squaring off

The word 'cull' looks and sounds pleasing to me.  But it connotes something nefarious when the word appears in a discussion about wildlife or livestock.  Nothing more.  I return from a six-month hiatus.  But I never went anywhere.  'Sabbatical.'  That word harbors more selective emotions.  I do not particularly enjoy the way it looks but the sound of it intrigues me well enough.  But, after all, it means nothing, to me, in its irrelevance with my own life.  I recall things, in bed.  But I leave the bed and the things leave too.  Or they stay there.  I am quite unsure of which.  One should not talk that way.  It is not a feasible pronoun.  No, I meant to say 'palpable.'  Odd, though in a manner of some peripheral interest.  That feels right there.  Four clicks upon the digitized odometer.  Carries itself out in a single motion.  Fascinating, the lack of ocular immediacy.  That, however, feels incorrect.  Direly distasteful.  Do not equate this to the re-reading of something else.  We are not related.  A simple image escapes me.  Just coming up with a basic human representation.  A symbolic gesture.  But even that is too much.  I desire something even more essential.  Teeth snapped like fireworks.  Only less like rubberbands.  Taxidermied things impress and repel me.  Or impress me in their ability to deter.  Or disgust me in their awe.  I do not know.  Just like I do not know why I fail to employ a contraction.  A contradiction.  We paradoxicate the air under the circus-like tent of pretense.  That fits.  But it is still like putting socks on a chicken.  A paramount expression.  Lights and petroleum jelly.  A rattlesnake bite kit in a giant silicone pill.  Guidebooks inherited decades too late.  Indian Paintbrushes.  I thought these things.  I conjured these unstories.  The fish, they swim.  The elk, they flee.  Why do these sparrows cheep at two in the morning?  Noises typically frighten me and certainly at this hour.

last field

            “They hunted pronghorn antelope by attaching something shiny to a post in the ground,” my father said, “and then they would go hide behind a rock and wait with their bows.”

            He sipped from his longneck of Coors, gripping the tapered mouth between thumb and forefinger.  I did not know which Native American tribe ‘they’ referred to, exactly.  I had stopped listening just prior to the part about these peculiar stalking methods: the goading uses of light-catching mirrors and minerals.  Even gaunt, spindly quadrupeds could not escape the shimmering allure of fate, apparently.  Just the words, the simulation of it, had ensnared me.    

Before my father’s historical flourish—how had the conversation even regressed to this?—I’d been unable to avert my eyes from the squeaky full-court presses and lofty three-point arcs that played themselves out on the bar’s staggering flat screen.  But now, I stared at my father, pulling from my own bottle.  The age spots on his forehead dotted like a significant constellation and his hair appeared thinner than just yesterday.    

“Pronghorns,” was all I could toss back to him. 

My mind flew.  I tried to imagine feathers and arrowheads, plain winds and small pebbles in the bases of grass strands.  Except I only saw beaded loincloths, black braids, and clear inaccuracies.  This was too hard.  We all just seek horizontalness, a quiet singularity.  My father and I drank from our Coors bottles, nearly in unison.  Nearly. 

            I looked back to the massive television.  Kobe missed a free throw (it hit the front of the rim and bulleted right back to him) and the crowd around us rumbled loud enough to mute the game announcer.  I swiveled to the passing waitress and ordered another beer.  By the time I’d pivoted back to the giant screen, there was a close-up of Kobe, gnawing on the top of his jersey, that Laker-yellow illuminating the faces in the darkened booths like a searing quasar in the cold bodies of space.     

                 

allegedly, things appear exactly as they appear; or, the addition of a trite oppositional qualifier

I had just finished urinating and felt again for that urge and there it crept, like a phobia of something insubstantial, something so terribly vague it could not articulated.  But as are all things.

Welcome to Colorful Colorado, it exclaimed in its rustic but inviting demeanor.  Things took on the form of the living elements of this world.  And there it was again, waves of the feeling, crawling like scorpions, translucent and deadly, through the numbered gaps in the mesh netting.  Spirals of glass, forged through lightening-speared sands, tumbling down through the libraries and catalogs of communal recollections.  Did he really exist, he wonders, tugging at the door while tugging at his cigar.  Teeth and lips and tongues and gums gunning towards the noises of the knocking.  Chains lashed accordingly, removed and reeled.

