happenstance

These things I see repeating, could be. They could be repeating themselves to draw something to my attention. Or it could be I'm looking for them, to convince myself of something else.

I hear the speaking of the same word many times. I see a bird, a starling, twitch its wings. It sings out the same notes to its neighbors.

I feel the pink softness in the same petals pulled from the same droopy flowers. I see the same bright minutes stand beside the same white hours, before they jump away.

I watch it blur by me, the same branded symbol on the same make of car. I feel the same jar's worth of air disturbed by the same swarm of gnats and their thimbleful of wings beating.

None of it is real, and yet it's all happened many times before. No part of it could possibly come to be, but it all lives together right now and everywhere.

I'll walk where the lights take me, sometimes, following the greens so I don't have to stop. Or I'll walk where I want to go, ignoring the lights and daring the cars.

I'll put two words together, because they rhyme, or they don't, and suddenly I'll find myself at the end of a passage, which says something insightful, or it says nothing with any meaning whatsoever.

in between

It's these in-between places. The pauses in between phrases our spun orb hums. The gaps between made-up catches it's whistled. There our when's are unlatched and misled.

foolishness

Waiting the way I wait, and I wait, awaiting more waiting, may make this wait, or waiting, a fool's game. But wait, some fools are wise to the surprise that comes when the wait is no longer waiting, and it finds at its end, one smile waiting for it, and a look that unlocks a kingdom.

what's given; what goes

What's given is, it's not given. Or it's not given long, but it is blessed (and that's 1 syllable and 2). 

It's not long at all before it's taken back. No, it's not taken; it goes back. Yes it goes, and it leaves that blessing behind.

this dream

This dream is a memory that couldn't happen. These dreams are. They were a sadness that will not come. All of my dreaming will be a happiness that didn't awaken.

steps

Today I walked approximately 9 miles, though it was over five total trips. A two-mile walk has gotten to be pretty routine for me.

In between stepping out, I read a New Yorker article about "treadmill desks" that you can use to walk at low speeds while working. It sounds funny, but it's supposed to be much better for you than sitting (and I know how bad sitting can be).

I also read a very short article about "life-editing"; living in a single room that can be configured to meet different needs. For example, changing it into a bedroom, office or dining room by using Murphy beds, sliding dividers and pull-out surfaces. Building-wide common areas (such as a professional kitchen) and shared resources (eg., power tools) play a role too. As an aside, it mentioned that people used to walk much more, and those walks became opportunities to socialize with neighbors.

Maybe others will swing around to these ideas. On my walks around town now, I can go long stretches without seeing anyone, and most people I do see have just gotten out of a car. I feel out of step with people in a lot of ways, but maybe I'm just a step ahead of them.

noise

The noise comes. Unwanted, it thrums and rushes. It shouts in unwise whooshes. It pushes doubt, nonsense and lies, as the day's expectations unravel.

in place

A dull day under a dull gray sky. My only real accomplishment was spinning 31 miles on a stationary bike. Symbolic of the motion without movement in my life.

silence

The silence is questioning. Silent, it asks me. It searches me silently for solutions I can't yet speak. I haven't yet spoken.

persistence

The stink bug believes. It must believe. A bulb is the sun, the ceiling its sky. Over and over again, it collides against a hard white that in the "wild" gives way. A bug doesn't learn. It persists, both in success and failure.

It can't stop. It won't stop until it falls damaged or exhausted. Then I'll cup it, and put it outside, back where the ceiling knows forgiveness. You see, I have a little bug in me.

dust

To be again, back to dust, back up to starry dust, to glittering float, apart and a part of everything particulate, and no part to any some in particular.

never. yes, never

Today wasn't a good day. I'll summarize it thus: I've booked way too much time on the selfless side of the ledger.

I've lived enough years, and my remaining time is too valuable to be given away too easily. I have knowledge. I have wisdom. I have talents. I'm happy to share them with the right people, for the right cause. I will never again be, however, just a body to fill a slot and engage in mindless activity.

They who say such things, say, never say never. This is a never I'll say with absolute certainty.

eine kleine

I'm inclined, night. Music is shadow. Light is a bent line. Absence rests in between, a second or a lifetime.

nada

I've got nothing today. Zip, zilch, zero. I worked from 9 till 9, with a short break to buy groceries and make dinner. The neighbors did have a jam session going with period instruments, which was fun to listen to.

Right now, I'm trying to watch a hockey game, but the complete and utter insipidness of the advertisements tends to twitch my finger onto the off button. I'll probably read a little before I drift off to dream more dreams about someone who I don't want to dream about. My sleeping mind never lacks for material, but it can be rather predictable.

visitors

115 years ago today, Anthony Palisi, better known to me and mine as Grandpa, was born in New York. Our family trip to visit him and Grandma Rose up in Armonk is a favorite childhood memory. They would later move next door to us in Maryland, and I got to spend several months living with them during my senior year of high school. He was a sweet man, and I miss him and Grandma.

Last night I was visited by a mouse, one of the various critters that seem to pass through the apartment from time to time (mostly insects and spiders). I generally let them be, or try to guide them outside, if I can. They're just doing what they were designed to, so who am I to hold it against them.

Outside my apartment today, while shooting the breeze again with Bob, a little dog named Amber came over to say hello. She was exceptionally sweet, and insisted (with some irresistible whimpers) on being pet. Not all visits or visitors are created equal.

these are the minutes

These are the minutes. The ghosts of lived yesterdays haunt. Their haunts hum circles colorless. They ply the black with a plea that's forget us.

this is the hour

This is the hour. The ghosts of tomorrows never born come. They come with their chorus of voices. They come and they sing silence and darkness.

Sunday mysticism

There are songs I love so much, that when I listen to them, I don't just want to sing along, I want to dissolve into them and float away with them wherever it is played songs go. Into the Mystic is one such song, and I listened to it many times today. No need for church or mediation, as long as I can have this music in my life.

love is in the glare

I admit that drivers often piss me off. They generally ignore the fundamental principle that a pedestrian always has the right of way. Throw in the fact that I'm doing the planet a favor by choosing to walk rather than drive, and their sense of entitlement becomes even harder to bear.

It's understandable, we live in a society where, thanks to nonstop automobile and fuel industry propaganda, car ownership is associated with personal freedom and economic mobility. There's also a mania that seems to grip people when they get behind the wheel, replacing common sense with an overwhelming need to hurry wherever they're going.

I buck that bs. If you nose your car into an intersection to try to intimidate me into waiting for you to turn, I'll slow down my stride (which is usually pretty snappy) and glare back at you with eyes that say, "F*ck you, you're going to have to wait."

I did that today, while wearing a shirt that spells out L-O-V-E rather prominently. It might have passed for ironic, or it might have diminished the message a wee bit.

In other news, there was a wedding in the park across from my apartment this afternoon. Real love, or that brand of love we call real, was in the air, and it didn't smell at all like exhaust.

all in a day's walk

Today I made a conscious effort to clock out at a reasonable hour and enjoy some down time. For me, down time means outside time, away from the magic boxes at which I make a living. There's magic outside the boxes too, and it's real, and it's scary, because I know when I find it, or more likely it me, I won't be prepared for it.

I do go look for it, and looking means walking. Walking, this evening, I took the road less traveled, at least by me. Unfortunately it took me too. Consciously or unconsciously I ended up someplace I both wanted and didn't want to be. The not wanting proved stronger, and I hurried away, back to the apartment.

Bob from the building was sitting out front, as he often is, and I listened to his stories and his jokes, while life's rich pageant passed us by. I can't say this place is wholly home yet, but it's becoming home. It's where I am and where I feel I have to be, at this moment, for the real and scary magic I know is out there to find me.

in_onsequential

The "C" has worn off the c-key on my keyboard. It's still a c-key, producing Cs without complaint, even though it has no "C" to mark it.

I don't seem to be marking time the way I used too. I know it's passing. I see the digits on my clocks change.  I see the sun rise and fall. Yet, time has gotten progressively more compressed, collapsing more and more back onto itself. I can only guess that's what it does, until it and I reach the point where it won't pass, or everything will pass, all at once into something I can't define. At least not while I'm limited by this human brain.

