The Texaco bitches tore me out of my heart, I tell you. There isn’t even the sweetest ancient word that can suffer me the proper expression of this loneliness that eclipses me by the infinite desertion of my world. I suppose a man is made of certain things, certain things that that man can give, well, he can give his things to whoever he damn well pleases. But that’s what a man is, don’t be mistaken. Borrowed goods. Give those burdens to the latest stranger, or the proximate fix for a good life, the latest dream—a man is likely to do that. What I did, to that ferocious time, to those ferocious kids, is I gave it all, all of me, all that I had to give, to the breathing incarnations of The Waste, and I realize my folly only now, a broken man, on my knees, shuddering at all he has lost.Let a man live in the river long enough and he’ll regrow a tail. Let a man clamber upon rocks long enough and he’ll grow hooves. Let a man tear at the flesh of a corpse long enough and he’ll grow fangs. The man of today begets the monster of tomorrow. While we open ourselves up to a mountain, and offer all of us up to the sky, to beget the awesome angels of tomorrow, we must take to leaping. Where we fail, genetics will pick up the ragged remains from the bloody floor below. The tale gets told, via some remote report, like a prayer in progress, or inward chant, resounding “please make me better, next time.”
Regrowth, maybe? An isolated beam of something entering the chambers, the placid face of something I had never considered—discovering me again, and my fortress, locked, my bitterness—pithy! What, removed from the massive fiasco, could there possibly be that I was holding desperately like a baby suckling the nipple, drinking deeply to the blue nectar of red truth, and my mouth forgot to meet my mind, my full belly forgot to tell my soul? Have I forgotten my self? Can I encounter the forms of a thousand towering gods, each bowing to me with their hands stretched out to the dancing butterflies and scrubby cactus in the overgrowth, and can I not even see it the whole dance through? Shame! It’s a lonely parentheses, that (I remember the names, I remember the face)! A hand is outstretched, it is most certainly outstretched, crossing over damaged energy fields, I am held, holding, and I am almost into the new day.
My presence here must be disturbing the air, the magnetism – even the farthest tree can tell I’ve arrived, and so I pass in the spirit of a ship, smoothly swathing through. Every upturned pebble is counted, branches swipe at my shirt. Oh, but if the new day would hasten to rise, wherefore to see the perils of this passage. I nod my head in respect, I marvel at the constancy of water moving down (always, always), & I climb up the face of old dust. Somehow, I am allowed to rise, and do this in the night as capably as if done in day. Nature permits this? Aye, a little, but it’s mostly just youth. The tendons of my heels account and debit the proper price. It’s a summit well spent – a foreign exercise – to let the soul blindly lead itself, up a cliff just as blind-folded across an avenue. It takes me on, a fledgling young insect (when you stop in these hills at the high tide of the day, a thousand desert beetles dance around your body). I know sometimes all I can think about is the vigorous shaking tendency I have to remember long strands of past, of the practice I’ve accidentally earned in constantly considering what will be, and I bounce back and forth in the air with my beetle wings. But it is a long hallway, built of fantasy strands, and if the seat of space within my mind can settle a second, I can step into the frame center without the feel of force or folly—a thousand birds will return to their nests, my grandfather will fall in love again, a million reviving souls will step out of their apartments and at once discover, the Texaco twins, damn their devilry, will start to laugh with my godfather. Dogs and children and even the horrid forms of pain and doom will smile to me from their place, at once, at once, at once. Permit me a thousand opportunities! There is so much space on the ground of this brown town, there are so many flights in the endless empty sky—give me a million grasps—teach me, touch me, perform me my very same miracle, and in my small space, my insect eyes will shut the parted grace of its pain, my breath birth will take my humble heart to the hearth reservoir of the obliterated me—oh, I will see, I will see, I will see!
You really think the world will end tomorrow, I asks without looking ups, and you says in the way you always says, yeap, I know these things. And then you asks me in the way you always asks me, did you bring what I asked you to bring. I reach into my coat and retrieve two vials of a purple liquid that glows white in the semi-brilliancy of a half-moon, and you nods your head contentedly. We continue on our way, your head steadied straight on your shoulders, and your eyes sweeping for some safe passage, while I oscillate my chin from side-to-side, hearing a thousand unfortunate opportunities disturbing the brush. An invented vision of a wolf-woman, a witch maybe, moans ‘round the bend, giving birth to something at once both beautiful and horrible. We pass over the spot, nonchalantly striding over any patch of dirt. What is it this stuff is suppose to do, I calls ahead to you, and you say, without looking back, it’s like a dragon. I imagine what the dragon may look like for a second, I imagine a wyrm crawling in the darkness, and screaming underground. I shake away the image and says, no, I think maybe it’s more like a snake, lying among the cool soil of a dry river-bed at night beneath a cactus. And you say back, yeah, maybe suppose it is. But, dragon or snake, it wouldn’t matter much either way because, in truth, the liquid is more like a cloud colliding with a mountain, a whisper lost upon mention.
reined in by Naidrawdef and OJ Y-Doc
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