a hagiography

i knew him for a time.
we flew around
the room of the world
like crazed moths,
bumping into one another
more often than not,
knocking loose the dust
from our wings

i heard he changed his name –
funny, i did too. we made
pentimentos of ourselves,
scrawled over the names
we once called one another
with ink & with wax.

we were wildeyed,
two jongleurs of
an old &
sour tradition,
ghoulish and gabbling
under the scold
of the moon,
ghastly and garish
under the scald
of the sun -

we unravelled ourselves
then gleefully set to the strings
with our teeth,
sawing giddily
back and forth,
magnesium sparking
exothermically
in our bellies

then suddenly
i knew him differently,
like a book from childhood -
he acquired a dingy patina,
became covered in
something sticky
like spilled jelly -

i came to know how
he acquired clothing:
by osmosis -
something borrowed became
something his
just because of how he wore it.
that,
and the stink.

i came to hate hearing him play
“her majesty” on the guitar,
especially the whole
bellyful of wine bit,
came to loathe
both his wistfulness
& his ardor,
latenights,
by the bungalows, crooning,
while girls, swooning,
clutched at his threadbare sleeves

how the ragged fall apart!
years down the line
i think of him,
somewhere west,
past the heaving, sighing Rockies,
past the arid and
steaming deserts -
i think of him,
sitting high up in a redwood
amongst whispering,
adulatory leaves,
in a familiar jacket
pressing a looking-glass to his eye,
facing east -

i am not so high as you;
i am nestled snugly
in my harbour-town,
an island amongst islands,
one for every day of the year -
& i have always preferred
the hard sheen of the Atlantic
and you,
you’ve always preferred
to be pacific -

once,
i broke the string of your guitar
on purpose, and never told you,
viciously turned the knob
as easy as turning a key
in a greased lock –

i blamed it on the humidity -
these things happen, i said coyly,
when they’re pulled too taut –
they capitulate,
sing one desperate chord
and then

twang

like the zithering lash
of a downed power line.

my fingers thrilled
to the snap, yanked away
as though burned,
itched -
for days after.

i can still hear it,
that sound –
can still see your manic,
berserker eyes
over your manic,
berserker beard,

i can still hear you
galumphing through your
frustrated coitus,
grunting and moaning,
slapping and sighing,
as though wresting madly
at the lock on the door
where love is kept captive
secreted away
in a dark corner,
shying away from your
red-faced advances -

we battered at the world,
ran full-hearted at doom
heedless of warnings
and admonitions
from those who had run
the same path before,
grinding our teeth
while congratulating ourselves
on outwitting the slow men,
the low men,
the causers of this and that and thus,
removed ourselves,
turned frail and brittle,
cracked
in more than one place –

for me,
the thunder of our separation
still reverberates
through time’s
glassy echo chamber,
like an orchestra halted
at the point of climax,

for you,
it’s no more
than a whisper,
the susurrus of drug
still feathering
your heart,

no more than
a moth’s wing
against your face
in the dark,

no more than
the schuss of cars
going through puddles
in the night,
somewhere between
departure
& return

last published

been thinking about old friends.

CHRIS FLETCHER

WILL FLINT

(in capitals because i am invoking them)

the haze of summer, as though looking through it. squinting in the sun. the saccharine twinkle of the ice-cream truck around the corner. clouds muscling in overhead, tired from their eastward trek, bogged down with unnecessary luggage ...

i am giving you Eddie's house because i never saw yours, Fletcher. you lived at the top of the stairs and just off to the right. it was dim in your room, and some broken blinds over the lonely window weren't enough to keep out the sun. you had a Nintendo and two controllers. the ashy, variegated carpet that made me feel like i was standing in a litterbox. Eddie was a humorless sort, but you were not. your family was poor, and your mother was still at work when we got home from school. right away, you showed me your toys - exuberant over the stamina of your oldest action figure - Commander of Planets, Master of the Universes - i can't remember. i remember the look on your face when i broke his arm off - accidentally! - like someone had just punched you in the gut.

Will - you'll wait for another time.

emulate

so i thought i was sal paradise that summer and i was looking for a dean moriarty. problem was, they never existed in the first place, so i guess i was just filling a void. other problem was, i found a dean moriarty. he had those little pieces of white and orange (sometimes blue, sometimes flesh), colors of the devil's own rainbow.

a summer later, a new novel, and a new friend: i wasn't looking for anyone in particular but i guess a japhy ryder happened into my life. we tripped, got high, got ludicrously drunk. dropped acid in december, the first snowfall. smoked salvia divinorum and flew around the world inside of my head. skyscrapers and all. then we broke on each other and flew apart, as if discovering all that time we'd been lodestones of the same polarity. as if all that time we'd held to one another, vibrating furiously.

winter was always the breaking point. the late gray of january and the mess of february. by march and my birthday, everything: different, in a violent way.


i take myself way too seriously.

beast.

the shrill whine of the phone, like a shocked animal. unexpected at this hour.

spring has just shuddered around the bend, gracing us with warm days & with balmy nights. the window is open & the bedside lamp is staining the walls with diluted yellow. i can't sleep. i've gyrated from position to position, ultimately no more comfortable in one than the other. the sheets are a mess. i've stopped caring.

on the display is an unfamiliar number with an even more unfamiliar area code. by the third or fourth ring, panic grips me. indecision stews in my stomach, but it doesn't even have time to simmer before, for whatever reason, i answer. it's S on the other end. i knew it, somehow, maybe the fog of insomnia gifted me with extrasensory perception. i heard his voice seconds before he spoke, like an echo ahead of itself. with that recognition came surging dread, and the muddle of my thoughts gave me away.