The wiry alphabets scrawled behind everything and try their best to remain undiscovered.  So far, things run fairly smooth.  She will call soon and those particles will cement in my ear drum, quick-dry through membranes where they will set.  Future tenses.

"We already have one of those," he squints, teeth squirt.

"I am leaving in the summer, then," she responds.

So it came to pass, as they say.  It did not do so with a sense of sharpness, however.  Too soft.  Edges frayed like a used stick of butter, left out for gouging and gorging.

"God, I wish I had something to smoke," his head shakes too slowly for the banality to not be apparent.  In all of it.  Airtight.

Well, you don't she thinks.  Up the hill and beyond the loggers work at their destruction, now adapted to a mode of silence never before seen in the natural world.  A quiet destruction, a beyond-quiet destruction.  Something unheard of, in all senses of that phrase.  He laughs to himself with that one.

The most grating sounds erupted then.  Triads of a cacophonous wonderment; it had to be.  There were no bones about it.  Bones, gray like grease on a white wall that has tried to be cleaned repeatedly.  Notifications coming from all angles.  And that word loses more of its diction each day, its pronunciation rendered lax like the lips of the infirm.  The ones who smell their own impending deaths.  She laughs to herself with that one.    

Targeted, slated.  Horns squeal.  Time to ramble: nothing has ever made itself so clear as the water in the bowl replenishes itself like a Belgian fountain.

  



 

well it does now

I can recall the recent debate on whether the picture dealt with entering or exiting of the car.  Surely, I was on the losing end (and I cannot recollect which side I'd argued for).  Well, it exists now so it is a non-issue anyways.  In fact, it has been for a long time.

_____

She mistakenly bought the light olive oil last week and is still apologizing profusely for it.  A colossal blunder, she'd called it.  I pan-fry some perogies, using the oil for the first time, and she strokes my back.  Her fingers feel like hummingbird feathers through my jersey knit pullover.  A kitchen light flickers.  In the pan, the crescent shapes began to crackle and crisp.  I turn down the heat and she compares the oil's procurement to Seward's purchase of Alaska.  But that was only a contemporaneous folly, I respond, the decision was irrelevant by the turn of that century with the discovery of gold up there.  She acknowledges, first, my accurate parlance then, secondly, my wider notion that all decisions filter away through time's sieve.  Those are her exact words.  It is all about relativity and context.  Those are mine.  And when combined they make more sense than onion powder and paprika.  

tell me everything

i am still sick with disease-profit

nobody knows how much dwindles on the timer, so many numbers.  i shall soon feel better because of it, it hands on (the lines).  my stomach constructs cloud-noises, souring our sacred sky-fields.  my hands become wet, now, my feet rotating like grass stalks in a confused wind.

a perfect percentage sign, drawn in RED chalk, on a concrete wall

a toy block castle made of interlocking pieces, pieces that hurt when you step on them with the, in my case wide, fleshy part of your foot between your heel and the balls of your toes; a stack of old compact discs with dust and scratches sandwiched unto themselves; a nearly filled black journal with a binding that was recently repaired with shoe sole adhesive; a lens blurred; a desk corner that i told you to watch yourself on and that your thigh met with the most resistance possible even if that is an asinine hyperbole; a moonset that gives rise to a squeaky bedframe despite being boxspringless; a perfect percentage sign, drawn in RED chalk, on a concrete wall; an exact duplication of your smile from eighteen months and seven days ago; a hypoglycemic index of some nonsensical amount and pronunciation; a manila folder that has a tab full of annoying creases that look like hand lines (you will have two children); a switching of window treatments; a 60 mL plastic cup, plastic that smells like plastic; an overabundance of frayed fibers in our midst; a simple lack of simple patience; a teetering array of free vases donated by the defunct florist; a day-old everything bagel; a warmed forearm spot on the surface of a particle board desk.