing cries: “She ain’t the same as you are.”

All such things are relative. Offering a cold beer after an apocalypse is like delivering a truckload of gold in the High Times. To think we cared about politics, about football, about butterflies, about pronouns, about someone able-bodied parking in the handicapped space. About spades and hearts. Before the Great Loss, I drove south through Wisconsin one early fall, got caught up in some biker thing, some end-times rally of aged outlaws, checked into a Travelodge outside Madison along with two hundred slow-moving leather-clad seniors. They were blunt and loud and likeable and no longer capable of violence.

“Bear with us, sir. We have a room that overlooks a field of corn. Or are those sunflowers?”

The High Times were adorable: Opera and spice and guts. Opulence and idle spite and us. 

This night, tonight, the other side of that sliding light, is our night.