Right now, I still count it, and it still counts. I don't count down. I count up. I count the time that's passed since. Since what? Mostly since sadness, I guess. A sadness that's its own plural. It too will leave me, or I'll leave it. Not yet. Not soon. It will still be here, even while I hide it. Just like that "C" that's left the face of my key, while it keeps on making Cs.

life rips itself off

it's a little hard to describe this, but lately i've noticed that life likes to rip itself off. the same way the Flintstones was a ripoff of the Honeymooners. or Apocalypse Now was a ripoff of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. homage would be a kinder word, and a classier one.

are there patterns that follow us? do circumstances keep recurring in our lives? the same plots and outcomes, but with different names and faces attached?

some theorize the universe/universes is/are constantly expanding and collapsing back in on itself/themselves; cycles of birth and death, and the everything in between. could there be small variations within those repetitions, whenever they re-play out?

and are our lives microcosms of those cycles? do our own births and deaths, and the everything in-betweens, repeat into infinity; a program caught in a loop; a loop that's become the program.

i walk down the street and i see an older man i know standing there with his cane, as if he's been waiting for me, as if it's pre-ordained we run into each other. i've met another man with a cane in much the same way but in a previous life, in a previous city. i'll likely encounter yet another when i move on wherever i'm meant to move on to next.

is this the universe giving me a chance to repeat these scenarios until i get them right, whatever right is? i don't know, but being aware of these patterns doesn't make me want to break free of them. it makes me want to improve on how i've handled them. and yes, that's me ripping off the movie Groundhog Day, but there's no shame in paying homage to anything involving Bill Murray.

cancel that coincidence

for me, coincidence has always been the reddest herring. it's no coincidence that the phrase "there are no coincidences" is oft-repeated. our minds find connections wherever they can, and quite often the associations they make are as real as they are imagined. we write this life as a story. we love stories. we live stories. we are our stories.

our stories give us comfort. they make sense of a senseless world. one thing flows from another, even if it doesn't. effects have causes. actions, reactions, equal and opposite, and the opposite, when we tell it, will sound made up.

life (read work) has been a bit hectic for me lately. i literally tossed and turned in the night just thinking of all the things i had to do today. was it a coincidence that a couple appointments got canceled today to ease the burden a little, at least for a day? it's happened a few times recently, things "working out" that way, in the end.

i'll tell myself this, it wasn't a coincidence, and i'll thank the invisible power that is yet isn't. i'll likely curse it tomorrow again, when too much life (read work) comes flowing back upon me, in an unexpected and overwhelming wave of randomness.

multi-versing and the music binge

i have become a music binger. some folks might down a quart of ice cream in one sitting. i over-consume bands' album collections. i spent a few weeks listening to all things Bowie, again and again, then Time Fite, and lately it's been Wilco. what next? perhaps Radiohead or back another time to Elvis Costello. it could be a rut, or it could be my returning to the comforts of things long-loved, to compensate for things long-lost.

i set a personal best for "conversations" held simultaneously tonight, composing an email while answering a text, in the midst of a chat session, while also on a Google hangout. yes, i might be overdoing the multi-tasking, or i have too many competitors for my attention. such is the nature of my virtually ultra-connected but fragmented life. broken and yet appealingly sparkly.

Flirt those bad dreams away

i have weird dreams. i have sad dreams. i even have angry dreams, but i don't often have scary/bad dreams. last night i had two; not grade-a horrifics, but pulse enhancers.

a vague accounting of a dream is like poorly retelling a joke, it never pays off. so, i'll only say this: one dream included a storm of horizontally flying thick, black drops, which was a neat visual.

donning my amateur dream-interpreter's cap, i'd say they both centered on the fear of being driven/pushed into an impending unknown. when isn't the future unknown? only when all of its quantum possibilities collapse into an observable present. my lesson learned, though it may be unwise to take lessons from dreams, is to dread less and accept more, especially when it comes to circumstances i can't control.

one thing i can control is a "flirt pole." i learned how to use one today during my sunday morning shift walking dogs at BARCS. what's a flirt pole? it's basically a piece of pvc pipe with a string at one end. the string attaches to a tug-toy. you swing the pole around while standing on a platform to get the dogs to chase the toy. it's pretty cool, and Cosby, the particular dog we exercised with it, loved it.

as i get more experience working with the dogs, i hope to be able to do a lot more of these activities. it's one possible future popping in and out of view, and with some dedication i'll collapse that puppy.

What now?

not poetry. i'm pretty much done with that for a while. there's still plenty of it to find on the interwebs, so go seek it.

if not poetry, what? randomness, which is to say life. no one may read it, and that's okay. i'll record stuff here, and see what evolves. back to the way-back then, mr. peabody, when blogs were 'blogs (short for web logs) and designed for journaling. off we go.

there is some festival going on in my hood. a flower fest of greenery getting with an official title i don't know. it seems to be drawing in mostly folks who don't live in the city and otherwise ignore it on the weekends. of course they're choking the streets with their automobiles, and the atmosphere with the filth those belch. i'm sure it's worth it so they can prettify the homesteads out in the vast suburban expanses.

i read this today: our drone delusion. nothing really that i didn't know, but plenty that most americans like to pretend doesn't happen. does anyone still remember that directive ford signed in the seventies to outlaw political assassinations, or the various topplings and killings that the cia perpetrated abroad before that (and probably after)? probably not. now it's not spy craft but drones that we use to dispatch folks, and they might as well be called that because of the humming these beasts force many americans into so they can ignore the stories about the death and suffering we cause overseas.

i did go out for a nice walk. i like walking in this city, despite it (and its steeped in car culture) not encouraging me to do so. it has monstrously snaky, multi-level expressways that dominate the landscape and try to intimidate my pedestrianism, but i'm undauntable at this point.

once i got past the flower stalls, the sidewalks were pretty much person-less. i went up to the bolton hill neighborhood, which is a couple miles north. there was a statue of a guy named watson in a civil war era uniform there, with mortars and balls at the ready below him. i'm sure he did something stirring on the battlefield and was worth commemorating, but we do too much celebrating of those who are skilled in killing, and i'm not going to bother looking him up. he'll live on in my mind as an unassociated hunk of metal; well-formed, but meaningless. that's one better than this post.

The truest

The truest
poetry (the only
poetry left) for me
is silence. I will
be. I will
finally
be,
with this poem's final word
(with my final word?),
silently, and to you,
a true
poet.

said isn't told

said isn't told. said
isn't telling. i've told
the hours to slow.
i've told
minutes. i've told the moon
to hold
its blue in deeper. what's soon
unheard is saying. i know,
i said.

11:12pm

Don't wake me. Don't. I'll wake. Me,
I'll wake when time wants me. Time
tells me when is its where. Time waits
me out. I'll find it waiting there.

gripping

i did try. i tried to hold it all,
for all as long as i could. then,
the blood came acrylic. it came
in small, loose drips at first, small
drips of the most vivid red.
stinging hands, shaking hands can't
grip it all. drained, they can't, not at all.

i am what can

i find, and i've found the seconds
stay still, and
they move faster as i count them.
i've counted them
slow and fast. i'll slow them down, and settle
in the middle
of them,
slide in right between them.
in their gaps, i was, and
i am, a wish. i can,
and i will, wish me there,
and wish her,
and him, and her again, all of us
wishes. i wished us
as those wishes spelled out in smiles.
we're smiles
meant to wrinkle, and increase
with that wrinkling. we, as wishes creased
the freckled, and the pale, the mahogany
skin on bridges of noses. we are, we'll be
those wishes written
out in sparkling green,
gray, blue, brown, black eyes. i have,
and we have
sparkled. we sparkle being them, whether
those wishes come true, or whether
or not i am and can be,
and they're all now, the seconds, here with me.

falls falling

this dark-proud night doesn't fall, its partner light
leaves. i did fall, falling into a night
that was hidden. i fell, and i'm falling
toward a too shy infallibility. the failing
light is where sleep loves, but love can't sleep,
not when there's night to break, and light's promise to keep.

dozen-n't

A dozen starlings
dozing in the evening sun
doesn't dare the season's end.

