Drafting



"Yep, about four sentences and I'm off."

He takes another pull and looked around the bar. It was only 8:00, but we always show up before 9:00 to avoid the cover. I've known Chris for about 8 years, and we have talked about books millions of times, but this is the first I had heard about this.

"Four sentences...really?"

"I know. It's nuts. It doesn't matter if it's a novel, a short story, or what. Four sentences."

"That's the shittiest attention span I think I've ever heard of."

"But it's not like I lose interest or because my eyesight is bad. It's about the stuff that starts popping out of the shadows in response to what I'm reading. I grab a book, open it up, and things start to go online."

My eyes squint. From behind someone yells "Bullshit, he is."

I could see he was starting to go to his mind palace, or as he called it, mind garage. He looked right at me, but was only seeing what was churning in his head.

"The first sentence, and I can almost hear the hum somewhere deep. Lead word, follow up verb or adjective, flavoring second sentence. Lights flicker behind my lids. Switches snap. I imagine a furnace coming alive. At..."

"Man, this is the"

"AT SENTENCE THREE my eyes start focusing on how the curves of the letters buttress against one another. A voice, a small, little voice, begins to wonder as deep machinery begins to warm. I can feel it starting, like its right beside me, closer even. I wonder how the words got here,  how they were chosen, THESE words, how were they picked and ordered, amidst all of the permutations and combinations, the literally (ha ha) dizzying array of linguistic choices for this. very. sentence here. It's a funhouse? Why these?..."

Chris' eyes were dazed as he stared down at the etchings in the table, though I really don't think he was referring to the FUCK YOU scrawled just north of his beer.

"Hey, man, that's the way it is. It's the choices that separate those that are and those that want to be. I would think you eventually get to the point where you feel more and more comfortable making the choices and stringing shit together."

"I guess." he mumbles, scratching at the edges of YOU. "When it's good, each sentence seems so natural, a natural thing grown. By the time sentence four reaches its subject verb agreement, the book goes down like it's on fire. Whatever I've just read, whether its a descriptive scene or bone bare fact, whatever I've read starts a cryptic chemical reaction that makes me grab a pen and paper."

"A fountain pen, I'm guessing."

"Hell yeah, a fountain pen. 'Yes, of course,' I say to as I find a notebook. All the lights are on now, and the pistons are slamming smooth. The taste of the last sentence is still on my tongue, and with a peal of rubber I'm gone. Sometimes it looks like what I just read, and sometimes the words take off on their own. Just a push. The momentum carries them, like drafting in car races, passing dust fields and highway dives. Neon seems to be a good power source.  Hooo! Over 3% grades, down valleys of pure energy, and shot fast through long stretches of asphalt and glass. They roadtrip into the night. Sometimes I wake up at the table. Think I'm in a speeding car, diamonds still on my windshield."

And with that last sentence I notice that it is, indeed, Tom Waits on the jukebox and smile.

"And then it ends. Out of gas, just like that. Wad shot. Feels like the words, language has been demolished somewhere back in time. They begin to fade and blend into the landscape. Nothing fits, and I am left with a pile of melting puzzle pieces whose edges no longer jive. The combinations don't come. I've forgotten how to arm the device, and there's so little time. The vehicle slows, as the rest of the world zooms by. I lose lap after lap. I get out and push in some pitiful act of desperation, but it's hopeless. I creep to an impotent halt. Crickets chirp, and what once felt like a child's trip to the moon has become a deadfast stump, immovable for centuries in the heart of a forest, beauty be gone. And like an addict I start looking for another hit. Wolfe. Capote. Bataille. Varese. Eiseley if I'm feelin' rich. Crews' hard scrabble plans or Mallarme's diaphanous vision of the opposite of hell. I scramble, scramble for something that might shoot me forward again. I feel fake or worse. I sit, staring ahead and feeling like some no-trick pony who can't even remember he's supposed to compete..."

And with that, Chris looks at me like his dog just died. I think there are tears in his eyes. He drains his beer and sits back, spent, empty, whole. I get up to get the next round, but he gets up, too. I figured as much. Happens every now and then. He's headed home, ready to try again, drafting weightlessly on the words I can still see floating in the air.

