the ballad of st. paul

I am about to be in the dark writing, wrists writhing.  I am about to dream of park benches covered in snow.  I am about to dream of pine trees swathed in sunbeams.  Unlike the tepid seas that foamily, lazily, lap at your tanned ankles, my own cold lakes sever Achilles tendons like spoons through kitchen-counter margarine.  Buckling over.  Proselytizing futures.  Coughing.               

He was a real jocular kind of fellow, that Saint Paul, with his piano and his peanuts and his blond beers.  This one is to you, my good friend.  Your arms must have been so hairy and the beard's greatness goes without saying.  And if the movies have taught me anything, it is that everything was lashed with those itchy rope-belts and shit.    

I remember humble headstones and entire basket-loaves of Wonderbread and everyone being some cousin of someone else, nth-detached.  Comb-overs and crow's feet.  The Patron of the Broad Clouds whistles like a songbird then eats a single pretzel from a plastic bowl that is supposed to look as if it's made of wood.  Like the archaic weight of an ancient VCR or the long panels bisecting the sky blue of a decades-gone American station wagon.      
  

       

flashcard

Everything itches, everything.  A calamine lotion ocean, pink as a labial sunset, could not even dulcify this scaliness.  He is a small business owner (let's be honest: a partner), of course he is out cavorting in the linear modernity of an upscale establishment.  Mojito glasses clink and wink at each other.  They are in over their heads.  Mint leaves swirling and plastering to the interior of the sweaty cylinders and he thinks of the old avocado wallpaper in the house where he grew up.  Today, he wishes he could become even more obdurate to the advancement of everyone's zeal.  However, just because he has dry skin doesn't mean he is a snake.

"It's, like, the worst time right now to upgrade your units."

"Well, the weatherman said there was going to be a sixty percent chance of rain tonight."

A dissonance in the scratching of heads that engenders an even deeper cacophonous lacing of the metaphorically mental shoelaces.  Tomorrow morning he will hear his shower running while he still lays, sweaty and prickly, in his three-week unwashed sheets.  Christmas lights with small, but boldly colored, paper globes (like a dozen eyes) act as crown molding and doorjambs, ambient gateways to other worlds.

She produces a handful of matchbooks from her purse.  She narrows in on one of them in particular.  A conglomerate of numbers more than letters.  

"I have something I want you to look at," the look of remembrance still twirling in her eyes.    

She holds the matchbook a pinky-length (the average sized pinky) from his nosebridge.

"Can you read this phone number for me?" she eats her left lipcorner in a rapt fear.

He unlatches his hand from the tall drink and aims his fingers for the rectangular shape.  Water-beads recede southward down the glass.

"No, no," she is defiant but amply playful, "look at it from where it is."

He squints his eyes and plucks at his chin scruff like he is picking up dry elbow macaroni noodles that spilled from a kitchen counter, one by one.  He smiles that smile that most would call a smirk, the smile's rough-edged, Old Crow-swilling uncle.

"I am very happy with this," he responds, deepening the irony, "Okay.  1-2-3...4-5-6-7.  Is this some kind of joke?  That's not a real phone number."

"So, that's what you see, too, eh?" she quickly buries the matchbook into the cavernous folds of her purse once more.

"Where did you get that?"

"I found it."

The Puerto Rican rum has fully embraced the raw sugar coating the back of his throat and has sent him somersaulting into a visible torpor.

"Where?"

"On the train last night.  The Q line"

It all seems so heavy.  And he realizes he hasn't raked at his dessicated arms, his parched neck, or his arid soul with those clawed, oily hands of his since the tiny enigma arose like a patch of rosemary in a crack on a twelfth-story fire escape.

 
 

quality not quantity

While waiting for the slow connections to seek completion and finality like we all do, I see a pile of staples, amidst the periphery of my myopic assaults on a damp newspaper, I see a pile of staples and I think that they are a bunch of insects, folded and doubled (at times, tripled) over.  They move hastily towards me now, forcing me to retract my desk-laden elbow, first, then re-examine my entire catalog of perception, secondly. 

While waiting for her to come home, I hear the metallic cogs of my my pet lion's robotic brain shift into a higher level of thinking.  He must be stalking something (it is not me) again.  The gears crank louder (whenever I can hear them from here it is serious churning) and longer from his vast pen in the next "room."  I quotate that word, room, because why, because it is the opposite of course.  It is not really a room, at all, in which he lives.  It is more like an open-air pit adorned with glistening steel trees and iron vines.  Quality construction, it is.  But that is a story for another time.

While waiting for the water to boil, I smell--

"I am not a real magazine writer," Xyz blurts out, his squat body compressing further beneath the admission, "I just got lucky."