It dozen-n't, dare it,
these dozing within warm pinks
to dream up spring's spry bend.

the light's not

The light's not chasing
tricks tonight, and I'm chasing
it. It's sticking to
the barest white faces, to

fire-escapes' twisted
teeth, to the straight-edge
snarls of brick crevices, and
to the slight, tight cracks beaten

into the jaws of the slick
cement walks. I'll stick
wherever it would, could be,
and I'll fall where it casts me.

ecco

I don't like it
repeating myself
I do like it
repeating others' sounds

This hissing fits
the night's shut eyes
it fits, the hiss,
its missing ears

I won't miss it,
the hiss. Where does the air
slip, when it stops
repeating after me?

night wail

the mechanical night
whale wails its plea. It's wanting
for pale's breaking, weights
to be lifted, when it brakes.

fly on the wall

The fly on the wall
stalled, its small
head pointed
n
w
o
d
,
not to listen in
but to black glisten in
the reflected light,
the wall's, and then fly

dreams

The dreams I dream (when I dream,
and I dream
quite a lot) — dreams within dreams
without dreams —
dream up a dreaming me right down
to the me
I am dreaming, when I dream

cracked

The deeply transparent,
cracked, slowly it fills
with a wholly still black,

this seeping night keeping
what it can sleeping
with what it clearly might

tip-tap

tip-tap
the tippler rain drips
tip-tap
the tippler rain's slick
tip-tap
the rain, tippling, wraps
lit-up
city streets in plastic

Half moon

Half moon, I have half a mind
to mind your have-not
half, not minding what I have
to mind, oh, half moon.

whistle to the unseeing

an unseen train tries,
it tries, the train, it tries,
it tries and tries to
whistle poetry too
to an unseeing night,
but the night,
it can't, it can't,
the night, the night can't
hear when it can't unsee
and what it can't unsee
is a coal black stain
trying to be a train

one some day

one some day, it still won't
start ... it still won't not start
it all still won't start to
or not to make sense ... one
some day it won't but it will,
and someone, one some will ... stop

Coins

When the coin dropped, it drops
with a clang ... Clanging's
a kind of language ... A kind coin,
it coins me as phrases ... Its careful
words phrased not to spend me

nightfall

The slightest sliver
............................... of silvery moon, scythes through
the blackish and blue

untitled

Starry we might

starry I am, we're like stars,
stars whose dust fell, falling
dust becomes us, like stars, we,
I pulse and move, we all
move in patterns, in mine, yours,
patterned movements, patterns
repeated, repeating,
starry are we, I'm like stars

Winter flies

A winter fly,
not yet dead in this dead of winter,
flies. It flies
in the face of flies not facing winter's
little white deaths.
Not yet.

i am the king of insects

i am the king of insects
he said, he says,
he continues
a conversation
he started but dropped
he starts, he stops
this conversation,
it’s ongoing,
it went, it goes on,
he goes on with it
to the fine veins of a tattered brown
leaf, he doesn’t know
leaves, but he’d guess this one is
from an elm, he guessed it, he guesses
it became, it’s become
plastered to the window with a glue,
this glue called rainwater, he calls it
rainwater, and it was,
it is a glue, with the winter air,
stronger than paste,
much stronger,
it wouldn’t,
it shouldn’t
hasten anywhere, so he picks up
where he left off, he leaves off
after long pauses,
no,
no not the king, per se,
but they flock to me,
not like they’d flock
to a living leaf, or a wayward crumb
of pumpernickel, but they come
seeking
something,
I said I was a king,
not a wise man,
though wise enough,
and he paused,
and he pauses,
but he can’t continue,
he tries
but not with a glue that’s dried
and a leaf that’s slipped,
it dries, the glue,
and the leaf slips,
it slips and floats down,
down to the gutters
filled with so many browns,
when it hears it,
it has heard it,
enough

lonesome blood doesn't move

lonesome doesn't move, it clings
to time-tapered tree limbs,
to grey
sidewalks refreshed with a white snow,
and to the blood red brick walls overlooking them,
but not overlooking what went
past, no, not overlooking what passed as a life,
a life that went speeding past them,
with no quiet moments to take a breath
or to sit within them;

the past didn't go
the way she wanted it, the way
we'll see it, not the way
the blood red brick walls wanted to feel it,

but the bricks hold it, with tree limbs,
with walks, and they hold her,
and they offer her, still lonesome,
Hattie, stilled by blood, here to me,

and she comes to me, no, not her,
but the thought of her still blood, and when I take her,
or the thought of her, I take it
away, a little of our lonesomeness, the blood

everywhere and nothing

god,
i envy it.
it's being, everywhere
in nothing and ones. it's god
i don't envy, being
everywhere
and nothing at once.

There are. Know coincidences.

This coincidence
is only the difference
between paying and stealing attention.
I stole
a glance at a bus. It speaks its destination
in lights, and the lights think
they know where
you are. I don't, but I know
I won't go there.
I know instead
I'll go home and not watch the TV
where actors speak with words
not lights, and they speak one word to me
at the same time,
the exact same moment in time,
one word, a name,
pops into my far-away mind.

Happiness

Happy. Happy. Happiness
won't. It can't. It does not hop
out hazel-eyed to greet me
from there, behind a Hornbeam.

Happy. Happy. Happiest,
it's not, to hide. It will not
hide its slippery, crimson
cheeks, beneath a skipping stone.

Happy. Happy. Happy thoughts
it can't keep. Sunlight yellow
grins, it gives them. They are not
bundled in petunia buds.

But, I'll chase it round. I will
take it and toss it. I will
pluck it and sniff it, and not
finding it, I'll still have it.

There is

There is
I can feel it
when she lets me
get close
a little piece
when she lets me
if she, she is
of god
she's god
in each of us.

On the face of it

Why are you stuck
on the face? She asks.
She says. I say,
I like faces. No,
she says. I mean the face
you draw. That turnip
of a face, she says.
I say, Maybe
it's my face.
It's my face I draw,
I say. I ask. She says,
yes, I'd guessed that.

At the root of the tree of life is the jellyfish

My struggle to know

"We are the universe knowing itself." I keep coming back to this idea. I first heard it spoken by a man at a meeting many might call a gathering of godless Communists. I'm not sure where he'd heard it, but I'm sure it wasn't original. He may have even mentioned the source, but I've forgotten it. It doesn't really matter. What matters is, every conversation needs a starting point, and every feeble attempt to sum up this life needs a framework, however faulty, and this is the one I've chosen.

To know: It's our strongest impulse. It's what pushed our species, from the moment we could put one foot in front of the other, to search every corner of the globe and beyond. And those things which we don't know, and can't discover the meaning of, no matter how hard we try, are the one's that drive us to do the craziest things. Like invent a religion. That's where all our mysteries get stuck. It's the closet where we keep the worn but oh so warm and comfortable blankets to wrap ourselves against the cold of doubt.

The ideas of purpose and synchronicity are two of the fuzziest blankets we pull from that same closet. They give our lives a sense of inter-connectedness, of direction, of worth.

What is our purpose in life? Why were we put here? Are the things that happen to us in the course of our various journeys — some long, some short, each with their own measures of joy and pain — completely random, or do they happen for a reason? Is there something bigger than ourselves that guides us, or watches over us, or rewards and punishes us?

Etude

How could he paint
a flower some wisdom,
but no god

he could believe in,
designed so perfectly? Don't
borrow its periwinkle

or its vermillion. Don' t
borrow its curve,
or its line. Take them!

Break them up!
Mix them, move them,
and build them back up.

What was there that was
flat, what was there that was
white, it was what

a wisdom, but no god
he could believe in, told him
couldn't remain untouched.

