15.7
He’d cackle like a drunkard if he thought that it would help, remain in favor of the short term, drive the long term from his mind. Anyone who said that they would help him now would cement his allegiance. He was tasked with cranking out the bucks for other people. It made him versed in playground chants. He skipped to his Lou and when he got there, there was no instruction. Looking round he called forth bandages, see-through cotton wraps that softly hugged the mental constructs that made up his world.
Most questions put to him at work were embarrassing and turble (crassly terrible). They crept along, nocturnal, gave no pause for those who barely moved. One thing was certain in this nation of these mouths and motors — any who examined light were noble. They would rest easy from capitulance.
In conversation he tried to guess what the other person wanted, why, and gave it to them. Nothing ceases talking like a promise newly made. The listener will stop, first befuddled, and then quickly brightening. Esteem went to the speaker. A hunched and greying mania is searching for a feast. What was lost will be unknown to it.
Conscious beans left early over stains on pulp. They were hampered, defensive as to why. They wanted passion to ignite — then they could feel whole. VR will take over when it can simulate the consciousness of a berserker. The current, on-going extinction of plants and animals will reach its zenith when VR achieves immersion. There will still be craftsmen, hikers, poverty — but given the choice to become a Visigoth for an eve, they will set their lives aside for that. Caesar was no hero — his actions wrecked a fine democracy — which is precisely what a plumber wants to feel. The end will be abrupt and full of pleasure. Times will quiver with a wrench and snake through our desire.
Our heroine felt lighter having left him — she was in pain, her heart was broken too, but the undercurrent was of calm, so she knew that this was best, and best for him, because she loved him, and he did not deserve a partner who wasn’t there for him completely — things we’ve heard before. Beauty itself could never be exhausted. Tears came to his eyes. She told him, somewhat coolly with a hint of irritation, Don’t cry. Then what am I supposed to do? he thought. It was as though he accepted the finality before his heart did, because he tried to speak and found he was unable. She observed his epiphany. The old her would have hugged him, but the truth was settled equally on both. She acted first, that’s all. Where once she’d felt a touch of mothering when he acted weak, now it was repulsive, below thought. She repeated that she had to go. His face went plaintive, searching. She saw he was more open in this instant than he’d ever shown her, even during love making, or full-body holding themselves after, or sharing all their secret inner hearts after wine on honeymoons, when they’d found each other, and first love was magical and light. She realized there was more to him, when she’d thought she knew his all, and so their love, up to a point, had been an act. (In fact it was a drive.) He was similarly thunderstruck as the speech she chose revealed another part of her that he had never seen. Her resolve confronted all his pleading, made him wonder who she really was, as the button-pushing that had worked before were now unpressable, against her steely brow. He saw his every word, his being at her door, had given rise to feelings in her that he’d never caused before. It compounded his panic. She saw he’d gone irrational, would soon be sealing narghiles with his lips. Her sense of her protective self bucked, now that he was past predictability. She had a friend whose man had said I love you with a slap. Her sight of him diminished. Now he wasn’t singular, now he was all men. She said she had to go, again, and made to close the door. The porch light seemed to flicker. He shifted his weight in swaying invitation. His shoes were clumped with clay mud. Wet, staining chunks were falling off them on her parents’ welcome mat. His odor was abysmal, mainly from his mouth, the kind that whips a head around and scrunches up a face. One eye was disgorged, lolling on its optic nerve, its revealed cavity all red and pulsing. When he smiled hopefully, his four front teeth were out. He raised his palms, outstretched — she saw that they were webbed. Certain fingers stopped at the first knuckle. His thinning hair was pulled back in a greasy ponytail, held by a thick blue band that said Hearts of Palm. The sweat under his fat rolls formed stripes on his wife beater. He wore sandals with black socks. He was pigeon-toed and scuffed his soles with every step. The only songs he listened to were horror rap and that was playing now. His nails were chewed, his scabs were picked and pink around their bleeding. His wispy facial hair blew in the wind he broke. His pores were stewed in fry gunk. No amount of first-class hospitality could ever make him whole. It was a good thing that driving was so automatic because when he left he could not see the road.
15.8
When bright her hand was his and every frigid morning was like wands of steam pressed in his bed clothes — they gave off warmth, crimped and strewn across their bodies — it was as though a fog machine was running in the room til the moment just before her eyelids parted, the bedroom was in haze at every dawn, dusted with the smoke of Sisley. To them it seemed not lit by glass but by her at her fullest, when her pallor became beams that cast sharp tree-like shadows in suddenly a too-near glade, and sound is burbling — in a charcoal patch just there where steam condenses to a liquid trickle, and it takes its color from the evening and its volume from the lady frogs who answer fellas’ screech. They calm the fellas’ throats restoring quiet to the land. Their cool and bumpless skin makes frictionless their act, as toes like sucker pads find leverage on the bark. Their ending is a gasp and squeal unsettlingly like man.