Time or Something Like It

 

It's a big, wide open field. Alone. Night. Frustrations and stars above and distant. Your smallness is clear. In it, maybe wisdom. But mostly you feel alone. you are sure if you only turned to your left or right, you would be able to remember a story that would help make ithis make sense. Crickets are chirping, and something in the horizon moves, and you want the loneliness to feel good. It moves again, but it doesn't. Maybe if you walk toward it.

It's more like floating. Maybe you're sick. Oh, a dream. That must be it. But you can't remember your fingers being this cold asleep. It doesn't matter. A small, nostalgic sting as you leave your spot for new ground. You've done this before, or at least that's the feeling. The new space you enter, the way the old one ages without you. Things die when you leave them. But you always leave. You want every option at once. Impossibility itself. You are a part of neither, just the space in between, like calling the airport home.

The distance you approach on the horizon isn't made of space. That much feels true. You're drifting from even your own thoughts, as they become part of the left behind. The distance you approach is made of time, or something like it. You feel too old to reach it in time. You've been here for so long, but the music has always been nice and has never stopped, but now, for the first time, it has stopped.

"New music." you say, first words in a long time.

But all you hear are your own feet, anyone's else's feet, shuffling toward the dark with the bravery of a child.

Murmur turn
Ascend and enter
All at once

Yes, things are falling around you. You've felt alone before, but not like this. Things are falling from you. Words like Earth and Dimension and Starfield seem more intimate now, less cliche. World, City, Time Zone are bougeous. You know you've changed, or the world has.

You are now landscape to everyone you have ever known, lover and family included.
Why is it all so distant? The question you wish made sense.
But this, too, just bubbles to the surface and is released into the night.
Just words coupled and offered in fear. They have no place.
Not here.
Not for you.
Not now.

(River) Lesson Learned

Happy to hear that my poem "River Lesson" will be published Jan. 5 over at Jellyfish Whispers.

Muscle Memory

Read a story at the cool journal, Still: The Journal the other day. I didn't think I was going to enjoy it. Haven't read in a while, and it felt like returning to some hip secret club where you forgot all the rules and handshakes and inside jokes that make being a part of such a group satisfying. I just read the words like I was assessing the first colors of the day. I didn't sense what was coming. A year ago, I would have. I would have winked at the foreshadowing, put it on the inner clipboard, and waited to see how well it was utilized to drive the theme home. I looked for gimmicks and techniques used like jazz hands pressed into paper. But now the words just came, one after another, and I didn't care where they went. Joy ride. Lazy stroll. But it was good. The story. It had a William Gay flavor to it I liked. Slow and southern with rust. Made me feel like my parents reading Faulkner for the first time or something. Felt like I was missing all kinds of easy ones.

But slowly the old feeling returned. There. Yep, I see it. Oh, and there. I started to recognize imagery and symbol. The story never rose above its intent, and it was appreciated. Years ago I would have disparaged it for feeling it was trying hard enough. But now, here, I appreciateed it, its theme and the way it was being carried out, achieving a kind of harmony with its nod to the past (literature and life), the tenuous present (with our hands covering our eyes), and the future, which for many of us growing older against our will, seems slowly to be arriving in shiny trucks and guns mounted and always loaded.

Some of the observations from this story started turning it back in its reader. Chig doesn't partake in dinner. He is the hermit, not ready to return. Rick has become a part of the world, which distances himself from Chig. The missing step on the stair, the danger of passing time. A hand over the face and the unwillingness to see what's out there. Takes the chance to leave his Eden only to try to return, before it is too late. So yeah, you see where this is going. I started to see myself as Chig. You leave the world long enough and you find yourself unable to go back. The dance continues, but when you decide to join in again, the feet don't move like they used to.

But like Chig, sometimes you find yourself being pulled back. You go because you feel it. You may no longer have what it takes to survive, but if you gotta' go, go trying.