To My Dear Friend, George

It's easier to admit to
a higher power, when you're higher
than the clouds. Something does it,

easily throwing a bulls eye of light
against their white caps below. My eyes
don't dart to it, they settle softly

into its faded blue center. Who
questions it, what you can't
know? I knew the snow of his hair

that's now ash. I knew it, but I can't
know the why, or the how of its
sudden change. Or the when I'll follow.

From and to

From isn't always. To is,
and it comes with a blue
bucket sporting red letters.
It comes in a blue bucket hung
upon a wing. OD is an ending,
the ending of that red,
and of that reading,
but I don't know
what it ends. It's not

ODD. Even odder, it's not
where I'll keep this secret.
I'll leave it, not in a bucket,
but where I always do, where
I left it before, in the internal
ear you'll listen to it with
while you read it. It's not
really a secret. Have I
told you? Have I ever

told you, each time
the plane's wheels lift up,
it feels only slightly,
only slightly less
miraculous
than the beating of your heart.
Then the beating of your heart
lifts me. It takes me
from and to.

Come on in, vent the moon

"Come on in,
vent the moon."

He looks like David Byrne. I don't
know David Byrne.

"It's filled with eye balls,"
he says. All those stares
must generate heat.

I'm sitting in a room
filled with other talkers.

In a room filled
with other talkers,
you have to stand up
to stand out.

"Come on in,
vent the moon."

She says it too. She looks
like Laurie Anderson,
and I don't know her either.

It's an idea
that's time
must have come.

It's an idea,
and when you come to it,
come to it
in a rocket ship
engineered
with new eyes,
and a strong voice.

Others will.

At least two
others, it seems,
have.

If a jelly ate a fish

More jelly

Gone to jelly

.-.

Le Fin

Jusqu'a la prochaine vie

Not looking to the wind for answers

The wind didn’t blow it to me,
Bob’s answer. It didn’t blow any
answers. It riddled instead,
both soil and sea, then it fled
without its debris. What it takes,
it puts elsewhere, then it makes
amends, by giving this place something
back, whatever’s at hand, anything,
when it returns. Returning
begins to feel a lot like learning,
if you do it enough. The sun didn’t die
when it went away. It doesn’t lie
in wait behind the clouds. It keeps
to its schedule. Repeating its sweeps
around us, like the wind. Unlike it,
it only gives. Heat. Light. And what’s lit
doesn’t come with any more answers
for me, or the wind that comes after

For what was taken

They’re not the some left,
those some, just some, yes
them, here. The golden
browns, they tuck thickly
around their honey
locust’s hem. They hear
her soughs, so unlike
the hot-throated wind.
And they hear her soft
sadness, not at all
like the wild-eyed wet.
Her soughs, her sadness
she gives, not for them.
No, not them. They, she’d
given. Not for them,
for what was taken.

Skyscraper

I’ve stood up
tall into its porcelain
mists, stood up
into this vitrified blue,
and I’ve watched them.
I’ve watched the people move
across hard sidewalk, across
leaf-litter seconds. They move
not unlike my idle hours,
some faster, some slower.
And as I watch them,
I try to catch them
up, in my mind, these people
moving. I sweep my arm
through the blue and try
to take them up as they happen
by, before they happen
away and into the hungry
mouths of market doors
and subway stairs. I take them
up one-by-one, in my mind,
to place them, taller,
higher up in the 3-D puzzle
pieces, atop the extruded jigsaw
pieces that muscle up
to a ribboned brown.
Shoulder to shoulder,
and foot to shoulder, and
shoulder to foot, they’ll stand
and their small faces, so much
alike at a distance, will be
windows. They will be
mirrors, and they will
pattern over the porcelain.
They’ll honeycomb into the blue.
I won’t move, like my idle hours,
and they’ll watch me back,
and they’ll catch me up,
and they’ll take me with them,
even higher.

It won't be long

It won’t be long, now. It won’t
be, yellow-orange tells me. It lies
across the damp, and it tells me
It won’t be long. I’ll belong to it,
but not now. Not yet. First I’ll get
to the oak and see five hundred
years. I’ll be the oak and its tossed
limbs, our mossy elbows down
on soft yellow-orange, and the damp
we'll tamp down, till I belong to it.

A leaf, it doesn't know

I could be this pavement,
here. It’s here,
where water’d recently run.
And when it ran, that water,
perhaps this morning,
in that morning
it was done,
done running, done
but for what remains
of it. And what remains

for this day,
not not young,
but getting gray
are the grayer marks,
the reminders of where
the water spilled out,
from cracks. There
its wet followed, following
the cracks for one wink
before breaking free

to mark more pavement
with its passing.
I could be that pavement,
but I’d rather be the one
dried leaf on the road.
It skitters by. A leaf,
it doesn’t know
the water was here,
and it’s blind
to all signs of it.

They say. They said.

They say.
They said. They
said, “It gets
easier.” It does get.
It got?
It got
to the point it gets,
and then it gets
what it’s not.
What it got
is, and it isn’t that
it’s easier. It’s that
it isn’t that. It’s this
now. It got, and it’s
getting
but what it’s getting
to be is an else.
Some thing, not itself,
and not what they
said, or say.

Their glass

Their glass was disposed
to the repose of steel blue,
but yellow-orange fell. Oh how
it lit them, reminding me of you.

While the cold's still young

The radiator rattles. It rides,
riding the cold out, out
in its rusty cart with one loose wheel,
one of those wheels that jiggles

and sticks, as it rolls
across a pebbled lot. The cold’s
not bitter. It still fits, but it will
grow. Give it time. Give it

a little time to live
a little. Give it a little more
time to build up, and build
the aches in its bones,

its joints, its sagging
muscles. The aches that push
this dying fly to fling itself
against walls and ceilings, to try

to break itself. To remake itself.
Then watch it, watch
the cold grumble. The radiator
knocks, a wooden block, to chop

the cold, while the cold’s still
young, and thin-necked,
and vulnerable to its taunts
and hisses. It’ll thicken. The cold.

Belly, the conclusion

[Well, this is it. The final piece of my puzzling Belly. I'll do some clean up and perhaps some re-ordering and then post the final version on my website. Thanks to all of you who stuck it out with me until the end. Once again, if you'd like to start at the beginning, please click here.]

---

“Have you taken the medication I prescribed for you?”

“No, but I don’t think I’ll need it.”

*****

And some amount of time will pass, but he won't know exactly how much. But he will know. He'll know. He'll know it's the morning. It's the morning everything changes.

*****

Jonas, are you alright?

*****

And he’ll be on the train again. And it will move through the black as it always has, morning after morning, but this morning won't be the same. This morning, it won't be the same, the same routine. This morning won't track smoothly along his timeline. This morning will jump the tracks. On this morning, he’ll find a different kind of black within him. And the voices won’t come there, only colors will. And he knows his color now. He can’t name it, but he can describe it to himself. A sunburst orange. The orange of a sun bursting free from the horizon. And he’ll become that color when he closes his eyes and enters that black, the black so different from what he sees outside. And when he opens his eyes again, he won’t see black, or the others, or even a train. He won't be on a train, and it will be a different morning.

*****

Jonas? You missed our appointment today. Call me back when you can, to reschedule. And please take those meds.

*****

And when he does, open his eyes, the special black is replaced with a startling, but equally special white. The white of an empty room, a freshly painted room. The white of a new start. The white not of refusal, but of belonging. And he will occupy this room with the other colors. They're not here in the room, but they're here with him, or in him. And he won’t put anything in it, this empty room, but a single spider plant hung from the ceiling, to keep him company with its parachuting, miniature green offspring. And he'll also put there a single book, leather-bound, with blank, vellum pages. He'll lay it at his feet with a fountain pen, to write in and with, when the words come, if they ever come. They’ll have to come, but he won’t know when exactly they come, because he won’t keep any clocks. He'll keep time by counting the times his spider plant flowers. And then he’ll write. And then he’ll write. And then he'll write some more, his pen moving like the cycling of those flowerings. And when he’s done writing, whenever that will be, he’ll let the book go, wherever it is books go, and he’ll go with it. And they'll go together to speak to others. And they'll leave only the spider plant behind, because there will be nothing else to leave. And then a new story will begin.