Xyz scratches at his black stubble and cuts a jig with his jaw, jutting the bottom out like a cash register drawer.  No sale.  Someone, an old neighbor we'll say, once said that if Xyz sneezed (not sneered, don't misread, even though Xyz has that as a major hobby, sneering) he'd grow a beard.  Funny.  I also like to imagine a PlayDoh Fun Factory, where you put the neon wad in that plastic garlic-press/torture-device looking clamp and squeeze through the thick stalks of soft clay.  Beard hairs the diameter of Bic ballpoints and the color of sunsets.  

"Well, I am not a quality friend," Abc responds, wrinkling his brow in that manner that he is able to make look so genuine, " so we are on the same page in many respects."

"Hopefully some long lost millionaire relative passes on tomorrow and my then my ship will really come in, boy howdy," Xyz feigns the ignorance of a local, "seriously, though, my rents are due tomorrow.  My rents!"

Abc's overbite snags his words out of the air: "I would take your job any day.  You poke your pen for Penthouse, man!"

Xyz shrugs, squints, sighs: "Yeah..."

While waiting for the water to boil, I smell.  Period.  I smell, I exist, I thrive.  That's quality.

   

allergens

I laughed through until the morning at the term "bed squirrels" because of the squeaking, sheet-rustling image it conjured.  Obviously.

And then I found myself thinking about the first person to ever sail in a boat.  Surely the initial discoverer of buoyancy saw some porous driftwood washed up in the sand and thus put together the proverbial two-and-two.  I sip from my macchiato.

The war-cries of the warriors tell us all that the floor is now open for debate.  Straighten your beret and make sure those boots are laced tightly.  Good morning.

The home of lofty pines and sleek storefronts.  Above the clouds because the mysterious forces tell us as much.  Steamy jungles and dry streets make me cough.  

alleycat scat

     Here are two somewhat related statements: 1) two Saturdays ago, I was in an alleycat-style bicycle race beneath lush gray clouds and 2) I always like to floss before a competition.
    But the shallow medicine cabinet had voided itself of the stuff some time ago. And my furious, beastly pawing through the half-dozen Dopp kits squirreled beneath the bathroom sink yielded nothing either. Perhaps the spools vanished in the move up here from Austin six months ago. Regardless, dear reader, this lack of jaw-twine should not be read into as a foreshadowed omen, a symbolic indication of my resulting standing. Granted, it is certainly easy for someone who placed second to last (as I sure as hell did) to extol some grand, sweeping rhetoric on the detriments of contest as it is also tempting to sermonize on the ubiquitous turtle-and-hare, slow-and-steady notion.
    However, the meandering trail I inefficiently blazed through the coarse corners of Fort Worth proved the most efficient way to show myself to the Town of Cow. Anyways, I hate the way that used floss sits coiled in the bathroom trashcan like some thin snake, waiting to strike.   
________________

    It is half past two, roughly, and I am the first one to hit the pulsating intersection.  There are twenty-one of us that shot out from Trinity Bicycles like taut rubberbands.  Our light is red and I am going to run it, that’s for sure, but it is all about getting the right timing.  Timing and weaving and totally like that classic game, Frogger.  Nicky bullets past me, pointing his fat-wheeled monster straight through the intersection and I follow him out.  Someone bellows hoarsely: “watch the cars!”  No shit.  We snag our manifests (the ride will be like a kind of scavenger hunt, we learn) from some forgotten and muddy dead-end that butts up against the base of the Lancaster bridge.      
    The next thing I know, I am riding in these city-blocked sized circles, herding skyscraper shadows.  I am trying to get around the Courthouse and it is ugly.  My Xeroxed maps look the same no matter which way I turn them.  Nothing adds up in the numbers of streets.  On the north side of the Courthouse, where Main’s asphalt waterfall cascades sharply down across the river, I slalom orange construction cylinders, my legs in a fiery sprint.             
    The first stop is around North Main and 21st, to an indiscriminant box full of cartons of eggs.  It is almost easy to miss, sitting as it does aside some industrial monolith that smells, ironically, like bad eggs.  The task: to make it back to the shop (after hitting all of the other checkpoints, of course), without breaking the egg.  Cute.  I gingerly roll mine into my bike bottle, where it is cushioned by the few remaining ounces of tepid water.  Probably the only good idea I will have all day.
    The pack has split: Keith is long gone, his shoulder-length hair flailing like the ribbons lashed to the box fans of an electronics store display (he will place 12th).  Ele is the lone female racer and I will not see her again until the finish (she will place 14th).  Nate powers ahead, pumping his calves that look exactly like Popeye’s forearms (he will take a respectable 2nd).  Somewhere along the way, I meet up with Abe.  Abe rides a nobby-wheeled mountain bike that makes his legs bow.  Abe resembles Santa with a shortened beard or a de-hatted garden gnome.  Take your pick.  He has all the quintessentially jovial mandates: red cheeks, glowing eyes, a warm smile.  And it looks like he has a fifteen pound bowling ball tucked beneath his baby-blue Trinity Bicycles jersey.  I’d seen him at back at the shop but hadn’t the opportunity to exchange pleasantries.    
    We roll in together to the back patio at the Flying Saucer to chug our free beer, as dictated in the manifest‘s rules.  A few other riders are already there (or have already there’d and gone); O’Brien shows up, like an out-of-breath Olympian (he will come in 4th).  The icy can of Brooklyn Lager is delicious and the air is smoky.  The place is packed with meatheads and I am thoroughly confused at the servers’ slutty Scottish get-ups; they prance from crowded table to crowded table, the pleats on their tartaned ta-tas fluttering like warbler wings.  I crush the can beneath the sole of my shoe and we leave. 
    It is now unofficially official.  Abe is my guide, my co-pilot.  We have both seemingly long abandoned the racing mentality of the ride anyhow, we had to.  We exchange formalities and discuss the plan of attack, as it were, for the remaining locations.
    “I’ve been here since 1982,” he tells me.
    So, what we lack in sheer speed we will make up for in precision.  Ideally.  
 _______________