Their course will wander them away with fitful sneezing unto planes where the predators are hunting. One of them on growing old was eaten by a beak in stabbing pecks, then regurgitated as a stomach-acid soup into the beaks of nestlings. But on this day they had been fertile, and cousins of one frog’s future murderer were snuggled up together, faces buried in their wings, twitching at each twig that snapped below. Everything that stood outside the angle of the tree was lit in pearly glow, its color skewed to cornflower, the setting amplified one’s step, one’s breath was audible, not once had trembled, by the brushing of his fingertips, she giggled at the goosebumps that he raised but she was full of languor, giving off excitement, her eyes were steady on him, she said it with her smile, and in her the feeling was the hollowness inside her and her want to have it filled — she felt the toto otherwise — but this embrace with the fella she had chosen gave rise to it again, she pulled him close, a bit insistent with the nails, which told him to remind her in the middle of her pleasure, and yea the headboard creaked and scraped the drywall like a cat, the perspiring did collect in navel puddles, and he woke up the complex of another — she showed him that the way he saw the world was incomplete, not through wisdom and experience but through her guileless unrestrained demeanor, and her tits. So much of his day gazing at himself, seeing himself from the birds-eye view, up and to the left, but now with her he was behind his eyes, there where lived the other. Their place was unbereft — would that it were eternal. Their ceiling disappeared to show a peck of atmosphere that went up past one hundred miles, and it was all for them, this piece — nothing could detonate from one mile up and send them back to atoms — it could not set back eon’s clock nor halt them from their worth, what they deserved — it could not block the sun nor kill the crops — it could not foul their water. This peck of sky dimensioned by their bedroom walls existed in a super-state that they created. Gerber daisies were her pillow, and Queen Anne’s lace her bedding. If liberty love takes away, new liberty arises in its stead.
15.9
Many youths brought flowers to her when she was alone. Today they pursue others — they fold their wings in hypnotizing shapes — it will not work a hundred times until it does — if they get to practice more than once they’ll cast off others’ judgments, and hop from one to one until it works — and find gaily that they were not too exhausted to perform for the one who finally will have them. Her freedom was a coupling in less performative, less pugnacious lands.
Our hero took the target from her brow and fiercely guarded it. He placed it in a safe and only took it out when stress was overwhelming. Love is to be secretly delighted, with the lads, that a woman is demanding things of him that he then can fulfill. Where once they said their love had duty mystical, now they couched it in a lathe, that turned by a machine — the faster that it turned, the more its consequence was unintended. The bottom of man’s mind is where reason goes to tend its garden. Lovers live there for a peace. Then they are ejected, are absorbed.
The countenance of the tan and waving NE grass relaxed her eyes — the edges of her mouth curled up — he wondered what had caused such change — he asked — she answered vaguely, and was confident in aphorism — he who wins is more adept at letting extra matters lie — it goes onto the parchment with what might be ignored without instant repercussion — as everything ignored will repercuss in time.
He saw in her a flame he could rely on, such was its breadth of fuel, and all the labors that he made at furniture’s creation called her for the final stain and she was in its favor — then he saw her like unto his liege — she wore the crown surpassing well — they were unbalanced by its power — and others were attracted to its ornament. He went into the woods. He took his knife and carved the letters of her name upon a thin-barked tree — the sap did run and fill them in — then children’s climbing scraped them off, and found the frogs and squished them. The children grew up into middlemen, longing for a novelty, going mad for locomotion, screaming in demand to see a brand new color, a new shade of cerulean-vermilion, just that if nothing meaningful, just that if nothing more. One slightly nouveau color would occupy their fantasies for long, well past their span of life.
Nature holds us over rocky crags — it is used to us and we are used to sub-dividing — p’raps we give it something new to see, on cave walls, on our faces, within these hundred miles of atmosphere — the ocean’s just beginning to imbibe — to forget who caused its degradation — we didn’t need a map and inventory of a thing, we can go ahead and wreck it.