*****

Is it time for another first question?

Yes, and I’ve got a good feeling this time. She won’t disappoint us.

Not like the last time? Not like Jonas?

No, not like Jonas.

The fiction of inside

My window mongers
rumors, not lies
of lighter traffic than yesterday
of a starling startled to cry out, then fly
of the cloying sheets neighbors use
to fragrance and dry
their clothes. The house
flies buzz by
assuring me, it’s all true.

Belly, part fifteen

[This is another passage from my short story Belly. To start from the beginning, click here.]

---

“When I close my eyes, I don’t see black, or I don’t see only black. And the black I do see, isn’t a dead blackness. It’s not a black of nothingness. It’s alive with shapes. Not geometric shapes, but irregular shapes. They’re splotches, or swatches of colors. Bright colors. Forest green, and magenta, crimson and cobalt blue.

“They move through the black as if it was water. Not swimming as much as floating, or gliding, as if their sides were covered with tiny bumps, or little hairs, or something small to channel the liquid past them.

“And the strangest thing is, I know these shapes are a part of me. Or, not a part of me as much as they’re others like me. Not physically, obviously, but somehow, we’re the same. I may not be seeing their actual, physical selves. Or what I see as me, or you see as me, may not be real. I don’t know. I may be seeing their essences. And these essences are my essence too.

“And when I go into that black, when I can close my eyes and escape into it, I can escape from the voices too. It’s not that the voices don’t still frighten me, it’s that the voices can’t frighten them, these shapes.

“Whoever the voices are, whatever they ask, it doesn’t mean anything to these shapes. And they tell me, not with words, but with a pulsing of their color, that the voices shouldn’t mean anything to me either.

“That’s when I start to let them, the voices, go. I feel myself, for a moment, dissolving into a colored shape, like the others. I feel myself becoming one of those shapes of color, someone, or something beyond the voices’ reach. Someone the voices don’t matter to. Someone, or something that knows they’re not real.

“But that feeling only lasts for a moment, at least so far, and then I slip back to reality. Or this reality. I’m not ready to completely let go yet, I guess, but I know I need to.”

Belly, part fourteen

[This is another passage from my short story Belly. To start from the beginning, click here.]

---

It feels different.

Yes, as if he’s about to slip away from us. We won’t have much more time with him.

We haven’t had much, and we haven’t learned very much either. Less than the others.

Each one’s different. We can’t know how they’ll respond, and every one’s important.

We do have a little more time. We should make the most of it.

We can. We will. Let’s show him.

Now?

Why not?

Jonas? We’ve almost reached the end. You’ve almost reached your end too. Can you see it? Can you see where you are? Can you see you aren’t where we led you? No, can’t you see? You’re where you’ve always been.

*****

One spark doesn’t cast much light, but the stream of sparks the metal wheels spray as they spin against the curved track make the landscape come alive, a liveliness that lasts for the few seconds the sparks still have life.

They light up a tree, these sparks, for Jonas to see, and it is a tree, but it’s more than a tree. In the flash of light, Jonas can see, not just the gray, craggy bark, he’d expect. He sees not just its branches swaying as unsteadily as aged arms, and the small, thin twigs that poke from their ends, the tree’s arthritic fingers.

He can see inside of it too. There’s a warmth there, a color, or a glow at its center. It’s a glow fed by the moments the tree witnesses standing rooted to its spot. It feeds on whatever passes it by, all the daily events, human, animal, mineral. It feeds on them as it feels them. Yes, feels, and knows, and recognizes, and cherishes, both the good and the bad.

There are the small harms, the sharp pains, as little boys stab it with pen knives to carve initials, or mower blades gash its roots. There are small joys too. Yes, it feels like joy. Yes, the joy it feels as a May sun warms its newly budding leaves. Or the joy it feels as it recalls its past attachments, to the squirrels and jays, and crows and sparrows who’ve made it a home, by sitting in it for no matter how short a visit. Jonas sees all of this, as those first sparks still burn, and then the tree falls back into the early morning’s darkness.

The train takes the second curve in an ess, and more specks of light sparkle to show Jonas less of what he thought he knew, and more of what he didn’t, like this plain, dead wall of dull red bricks. But the bricks aren’t dead or dull. They too glow, and they move, or what’s inside them moves. They hold the hum of movements. It’s not their movement alone. It’s the movement of all they’ve absorbed in the tens of years they’ve stood here.

They hold within them all that’s been said or seen, touched or felt around them, and they sing about them, all of these stories, to Jonas’ eyes. Every meal cooked, every dog walked, every child tucked tightly in their warm winter bed. And they sing them, all these stories, in a language he can’t speak. Every lover’s hand taken, every little and big betrayal, every boss cursed. And though he can’t speak their language, he can understand them, all these songs they’ve sung in this the briefest of flashes. He can understand them, all their stories sung together so nothing can be lost when the second set of sparks lose their lives.

And wanting to hold onto them, Jonas closes his eyes and tries to imagine them again. But when he closes his eyes, he doesn’t recall them, he remembers something quite different. He remembers the voices. Not the voices who brought him here, but those other voices, and what they told him. And he keeps his eyes shut, longer than he otherwise might. And he looks. He looks more deeply into the deepest black, deeper than any black he’s ever looked through, and beyond that, this black, he thinks he sees it. He thinks he sees just a glimpse of it.

*****

Jonas, are you there?

Belly, part thirteen

[This is another passage from my short story Belly. To start at the beginning, click here]

---

The patient claims to hear strange disembodied voices. He is under the impression these voices could be in some way prophetic. He describes various hallucinations, all of which seem to be induced at the suggestion of the voices. These episodes occur primarily, if not exclusively, on the patient’s commute to work. There are no signs of unusual stress at his job. He is not currently in a relationship, and hasn’t been in one of any significance for quite some time. He does not appear to be a threat to others or himself, but he does display some anti-social tendencies. He doesn’t make eye contact when spoken to. He doesn’t like to be touched. He says he doesn’t interact with others, if he can help it. He appears to be healthy physically, other than signs of fatigue and anxiety resulting from his recent experiences. He’s assured me the hallucinations are not the affects of current or past substance abuse. I can’t rule out some form of psychosis, possibly schizophrenia, although there is no family history of this, and it should have manifested itself at a younger age. He may have suffered an emotional trauma as a young adult, but he refuses to talk about it directly. It’s impossible to know yet if any of his recollections of past events are reliable. Understanding this better may be the key to managing his condition, but it will take more sessions to arrive there. I have prescribed a benzodiazepine in the interim.

The interconnections of water and time

Their white within the Inner Harbor’s
tea-colored water
first tricks me into seeing
them as trash. They’re floating
too-elegantly for me to mistake it twice.
The biped in me can’t help but admire the grace
of their jellied swimming.

To swim, I’ll swim across days,
up coastlines, to new cities, and memories.

There are fetal skeletons
at the Mütter, and they’re arranged in the display
case according to height. The boy
at the right end’s skull, slightly flattened
makes him look awkward and alien.

I’d feel like a monster to look at him,
and her, and her, and him, each of them,
these children who never took a step, too clinically,
and as my eyes move between their tiny
toes, they move closer to me than any jelly,
no matter how pretty,
could.

Belly, part twelve

[This is another fragment from my short story Belly. To start at the beginning, click here]

---

“And that’s when I start to think, maybe I’m hearing them, and seeing these things for a reason. Maybe there’s a message in it all.”

“What kind of message?”

“You know, maybe I did get it mad, the universe. Maybe it’s showing me it’s got some control over me after all. Maybe it’s making me see things, see everyday things in a different way, so I can learn from it. Or maybe others are seeing the same thing. Maybe the world’s changing, or it will if we don’t do something. Maybe we’re changing, evolving, and I’m getting some kind of advanced warning about it. If I could only make sense of it, I could tell people about it. See if there are others. But I can’t.”