    We are deep into Samuels Avenue, well past the brick canyon of shimmering new condos.  The checkpoint lumbers ahead like a decadently ornate Tim Burton set-piece: a late nineteenth-century mansion with a turret that tapers into an enormous Victorian nipple.       
    “That is probably one of the oldest houses in Fort Worth,” Abe huffs. 
    I scrawl down the required information (a real estate agent’s name from an askewed sign), noticing the bronze Texas Historical Landmark plaque before we double back.  In its day, this place used to really be something.   
    Suddenly, from the starboard side comes a fervent cry:  “I love you.” 
    A heavy-set girl runs toward us down a driveway littered with detritus: naked, asexual dolls; an entire tree’s worth of branches; a flattened, oil-stained box.  Her curly bangs drape low over her forehead, hinging her head back like a Pez dispenser in order to see.  She seems mentally disabled and is flapping her hands fanatically. 
    Another vigorous wave after we pass: “Hi, I love you, hi.” 
    I turn back because I have this strange sensation she would be trailing us like a small, untethered dog (which has actually happened to me in similarly dilapidated neighborhoods).  But she just stands there, motionless now, watching, diminishing my presumptuous arrogance. 
    Then she becomes a shrinking speck on the cracked sidewalk where tufts of grass grow in the fissures like wispy hairs on a geriatric‘s temples.    
______________   

    Over to Oakhurst, past gurgling Chevron plants, vast recycling centers, a police impound lot.  Everything is aligned for the proper post-apocalyptic aesthetic: dead weed stalks beat against a rusty propane tank; a humanless wind waving newspaper shreds entwined in a chain-link fence.  We ride parallel to some creek offshoot, which, to employ the verb ‘littered’ to describe the number of discarded truck tires, would be a grave misnomer for this stream was dammed with the things.  Damned.  Our clue: what year was Oakhurst the Neighborhood of the Year?  2006, according to the street sign.  Neighborhood of the year: the irony is glaringly inescapable.  I guess a lot can change in five years. 
    On to the last checkpoint.  It is one of the triplet of roundabouts that dot the map, like eyes, in the warehouse district due west of the toppled V that is the White Settlement/Henderson intersection.  We take the trail system into a brutal headwind and overshoot our target by several blocks which, by the order of the day has become common operating procedure for me.  The manifest says there will be free water bottles (we had to return with one as proof of our visit) but instead there is nothing.  Stolen, is our guess.  Me and Abe shrug and head back to the shop (we will take 16th and 17th places, respectively; we are the final two because four other riders dropped and went home).  It is a quarter to six and I estimate, after all said and done, we will have gone close to thirty miles.  We pick a prize from long card table to go with our new spoke card trophies.  I snag a decent light set, which is great, because I had not brought my other one from home.  I did not expect to be out until the sun went down. 
______________

     Two final items: 1) the Montgomery Plaza Super Target had a special on Glide floss and 2) I topped my bike tires off with air. Next time I race in something like this (the Trinity Bicycles anniversary alleycat?) at least this time I will lose without the stigma of halitosis.

i have returned to the path because of her

Like with most things, her face curved into expressions of curiosity.  I, on the other hand, wanted to just completely disappear.  I kept wanting to vanish, vanish like fog through a pair of fishnet stockings draped on a clothesline in an empty field.  And there was no woodpecker outside our window this morning.  The pounding beak had instead been replaced with the heavy drone of sunshine to earth.  If I couldn’t let my body disintegrate into the air I could at least allow my mind to spread like dandelion fuzz into a spring breeze.  

