Let me in, baby, I’m tired out here. I walked so far. I’m desperate for your love!
I found an open window and crawled inside —
My face suctioned to oozing particles in the dark, seeping grey languid memories chewing nostrils bristling with acrid-smelling flesh, pure inedible stain of memory, we nibbled at each other. I’m beginning to see you for what you always were, a nice boy whose whole life was spent avoiding potential scams. I knew you never had anything to do with any of this. I’m not so sure now that you even ever left your room. But now that you’re back there, amongst your things, it just seems so right.
You sweet sweet little pony-man. Why did I ever think I could keep you?
Birds and twigs scampered around on the wooden floorboards leaving scratches in the dust at my feet. Your blood had dried in tan crusty pleats all over your stomach, all marks your ex-girlfriends had made in an effort to get to your soul. I guess I never thought of you that way. Listen to my heart, you said, as I petted your forelock in a downward motion with the palm of my hand… The most tragic room in the world! No one would ever know.
Solid grey sheets of dusted cobwebs connect leaves and shoots. A thousand forest flies buzz their wings in the tall trees. The cats are in hunting mode today. Elsewhere the stolid hum of a dirt bike sneers off in the distance. All this, mingling with your fridge — that vibrating plastic trap — makes the whole place seem like it’s ready to blow. Any given slip of paper can only be folded in half exactly seven times. I read this once, but thought of it again this morning, not quite awake, but y’know not quite sleeping. And it’s true, I tried it over and over again and each time seven is the magic number.
Taste me as a way of being me. We hide inside our thoughts and wrack our brains trying to come up with something to say. There is nothing to say, this is it. That last bit was all that was left.
I got in bed next to you.
It’s all right.
The sky darkened on one of our last conversations. The one where he asked, “What’s important are feelings — do you have any?”
“Not really,” I replied, a little surprised there had been so little resistance on my part in letting that out of my mouth. “I’ll be your robot, c’mon.”
“That’s bullshit. That’s a cop out and you’re a lazy fraud,” he cried, rushing toward me.
There’s no way to really end this discussion gracefully, I thought.
“How can you live like this?”
“I guess I just keep thinking that one day it’s going to catch up with me and I’ll just be devoured by the crisis of the century. Until then it’s business as usual.”
“You can’t live this way — people don’t live this way.”
He tacked that on as if I aspired to join their ranks. The truth was, I was lazy and stubborn — a control freak of the highest order and I was never coming down. The story about the robot that woke up feeling human feelings was the most epic disaster of them all.
Cabbage moths, animal tracks: fresh? Old ones. Sand on the beach makes holes for my feet.
I singed my hair with long white candles and covered my face with tar. I lived as if in mourning on the edge of a lake. No one messed with me. I baked my own bread out of acorn meal and gathered flower seeds in the middle of a many-stringed storm of red raindrops at the top of a hill.
Further away at the mouth of a beach cave there was a large sea anemone, a static guard I wasn’t sure was even alive, only that it sat there like several hundred pounds of raw meat, salivating. Oregon beaches are like some space landscape, total unreality. Finding some dog prints in the sand I followed them up a trail to the edge of a ravine full of stinky feathers trapped with sand.
Rough rocks ground underfoot and cracked into smaller and smaller pieces with each move I made.
Mother hatched from the sea. The breath of a solid white shell enclosed her. She was cursed to walk up and down the beaches, tethered at the ankle by a stretch of kelp half a mile long held at one central point below the water. Her leash lay curled around a rock. She was bound; her hair swirled around her like an ancient cloud, banishing all sound.
In our twisting at the length of our restraints we began to recognize each other. Out of the mutual language of dead dust, dusted years, the two of us would never be the same.
She looked in the mirror and saw her future-body staring back at her, emerging out of the cloudless glass, a shadow inching across and blinking through two eyes like plastic eggs. She had hatched into a perception of her own future-self, however much it remained still tethered to her dreams, cast to the bottom of the ocean on an anchor of kelp, stones, and bubbles.
Passed out in a fever fog, under a black sky and the beach, where the only trees were horizontal brown stalks sorted and skinned by the tides; carbon dioxide seeped into my brain and poisoned me with its noxious dream coma — all I can call my own is this. There is nothing else in this world I can claim. I own this sickness, this poisonous fog. And I own these thoughts, orange and sticky.
I shook my head and thought, “Too many words.”
I get the sinking feeling that I’m gonna be here forever. I traced into the sky: f-o-r-e-v-e-r… In this world, there’s no edge, no junctions or seams, just endless rounded corners — the sanded contours of hell —
Summer ticks away What have you been up to lately? they all asked her, poking their heads into view as she sat scrunched on the sidewalk. She turned squinting into the sun and inertly replied, “nothing,” then slowly lost consciousness until they all walked away. Kim’s rule of thumb, as I took it to heart was, “don’t think hard, think deep.” It carried over into every facet of my life… We receded to the edges of life. Concerned only with seams, borders, rims, outskirts, we took refuge in these places. Where actual life became real. We hid inside you —
A dish of salt and cat food sat at the mouth of the cave, the crystallized remnants of some kibble left out a long time ago for some neighborhood animals. Where had they been? Did anyone notice that all of the raccoons and cats in town have disappeared? Uneaten saltwater kibble in dishes all over town — something tremendously suspect had occurred.
Close by, a coven of “witches” stirred a cauldron of wax on the beach. Their sea rituals consisted of nights and days spent without sleep. Grabbing at whatever was meant to keep them awake. This particular afternoon: wax.
All tribes convened on the beach. It was usually dark enough so that no one could really see anyone else’s markings too clearly. This beach was not like others. It looked to have been visited, like a shopping mall came by and shook out its clothes on the sand and all the little mites fell out and crawled away. The beach is a public place, like a park. Some are fancier than others, some more policed. This one seemed to cushion the bodies from all walks of life, providing shelter for all kinds of itchy semi-legal activities. The peasants have gutted the palace of the old regime and now lie sleeping in piles of shavings in every crevice. The beach offered precious few places to hide so inhabitants pulled in partitions from various sources, erecting shelter in recognizable shapes from all over town. I walked until I thought I passed all the people to where it was just sand again. I felt my body fusing with a man I loved — only I didn’t know him. He held me at arm’s length and it drove me crazy. Why couldn’t I just walk away? What had he gotten from me that I needed so bad I couldn’t leave without? I didn’t even recognize myself anymore.