i feigned drunk, too drunk to move. certainly to hang out. he doesn't want to "rekindle a relationship," he says to me, but he "misses" me, and "was thinking about" me the other day. of course he was. they came into my workplace. and due to my conspicuous evasion of them - (which, by the way, is no longer a question) - he found it necessary to recall my number from the swirling depths of his memory & use it at four in the morning. not that i begrudge him. i never sleep early. i don't think that will ever change. i will burn myself out on late nights. he told me he would call me tomorrow, but he hasn't, and i know what he heard in my voice, and i know what i heard in his: disappointment.

i am wilding around the edges, creeping with a sort of acquired fauna that appears lichen-like but which behaves like bacteria. i am concerned for my gulping, pulpy bagpipe of a stomach. for all of the slick organs, pumping in tireless rhythms against all the other rhythms. eventually the drummer's arms become weary. i meant to say that i was fraying at the edges by the word "wilding." not fraying harmfully, but in a slow pattern, as if getting one's favourite sweater caught on the exact same nail at the exact same time every day of one's life.

it's windy and E. has put out the table & chairs in the courtyard by our porch. there will be a lilac tree in full bloom, and what appear to be tulips, proudly striving to always be the first flower of spring, yet constantly beaten by the smug daffodils, the crocuses. the tulip is a flower in denial.

the son of vladimir nabokov, dimitri, has decided (against his father's last wishes) that the last novel (unfinished) will be published.

sui generis

S stayed after E went to E, and for awhile we yelled at one another over the music. she was drinking Guinness. i was drinking a lot. it's very easy to lose her voice to the din, a lot like my friend ryan, who speaks so softly so as almost not to be heard. ryan has chosen not to smoke marijuana as of late, due to an increasing paranoia while high. he has also taken to drinking vodka with tonic as opposed to beers upon beers. i have, as of late, taken to drinking shots of whatever with my beers. doctor macgillicuddy's. i've been staying away from whiskey. edging away.

last night (dare i return to it), a shock to the system in the form of old friends. i am a different person, i feel, than i used to be, yet i am standing on the rickety stilts of the past. sometimes the ground gives way beneath me. i wish i'd handled it better: instead, i had a strange panic attack. later, after they'd left the restaurant, i felt that old blackness settle on the insides of me, that disappointment. having reviewed my actions of the past hour, i was sickened with myself. i kept telling the story to everyone i knew who cared enough to listen, as if trying to explain to myself my actions, trying to rationalize that i'd freaked out and basically hid from them the whole time they were there.

Q: What were you hiding from?

A: a lot of things, actually. i didn't want to talk to them. didn't want to engage them in any kind of conversation. didn't want to have to, didn't want them to.

Q: Why not?

A: well. old patterns, i guess.

Q: What do you mean?

A: it wasn't them - it was him. i could've handled it had it just been the two of them, but he was there too. -- and, he said "good to see you," said this master of the genuine, said the honest, flawless trickster.

Q: So what is it about him that scared you -- or sent you into panic mode?

A: unresolved conflict, maybe? but everything is always unresolved. you lose someone, it's not like you can tie your relationship with them up neatly or succinctly.

Q: What do you mean by "lose" someone?

A: i've gone through a lot of social circles. i've known a lot of people. and i've fucked up in every single one of them in a major, awful way, and ended up crashing out of their orbit like an asteroid. those are the people you don't generally get back.

Q: Sounds to me like he wanted to be your friend. He said it was good to see you.

A: and he's not the kind of guy who would have said it and not meant it. or at least, that's who he purports himself to be. maybe he didn't mean it.

Q: Sounds like he did. And didn't she text message you before they even showed up?

A: yes - but she asked me what days i had off. i assumed she, and she alone, wanted to hang out. -- you know, i kind of feel like i was invaded. i feel like they deliberately came to the restaurant, probably high as shit, thought it would be funny, and thought i'd be fine with it. well, i sure showed them it wasn't. i wasn't.

Q: You did? By hiding from them?

A: yes.

Q: It's possible they didn't even notice. Maybe they just thought you were doing work elsewhere in the restaurant.

A: i was conspicuously absent.

Q: Are you sure?

A: well, no. i felt i was.

Q: They don't know that.

A: this settles nothing.

>>>

so after last call, S and ryan and i went to johnny's house. she got too high and i walked her home. may have come off a little creepy. i'm developmentally challenged. sorry. man-child.

days like today, in the backlash of last night, with an empty stomach and no goal in the windshield, make me kind of miserable inside. but the sun is so warm - !

i am wearing my watch again. it makes me feel like a different person.

FIELD NOTES #1

my mother was
always angry because she felt
denied of something on a far deeper
level. her bitterness
soaked her at the
root & discoloured
her heart.

in this way i am
recurrently possessed
by sudden rage -
i feel
the same liquid
sloshing in my gut,
the same hoary frost
over my heart,
creeping down my
arteries -

>>

my father spent
most of his time
sitting in a cave,
highlighted by its
weird greenish light.

i became obsessed
with the theory of
black holes & watched
the sky over our
house for any sign
of one. i saw many
things, but failed to
find even a clue.

(how was i to know
that deep in our basement,
lurking a box marked
"OLD CLOTHES," was the
seething singularity
that i sought?)

after the hurricane
came, there was no
trace of my father.
we searched for days
among the splintered,
fallen trees. in one -
a hornet's nest - my
first sting, between
thumb & forefinger.