So then, somewhere in fields of blue flowers, glass-winged insects danced while on a train station platform, stamps blew like leaves among the loafers and high-heels of those waiting for the scheduled nectar to arrive.  And in an outdoor pavilion somewhere, the sun foisted its countless, bright rapiers upon the succulent capsules of potted jade plants, like dry palms and dry fingers over hot halogen bulbs, a backlit burn, an eerie flesh-light.

That night I would have dreamt of a calendar without dates, a clock without numbers.  I could have dreamt of pay phone receivers dangling and swinging like rosaries clutched between the gnarled hands of the elderly penitent.  I might have dreamt of Moroccan mint tea drank within the false confines of wall-less houses.  I wanted to dream entire worlds viewed through such pinhole lenses.  No apex pointing towards heaven like our favorite monolith which has yet to be hewn from the face of the treeless mountain.  No flocks of black birds that looked instead like a school of sea creatures, moving as one, stretching out and snapping back like a rubberband, an organized chaos, moving more like smoke, maybe, or like free-tailed bats than birds.

scutum

The water streams down their

transparent shower curtain to the subway tile:

                a kind of miniature Pont du Gard. 

She puts the pillow defensively

between her legs

when they face each other on the couch,

it reminds him of

ancient Roman warfare tactics:

                the shielding of verbal arrows. 

The divisive borders

she creates with in distances:

                as impenetrable as no less than eight of Hadrian's Walls,

                layered vertically into brisknorthern dampness. 

It is this grand, this decadent.

               

—My parents are snowbirds.  Whenever they travel to Phoenix, they each take a set of funeral clothes, he says.

—What do you mean by funeral clothes, she says.

—Black clothes, you know, in case someone dies while they are spending the winter down there and they have to travel to a funeral.  Usually, they just wear shorts and leather sandals all day, he says.

               

She nods.  

Behind the hearth,

the planks crackle and cackle beneath

the numbered tridents of flame.  

She squints into the heat, 

prodding the ragged beams with the antique poker, 

its handle spewing curlicues of a primeval simplicity.  

Then a rustle of shifting sparks as she spears

the porous ballasts; the spongy, carpenter-ant-eaten posts

buckle and tumble into the dripping maw of fire.  

Everything is V-shaped as it collapses into itself.  

A miniaturized disaster

that is all

angular and tepid.
               

Before the fire, on a square plate,

he traces a trapezoid of flatbread

through a slough of olive oil.  

Carving some sort of illegible numeral into

the saffron-tinted glue,

he averts his eyes away from the blackened grate.  It reminds him too much of the

ethereal existence he Elysiumed through before she arrived,

trails unblazed.

—Look at this, she says.

Her palm spreads before his face,

four valleys of suede webbing

between

five embers of velvet.

He refocuses and he looks.

The poker handle has tattooed its cursive curves into her hand,

adjoining smooth linearities of innate palm-grooves. 

Etching a new design, a new blueprint for

back-alley future-readers to hunch about, baffled,

into the enormity of her infinite possibility. 

She traces the lines before they disappear.

She widens her eyes like two watch faces,

like a pair of undone camera lenses

and her mouth opens into a half-dollar sized hole.  

He quickly cylinders the flatbread shard and,

with her splayed palm still before his face,

shoves it into the hoop

formed by her fireborn lips.

The Dorian columns of air around their heads begin to crumble

and he remembers broad waters

the color of unkilned terra cotta.  

Mountains rising in skewed depths of field.  

A brown horse nipping the flank of a white one.  

Everything covered in dog hair.  

New batteries.  

Croutons.

Unexpectedly deep voices.  

Industrial fan blades of buffed steel.  

Underrated establishments.  

Pebbles.

Conversations skirting the real questions because they lack the real answers.  

Those soft Japanese pines.

Ten miles of hostile potholes.  

Her face on his phone.  

Backhoes.  

Sunpatches on saguaros. 

Lackluster performances from groundbreaking gadgets.  

El Nino’s sideways rain.  

Palmetto shreds.  

Subpar muralists piggybacking Ming Dynasty finery at a museum.  

Headlines read aloud from across rooms.  

Impossible climbs.  

An irritable longing pacified like a Germanic tribe.