“You shouldn’t try to make sense of it. There’s nothing to be learned from it. None of it’s really happening. It’s something we need to get rid of, with therapy, with treatment, with medication. That’s what you have to understand first. The universe doesn’t send people messages. Not like that. No such universe exists.”

“How do you know? Last I checked, you’re not an astro-physicist. And you’re definitely not a priest.”

Belly, part eleven

[This is part eleven of my short story Belly. To start at the beginning, click here.]

---

“Young Jonas believes I’ve got a purpose to fulfill. I’m not sure what it is. Something cosmic, or religious, or spiritual. Whatever you want to call it. Young Jonas still believes. There’s this dream. Something ridiculous. A bad B-movie script. Worse than that. I’m in heaven, I guess, and it’s a full out battle between the angels and devils, or whatever the evil forces are. It’s not guys with horns and capes or anything like that, but you know who they are. And I’m right up in the front lines leading the charge, like the Archangel Michael, but I’m a kid. Who knows how my mind came up with such a thing, but it did.

“And that was a long time ago now, but young Jonas still believes that kind of crap. He’s here. He never left. He’s hidden away, but he’s here.”

“Grown-up Jonas, me, I lost my faith in that stuff many years ago. Since my 20s. I don’t know what finally did it. Losing someone. Losing more than someone. Spirit, purpose, good, evil, they all went too. And after the years, and the disappointments, and losing other someones, you have to justify it to yourself somehow.

“I justify it by seeing the world as pretty indifferent. There’s no kindness in it. Why would it care about any of us, or for any of us. It’s all blind luck who does well and who doesn’t. There’s no one up in the sky keeping score. Rewarding the good, punishing the evil. It’s all random events. There’s no reason to anything that happens. People get pushed onto their particular paths, and they bump into other people along the way, but who they bump into isn’t preordained. It’s dumb luck, like I said. Or blind luck, same thing. Throw in deaf luck too.

“Young Jonas is here though, and he squirms when I say that. And maybe I say it to make him squirm. Or maybe I say it as a challenge. Prove me wrong. If there’s someone or something out there, prove me wrong. Yeah, maybe I just want to get whatever it is mad, so it shows me I’m wrong. Take the Lord’s name in vain, blaspheme, whatever. Just to see. Prove me wrong, god dam you. Prove me wrong.”

Belly, part ten

[This is part ten of my short story Belly. To start at the beginning, click here.]

---

He thinks it's one voice, but as he listens to it speak its words, it seems to multiply into many voices speaking together. They sound not unlike his own voice, but not exactly like his voice either. Some have a higher pitch, some lower. Some sound much older, some younger. Some are smoother, some more raspy.

Despite these differences, they all speak at the same time, or almost the same time. Their words follow milliseconds after each other, and their timing drags out the sounds they make ever so slightly, so that the words reverberate in Jonas’ ears and stay with him a little longer than they otherwise might have. Most importantly, their voices, joined with each other, are clear and strong, as if they were coming from close by.

They say to him, "The next time you hear them, those voices, not ours, close your eyes. Close your eyes, like you’re doing now, but not too tightly. Just tight enough for you to see the black. And when you see that black, look. Look for the colors there, running within it. We’re there, inside those colors. You can be too, and inside those colors their voices won’t reach you."

Then they stopped speaking, and as he let them go, he let his eyelids rise. The newspaper was just a newspaper again. Its newsprint, and the stories and photos made up of it, held firm. And then he realized, he had reached his stop.

Belly, part nine

[This is another passage from my short story Belly. To start from the beginning, click here.]

---

He still doesn’t know us.

He can’t. It’s not the way it works.

It affects how he takes what we say.

It can’t be helped, and we’re learning from it. We’ll make adjustments.

We’re on to variations of a theme now.

What’s the theme?

Time, and it’s relevance to how he sees the world. Or it’s irrelevance to how he will.

What if he doesn’t want to?

We always come back to choice, don’t we?

It’s pretty important.

We only give him the sparks of an idea. He has to choose how to react to them. And we’re overdue for another reaction, so ask another question.

Jonas, what if what happens, doesn’t happen for one reason, and it doesn’t happen only one way?

###

He hates the way the newspaper pages keep spilling on his thigh. He can’t stand the sound of them turning, and so constantly, with its crinkle and swish. And when he hears the sound of their voices come back to him again, he hates it all even more.

No one taught this man how to read a newspaper on a train. Some one taught Jonas. Brother Joe, in high school, while waiting for the morning bell to ring. He showed Jonas, and the other kids, how you fold it, vertically, length-wise down the center, and then peel the pages back. Jonas was impressed by the ease of it, the grace of folding the pages back, then opening it up at that reduced center, then moving on to fold more back.

It’s as if the man wants him to read along. Or they do. So he does, glancing down at the headlines there on page A15. But the words don’t want to stand still for him. They keep hopping around to different places, rearranging themselves, and sometimes changing shape to new words. “Killed” becomes “survived”, “won” wants to be “lost”, names and genders switch places.

And it’s not just the bolded words in the headlines. The smaller words in the blocky paragraphs below move too, their letters fall away like grains of sand sliding through glass, and new words take their place.

And it’s not just the words on the page, it’s the photos too. Someone bloodied becomes the same person unsmudged and smiling, or a different person altogether finds themselves in an altogether different place, or maybe the same but in much different circumstances. Their uniform and weapon have been swapped for a t-shirt and sign. Wartime is peace, angry protests are cheerful gatherings, a flag-draped coffin becomes a cradle meant to display the new year’s first newborn.

And it makes no sense. And it’s all too much. And Jonas closes his eyes to shut it all out. And just then, as the blackness takes him, he hears another voice pipe in through his ear buds. A different voice.

And they come, like leaves of grass. And they'll go.

And then I'm here,
and when I’m not here too

They walk past me,
and I see it in their faces,
the generations,
and their generations,
when they walk past me,
the worse-off
and the better,
they come too,

And they come,
and they come,
and in their faces
there are shades I can't name,
but every one of them is,
and everyone of them is
beautiful

And in their hearts
there are whispers,
whispers that speak in shapes
I can’t measure,
but they whisper
pleasures,
and they whisper of their pains,
and they’re not like mine,
and they’re not unlike mine either,
and through them all,
they have, and I have
stayed strong,

And they’ve come here
and their strides have covered,
they do cover,
not distances,
not years,
but those joys and sorrows,

The joys and sorrows of many
yesterdays,
and they came from those many days
and those days flowed out
from many places,
from many places
that are now one, and that one
will go too,
into many,

There will be many
tomorrows,
and into many
tomorrows,
it and they will go,

And when they go there,
they’ll go everywhere,

And when they go,
everywhere will be
one place
and nowhere,

And it’s from there
they’ll bring me back,
and it’s to there I’ll go
and I'm going there,
and I’m going there
again, with each of them.

[Union Station, Washington, D.C., 9/23/2012]

Belly, part eight

[This is part eight of my short story Belly. It's a work in progress, so expect some things to change as I progress further into the narrative, including the order of some of these passages. To go back to the beginning, click here.]

---

“No, it’s gotten worse. I don’t just hear them, when they speak I’ve started to see things.”

“What kinds of things?”

“Changes. Changes in things that shouldn’t, or shouldn’t so fast. All at once.”

“I’m not following you...”

“Time lost its grip. On me, on them, on the world. Peoples’ faces. I saw them all. I saw all their faces, at every age, at the same time.”

“Whose faces?”

“The faces of the riders on my train. Standing in the aisles, sitting all around me. Every one of them. Their faces all started to change.”

“For how long?”

“Until I got off the train. I couldn’t make it all the way to my stop. It was too much.”

“I can imagine. And the voices caused this?”

“I don’t know. They asked me something. Something about the past, present and future. What if it didn’t exist?”
“And I guess you saw that.”

“I guess I did. I wish I could un-see it. And how do I not see it, ever again?”

Belly, part seven

[This is part 7 of my short story Belly. Click here to start at the beginning.]

