20: What a Shame about Me

The heavy silver ball rolls up his spine

Rumbling

Picking up speed and mean

The gray loosens up

Ready to embrace the coming destruction

The end is blind

Skin gets the final solo

The silver ball makes no decision

It shakes a memory loose

It took a week to heal

And is propelled through the gray

Until it hits another cluster

The cold gritty wall at his back

Hot breath rushing out his nose

Waiting for Carl to give up

It's getting darker in his own head

And all sound is collapsing into pink

Standing in a stream

Water is not

One thing

But many snakes

Each with a slightly different coldness

The silver ball is the same

All over and to the core

There is a clear separation

Between the pole pushing up against his leg

And the leg giving up

What was a closed circuit is open

To the whole world

And the world to it

Communicating through pain

The silver ball

Does not loose speed

After a collision

Fifteen thousand pounds

Fifty four miles an hour

Feet off the ground

29: In Limbo

Ten years on and this country is clockwork. You know when to spit out "Yes Sir", when to susurrate "No Bitch". The rules don't change, but that don't mean that they can't be deflected, mutated, digested and shat out as Montelimar.

Just like the old men, you deal in real estate now, like Bobby Baltz or Lee Frost,

you're always on the lookout for soil with potential,

enclosed areas where each angle responds to the previous one,

places where one can stand and feel the rotation.

You are past the point (hell, can you even draw the point)

Where architecture can betray you,

So it knocks you off your game a bit to fall for the old round-the-corner trick.

Shit, shit, shit, Fuck.

It figures they would not disappear

Just because you stopped thinking about them

An awful long time ago.

Ten years of roads spiked with opportunities for contact.

Ten years they've been carrying your features on their own trajectories.

It occurs to you that they probably could not cut you out from the static. They may have the benefit of transportation, but transformation is beyond them. It must be. There has to be a reason you left. There better be. Four men are in the jelly aisle of a grocery store with one nose and one gait to split between them. You start to close the distance, and with every step you get closer to a new kind of comedy.

It's about twenty five paces to the trio

Just don't walk like a dolt at a wedding

Your path is butchered out of this world

You will splice it back after thirty paces

Close enough to tell Ted's asthma's no better

Eyes down they're looking for apricot

Aren't you glad you're strawberry tall

Rounding the aisle you stash the loaf

Bread can wait, the getaway's constant

On the wide open you keep it steady at 75

You make all the left turns they can't

You wish for another dime, at least

41: I Am Trying to Break Your Heart

Colin Mardsen sat in his study, ensconced in the red folds of his favorite chair, perplexed by this new novel. He was an educated man and the pejorative connotations of that word__bourgeois__ were not unfamiliar to him, but it had always been an insult without sting, a happy consequence. Outside of the imagination of a moralist author, does the werewolf curse the lunar power pulsating through bone and muscle? Certainly not. Yet there it is. The sting. But, along with the sting, a special sort of vindication. The ideas pushed and pulled at each other like the flavors in a complex Thai dish, and he could only digest so much at a time. There was an old envelope spotted at the bottom of an open drawer, covered in dust, he liberated it from the detritus of time and put it to work. The envelope moved at twenty page intervals, at thirty page intervals, at fifty. His makeshift bookmark served as concrete memory, a marker for how far his eyes and mind had travelled. In years to come, as he returned to the book, the envelope was always part of the ritual.

Family functions became a pain as soon as his sister found true love and a third husband. The man evinced at all time a wit and a bonhomie that made him almost irresistible. Almost. If only he had a sense of context, if only Mister Three showed an awareness of his place in the social constellation. Mardsen would rather spend time with an equal rather than that frustrating lump who occasionally passed him the rolls or the pepper. It had been so long since the family allowed him an accomplice to share a bon mot or an unorthodox opinion, and this one had such potential. It had to be done. Copies were so rare that it would have to be his own. One night, before leaving for Christmas dinner, he pulled the book from the shelf, removed the envelope (Mister Three would have to devise his own ritual), and wrapped it hastily in a tasteful holiday pattern. A small elegant package with hard corners to help the lump find definition.

The week before his son got shipped out he spent every evening alone in the study, crying. Each night, he attempted to find something small in volume yet significant in spirit that his boy could keep on his person at all times. He had silly, embarrassing dreams of his first edition "The Sun Also Rises" stopping a bullet. On the final night, disappointed by his library, he rummaged through his drawers. And then the compass. In his family for generations. Guiding Mardsens through three continents. Perfect. And under the compass his old bookmark, stripped of all talismanic powers and returned to messenger status. He read the name for the first time: Kadrey. The postdate was twenty years old.