Heavy clouds were butting one another til they were wrung out — she was touching him and they were pressed together — other leaves were bunched and twining all around — they rubbed together, were in ecstasy — and all the bugs arrived and crawled on them — stitching homes between their stems or chewing them for paste — they marked off every item on their colony’s instructions, on the self-same initial-carven tree — how it labored making sap but was sapped of treeling energy — the roots were harried keeping up — valiant in the vacuuming — so good at it were they that the forest floor went dry, cracking their foundation. Yet leaves were rubbing in a clump, and sought to rub some more, just on a particular — that is, where the feeling lies — past every rock they overturned and all the rain that sickened tongues held out to it — the stuff of life-span ‘ternity.
The meanness of the revelation, and all such happenstance, all pushed through soil to reach the air, then sprang to life, each with its lookout point, another view of the same land — essentially the same. Herbs for tubers and for meat had found the right conditions there — they brought aroma to the shade in which they flourished, growing full — in summer there were mangoes ripe and sweet, heavy in their purple heart and verdigris, and a little stringy in the teeth — and acerola buds turned red, were sharply tangy on the lips — while graviola hung from trees, its outside spiky lumps, and tried to spear a living thing once its stem gives up. Others, limes and clementines, pomegranate and caju, all fat when they’re in season, grew in such abundance they could sate four thousand families, when he would have just one.
It used to rain in torrents in the winter time, but the vast rainforest to the north is not so vast today — its southern border used to be entire countries closer to the town — the moisture has retreated with incessant slash and burn — there is less to whip up to make storms and farther they must travel over ceaseless cattle land — it does its best but peters out, over France-sized deforestation, before it replenishes the town. The herbs and fruit stand in their blocks — they sprout maniacally as soon as they get wet — they are conditioned for a drought, as is his love. And all the paintings framed on walls outside the home surrounding become teflon in the rain and run onto forget-me-nots and turn them cafe shades.
Such is expectation in the fuzzy waking moments on a cushion, foam, and spring. All the dim delights have crested and are spilling down into the mass that will erase them. They cannot hope to tell their friends the feeling that it gave, to leave the spray in single drops, in breath that anyone might breathe, to have a shape to call one’s own, rounded with a little point, surpassed, to keep it taut for ages, to deflect the fuller drops so to not absorb them — then perfect can the moments be before the surface’d breached, and took their form and spread them out in ripples from a point, that traveled far across the globe til pieces of them met in every sundry sea.
The stubbornness of holding — honoring a memory imbues it with import. And now that they are confident, if shaken and alone — they can ponder how to keep their lot alive and window-ready — to ask of them much more. Those with her possess treasures unique to their seam, the stitch of life that anchors them in bean society — there is no step, no guarantee — columns are supporting them, as chaste as idle reverie. A clamor reels intoxicant, which spreads out from the hands, more than power there is will that takes a greater spark to make combustion, and throw their bodies in relief they’re capable and fair, and find each other bittersweet there’s others on our patch — we’re left in places we must share, it will not decompose — given all that life piles on, the parcels balanced on lapels and handles swinging from our limbs, it’s clear some parcels will be dropped going down the spiral stairs, and fall into the street — to pick them up would upset more that we would like to keep, so ribbons turn to detritus and graphics lose their sheen — yet the parcels hum within, combined they’re musical, split up they are visual — agreed upon vernaculars that tell us of our roots, accepted for the bliss that counteracts the metal barbs that pipe through innards’ longing — alleviating bores has been the pact with bland variety — and then for just a beat the firmament is wonder, the ocean safe to drink, the air is just a little cool, and grain grows plentif’ly.
The feels inside do gratify what cannot be forsaken, the very clawing we possess is quicker than decision, first we give our love our hearts and then we show our minds. We find out what they’ll allow in and what’s been banishèd, and should we prove incapable of solving want and need, the claws will flash out in a blink, and everything that bounces back can share a kiss with someone new — two meet and become intimate within the very day, and all the scattered warning signs are draped in finery — a tale acquires the spark of life when living it is told, and plans to flee are set aside when one is entertained with someone else’s organ. A penny for the well! A ducat for an eyesore! A whispered sweet that none shall tell. It hangs together, can’t she see? It doesn’t hang together, is he blind? Friends they share beseech them not try again, to not go down that road, to make the choice that takes away a little of their pain — but there is the thing to see that goes on past its edge — at last we are attentive! Like tourism peeps we shake our heads and hold up empty palms, but in this culture shoulder shrugs are complex insults and one palm is seen as filthy cause it wipes — existence is a thicket and we’re pricked at every turn — we smoke for want of being pricked — we beg a room of strangers for their love, filled up inside until the clapping ends — the sick will try to separate us — the laughs will go on through closed doors.