---

And an image flashes in his mind. An image from his childhood. An image of a crowd. So many bodies crammed in such a small space. So many bodies with angry, uncomfortable faces. They’re not pushing each other, no, but they seem to be pulling themselves in. They seem to be trying to maintain some sense of self, here, where they’re just another face and body among so many.

*****

Star Trek. It’s like a scene from Star Trek. He must have watched it when it was small. Or his brother watched it, obsessively, and he only half-watched, caught in the middle of one of those far-away states he has.

He’s always done that, since he was a boy. Fell back deep into his thoughts and let his body continue on doing whatever mundane things it does. And his body does them quite well sometimes without him. It keeps doing whatever it’s supposed to and leaves him to his mind. He’ll find himself suddenly much farther down a sidewalk then he thought he was, with no recollection of the time it took for him to get there.

And though he’s not fully there, it doesn’t mean his body stops taking in the sensory data it’s supposed to accumulate. It doesn’t need him there to keep on seeing, hearing, smelling things that he’s not even half-aware of, or maybe not aware of until much later, when he feels he’s sensed something before. Is it deja vu if you can’t remember the first time?

And that’s what’s most frustrating, he can’t control when these memories resurface, or figure out where they fit when they do. Like this scene from Star Trek. He can’t say what episode it was on, or what season, or who guest-starred. He can’t even say what the stupid story line of the episode was. But he’s looking at this train full of commuters, and suddenly he sees that shot of a group of people jam-packed in a room. They’re supposed to be aliens on some over-crowded planet, but it’s not hard to tell they’re just a bunch of extras in bad costumes crammed onto a sound stage in Hollywood.

It’s like that here, except on Star Trek, their faces didn’t move.

The memory’s not important. The feeling isn’t either. This feeling of wishing they would all go away. Not in a bad way. Not to harm them. Just to move them away from him. To beam them off to some other planet, or ship, or dimension. Or maybe it would be better if he was, beamed away.

And the bay

And the bay, not purple
but purple
in this light, addresses
all who pass by it
with its uncountable,
jelloing tongues. “You
didn’t come here to stay. You
came to put on calcite
layers. To let what’s inside
grow, or change,
or become, what you’ll become
when you no longer come
here.”

Most don’t listen, they watch
the wind
make a dead leaf hop.

Belly, part six

[This is part 6 of my short story Belly. Click here to start at the beginning.]

---

To see life in its totality is a very special gift.

He won't appreciate it.

He'll learn to. He has no choice.

Yes, that's because we won't give him any.

These things don’t always go as planned, he might surprise us.

Then ask.

Jonas, what if there were no past, present or future?

The human face, it never held Jonas’ attention with the same intensity as a clock’s. That softness, the malleability, its odd colorings, and utter variability, it all unsettled him. And the eyes, there were the eyes. They had such depth, and held such secrets. What might hide behind those eyes? He couldn’t look anyone in the eyes for more than a few seconds. He only managed to deal with his customers by keeping his eyes fixed on the merchandise he showed them.

That’s how Jonas normally feels, but today, right now, after hearing the voices again, he can’t help but stare at the passengers clogging the aisles. Their faces, each one of them, seem to be strangely blurring. Rubbing his eyes doesn’t stop the sensation, in fact, it gets worse as he continues to look. Their features seem to be moving. No, not moving, shifting. It’s as if there were many faces inhabiting a single head.

Everything else about them is unchanged, from their scarves and buttoned up collars, down to the tips of their leather gloves and wool mittens, but their faces have been put into continual motion, a motion that is speeding up. It’s as if someone was flipping through the pages of a picture book, and that picture book was filled with portraits of a single man, or woman, taken every moment from their first gasp of air until their last. Ah, but these pictures follow no particular order, and they're in 3-D.

Jonas tries to focus his eyes, to force them like a thumb into those fanning pages and make them stop on just one, any one, but it doesn’t work.

If he keeps his eyes closed for long intervals, the faces slow their movement enough that he can make out individual features. A cleft chin sprouts a lawn of stubble. Two piercing green eyes cool and darken, while cracks radiate out over patches of skin drained of their color.

Eyes back to the watch. Keep looking at the watch, even if its numbers are stuck. Stuck doesn’t feel so bad now.

Belly, part five

[Another passage from my short story Belly. Click here to start at the beginning.]

---

"What do you hear?

"Voices."

"More than one?"

"Yes, there are two. Definitely two. They're similar, but they’re clearly different voices."

"Are they male or female?"

"Two men, I think. But it's hard to tell. They don’t seem quite human. "

"Are they speaking to you?"

"They mostly speak to each other, but sometimes they address me by name."

"Is it a running dialogue?"

"I think so. I don’t know. It feels like it’s a part of something much larger. An ongoing conversation. I only hear them for a minute, and then they’re gone again."

"Can you make out what they're saying?"

"I can usually make out the words, but when they’re talking to each other, they sound muffled. It's like I’m in one of those stupid sitcoms, hiding behind a wall, with a glass to my ear, eavesdropping on the neighbors. When they ask me something directly, the words are clearer, but what they say doesn't always make sense to me. "

"Are the voices friendly?"

"They're not hostile, but I wouldn’t say friendly either, no. Not even necessarily to each other. They're more dispassionate than anything. It's as if they're dissecting a corpse on an examining table."

"Are you the corpse? Are they talking about you?"

"Yes … maybe … I don't know. Would that be good or bad?"

"It's not good or bad. I'm just trying to understand."

"So am I."

Even more Belly (part four)

[Click here to start at the beginning with part one]

---

Jonas’ life involves quite a few circles. First, there is this “circle” he travels around each morning inside the Loop. The elevated track the train rides atop runs due north and south until it reaches the edge of downtown, and then it turns abruptly to skirt the city center’s perimeter with a clockwise path. From the air, the route might seem to sketch out an exclamation point, or a thermometer, or a clock’s pendulum arm held still.

Yes, make it the arm of a clock. Time pieces and their round faces are the other circles to figure prominently in Jonas’ life. He makes his living as a salesman in a small clock shop. Every inch of its walls, from floor to ceiling, is taken up with a variety of second tickers, some standing, some sitting on metal shelves.

It’s crammed full of stately grandfathers, would-be mantelpiece squatters, less serious cuckoos, and assorted novelties. Their exteriors are made of glass and precious metals, mahogany, and less sturdy but more colorful plastics. Their precisely geared innards push pendulums, cause small brass hounds to chase a rabbit, and tickle a black cat’s tail to twitch back and forth.

While working there, Jonas sits behind a glass jewelry case filled with smaller items: wrist and pocket watches, alarm clocks, timers and stop watches. When no one’s in the shop, he’ll let his gaze fall on their small faces for one second each. He counts aloud with their little and bigger hands, as they glide and tick around and round to lap up numbers and notches, tracking our oval about the Sun.

His fancy for time-tellers didn’t come solely in trade for a middling pay check. He’d had a fascination with them since he was very young. When and how did this start? He can’t say really. Maybe he was born to it. He does have a vague memory of a waltzing animated, grandfather clock that might have cast the first spell, but he’s not sure if he’s made it up to justify a neat trajectory from his past to present.

He knows quite well the first time, at Christmas, he strapped the black leather of his Micky Mouse watch around his too-thin wrist, and waited for those two very unrodent-like arms, fit with their precious white mitts, to converge up at twelve o’clock. He’d never not wear a watch after that. There was magic and dependability in the constant but invisible circles they traced.

Now, with his current watch strangely refusing to give up its fixation on a seven and two zeroes, and with an impenetrable black pushing in against the window beside him, time’s once comforting grip on him slackens. His memories begin to feel borrowed. To Jonas, they begin to feel less real than a mouse with white gloves, red pants, yellow shoes, and a cartoon smirk.

Latched

gods come in all sizes

These tiny gods come and go
unannounced,
as easily as they please
in their inconsiderable
incarnations,

as easily as gnats
or flies through screens

and they’ll please,
but not easily,

and only if you don’t try,
to hold them too close
to your fruit-like heart,
on knotted strings
and silvery chains.

Belly, part three

[This is the third part of my serialized story Belly. Click here to go back to the beginning]

---

And he’s on that train again. And time has passed, or he’s passed the time, but he can’t say how long, or how far, or if he’s gone forward or back. His watch still sticks at the same time. It won't move from it until he steps off the train. Then it finds the right time, on its own, without any winding.

And the voices have come to him again. And they’ve gone.

This train. He sits on this train. Steel rods are its bones, and a molded plastic dyed the color of tan flesh sits upon them. Jonas sits upon the pixelated blue felt that sits upon that molded plastic. And he fidgets. And he waits. He waits for the voices to return. They don’t come every trip, but most. And those sometimes, those sometimes when they don’t come, those very hard sometimes, it can be worse. The waiting.

He’s tried to distract himself through the waiting, with books and newspapers, crossword puzzles and magazines. He’s found that the insulation of sound piped through two small ear buds soothes him most. He doesn’t listen to music, as much as voices, other voices, any voices, just not their voices. Mostly clear voices. Voices he can hold onto. Voices that don't ask or tell him to do anything.

And within the seconds and fractions of seconds of silence that glue these broadcast voices’ words into sentences, those sentences into paragraphs, he knows theirs, as narrowly cast as any can be, will sneak through to him. It doesn’t matter how tightly he presses the ear buds into his canals, or how high he raises the volume, they’ll find a way in to him.

A crackle, and a hiss, a hum and a palpable silence, and then he hears them, but not clearly. No, what they say is not ever clear. It’s not as if they were in the same car, or train, or city. Their words must come from far away, and it’s as if they pass through a thick ooze, but when they reach him, he feels them pass into him, and settle as an ache in his bones.

*****

Do you think he knows about circles?

He must, he seems quite fond of them.

And how they have no beginning or end?

Well, unless you break them.

Let’s break his with a riddle. Jonas, where we’re leading you, is not where you’ll be going.

Continuing on with Belly (part two)

[Click here to start at the beginning with part one]

---

There are lights here, small white, plastic globes of light floating down either side of a steel blue center. They're not bright, but to Jonas’ straining brown eyes they burn intensely.

Ears, he has ears too. And they work, though they might not be working well, if they’re hearing strange voices. They have nicely rounded tops. Jonas always though his ears his best feature. And these tops are tucked neatly within a knit cap. Not the bottoms, the bottoms are unobstructed so they can receive their sounds. And they do. And they’re working. They received a sound quite like the landing of a cushion of water when he awoke. After hearing those voices, as his mechanical keeper made another violent thrust forward.

Jonas takes a deep breath, his twin nostrils gulping the stagnant mix of sweat and snow-wet wool. And as that air fills his lungs, he comes fully back to the jostle of the boxy car in which he's stuffed. To this train that carries him through his daily circles.

“The time. What's the time?”

What's the day, for that matter.

Jonas’ left wrist wears a watch, but it’s been pinned till numb, and won't lift up without the aid of his right hand.

“Seven o’clock.”

He thought it was seven the last time he looked.

Square with rounded corners, the window beside him is backed by an early winter morning’s black, and gives out no clues if he’s gotten any farther on this journey.

“Does it matter?”

It doesn't. Suspended above the invisible scenes of troubled city blocks, Jonas lets his mind slip back to where sharp voices dull to mumbles, their words softening to the sounds of distance and long ago. His head falls forward, returning to its “yes,” and and the disturbance those voices caused go with it, back into darkness.

*****

That was simple enough.

And not very rewarding.

True, but things will pick up. It’s good enough for now. He won’t get through the next one so peacefully.

Back again to Belly

[I've been struggling with my story Belly for many years now. I think this will be the last attempt to get it right. I'm going to plow through it, start to finish, and see what comes of it, rather than continuing to tinker with it piecemeal. So, here, yet again, is the first part.]

---

Can we ask him a question?

Yes, like before with the others, but let’s keep it simple. We don’t want to frighten him too soon.

How about the time? It’s simple enough to ask someone the time of day. Unless the person you’re asking is a stranger. Then, they might not give the answer as freely.

We’ll likely always be strange to him. It can't be helped. And the things we’ll show him stranger still. He won’t keep much of us, or them. No more than the whiff of decaying leaves he’d take from a walk in an autumn wood.

No, but we’ll remember, and we'll learn from him. We always do. Let’s ask him as if he were a friend. Perhaps it will help him accept us. The time, Jonas. Can you tell us what time it is?

*****

They’re just voices. What else could they be? God? A devil? Or an angel and a devil? Those cartoon appeals to conscience perched on his shoulders? Ridiculous. Too ridiculous. But more ridiculous than hearing these voices, hearing them for the first time, now, on this train? Hearing them indistinctly yes, but still hearing them.

Jonas, half-asleep, heard them. There’s no doubting he heard them now, for the first time, when it all starts and ends. This moment of a single movement: when his head, once so deadly heavy, jerks alive with a backward nod, as if it were taking back a “yes.”

Voices, but whose voices? And what would they want? What could they want from him, Jonas? Were they real? They could be. But they could be the remnants of a dream he had in that moment. A dream that retreated back to the depths without him when he woke.

Or they could be the trailed-off fragments of a conversation. A conversation he’s misremembered, or mostly forgotten. A conversation, perhaps half-taken from the television he left on at home, the night before, as he fell-asleep.

No, to Jonas these voices sound much more, much more like something from inside. From inside but also far away. They sound. They sound like a voice he’d hear. A voice he’d hear while reading a story. The kind of story he reads, but doesn’t like. The kind of story that troubles him with the details, and the uncertainties of others’ lives.

But this is his life. It’s Jonas’ life, and he thought he already knew all of its details. He thought there weren’t any more surprises in his story. He thought. He thought, his story was writing itself now. Writing itself in expected ways. Uninspiring, but certain, and expected, and not comfortable, but not disturbing ways either.

These voices are disturbing. Very disturbing. If they’re real. Are they real?

---

Continue on to:

• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four
• Part Five
• Part Six
• Part Seven
• Part Eight
• Part Nine
• Part Ten
• Part Eleven
• Part Twelve
• Part Thirteen
• Part Fourteen
• Part Fifteen
• Conclusion

this town believes

this town, it seems … believes
a subway is the way
the struggling move through it

one man says, or yells, looking back
and forward, side to side, in anger's eyes,
I learned what I needed … all I needed

to know about myself in that cell
be strong, always be strong … I don’t care
for them, or their excuses

another’s dressed like a pirate … he says,
I used to be a reverend … I know it,
and I’ll tell you … if you seek him

no matter where you are … no matter how
far down the wrong road you’ve gone,
god will show you a light to get back to him

this town is struggling … to believe it

How the world sounds, when left alone

Twelve or twenty, they’re black,
and wordless they fly with one mind
about the spire. My eyes try

to catch one that doesn’t, but can’t. I hear
a hum. It’s not quite musical, but it is
strangely pretty. Secretly, I know I’m not

meant to hear it. Last night, as I slept
I heard a voice I don’t know, or didn’t
recognize. He wondered, back where I couldn’t

see him, how to break it to us. The birds
and beasts, not like us, he said, he sensed,
know exactly where death takes them.

Not from these parts

They might be new, these trills
within the broken sun. Or I might be
new to it. A tall woman

with tight orange curls slides down
the wall face to sit on the sidewalk.
I walk past her, and an awkward look

gets passed to me. I’ll mistake it
for a smile, another newness
I’ve brought with me into it.

Diddly

I’m the old man who can’t tell time any more
what lies ahead ... any way he tells it,
what he’ll tell it is always
how he’s become more or less himself,
less the more ... he sits
a broken dish
down, and watches the hours run off
the end of his spoon ... it’s the same way,
the exact same way
his medicine slops, when he tries to
stop his palsied hand from pouring it ... oh, how
he’d like to run
off or away or on and on about it
after learning the moon doesn’t turn
blue waiting for her cow ... she turns her face for you
not to see her giggle
at the thought of how a cow might plummet