Shifting Gears

I can see well on all sides. That was the first thing I thought. It wasn't like being reborn or being given some second chance, like I had imagined it would be. May. Might as well be my last life. That month I was truly feeling my age, both physically and psychically. I lost my job suddenly and found myself forcing to reboot in mid-motion. Stalled in heavy traffic. Watch for the cars. Search your mind frantically for the mistakes you made leading up to this clear punishment by the automotive gods. Everything not associated with survival gets tossed, and you start clamoring for means to get back into the flow. I managed to get the car off to the side of the road and popped the hood. Hoses. Steam. Twisted small pieces so obscure I didn't know if they had been made that way. I found a simple stalled car metaphor and put it in my pocket for later. It was stressful, but forced me to take some time to reassess: the direction, the road, even the vehicle itself. Maybe we should all break down once in a while. But that's not what I thought. I can see well on all sides. That was the first thing I thought.

I called friends to help, and they did. I called on the kindness of strangers, something many of us are pressed to do from time to time. I now call a few of them friends. The strange thing is none of them really helped me fix the car. Turns out more was wrong than that. They prompted me to explore, to consider and reconsider. I looked further than I had in years, sometimes even outward. I walked to neighboring towns and breathed their air. Eventually, every encounter, every locus, every soul brought something with them. One, a new carburetor. Another, fresh plugs and wires. The quietest person I have ever met showed up with a refurbished body. In the end it was a new mode of transportation entirely. When I was ready I turned it over and merged back into the steady stream which never once slowed. I immediately realized I was almost heading in the right direction. I chose a side street and decided it was right. It will never be the same. I know that. My outlook. My routine. I can see better on all sides now. And that is something I don't care to give up any time soon. I'm still on that side road, but trucking along at a better click than before. It's not a second chance. It's just changing gears and moving forward and realizing that is what it's all about. Only now are things going smoothly enough that I can turn on the radio, allow my mind to wander, start making the trip more than just about getting there.

Get Low (excerpt)

E V E R Y  O T H E R  S A T U R D A Y he walked down to the park to watch kids dare gravity on the monkey bars. Box elders and clouds framed the playground in a wholesome scene which drowned out thoughts of smashed noses and broken necks. The thoughts came anyway. Hot and fast and each time dark blood cracks down downy faces found their way inside, he blinked them away or thought of the birth of his son, the rare goodness that comes of blood. From the bench he watched dirtybright faces sprint in all directions, impossible speeds around slide and swing toward nothing but themselves in a Mobius strip of abandon. A perpetual motion machine made of laughter. The legs in his mind remembered the lurch, burst, and arc. The drive of the chase. He rubbed his knees at the thought of it. Prickly rushes of blood feeding quads and calf. It was a memory so vivid it distanced him. The simple sense it made to fight the wind with your face. The half shadow you find youself sitting in when you slow down. Nostalgia is a kind of running, too, he sometimes told himself. If that were true, he figured he should have corporate sponsorship by now.

His watery, bluegrey eyes still marveled at it all. A glimpse of them catching a glimpse of him in mirrors and close shop windows. What a weird old uncle they seemed to have taken up with. He could feel the wrinkles with a light brush of a finger or against themselves with every smile or wince. A boy in a skull and crossbones T-shirt shot past, leaving his would-be captors behind. The sight made his legs hurt. They, too, seemed to have been moonlighting over the years. Cheating on him with a marathon runner. The night shift with a construction worker, his hardened time all done. His knees reminded him that, by the way, they have decided to retire and any work from this point forward was going to cost extra. He knew it was natural to slow down, for things to dis integrate. Succumb to science and chronology. The body had, somewhere in the night, become closer to errant scaffolding, creakfilled and erected against some larger edifice that never seemed to get fixed. What once felt like a single, fluid system had begun to break into fiefdoms. Arms, neck, and back had become plots of land, purchased cheap and growing fallow. Through the seasons each one grew a little wilder, filling with weeds you couldn't possibly fight. Marshland pains. Strange and gnarly funguses on branches, rendering them unsightly and, in the end, useless. Old branches. Tensilelost limbs. He looked at the trees again over the playground. Brother trees. Sister trees. All the years spent growing up in forests, looking for a sign. Weekends in slow reverence around oaks and elders listening, watching on as the wind shared intimate moments with their million leaves. They never told him the secrets he was earning in the solitude he chose over a normal life. Waiting. Watching. Sometimes a prayer. In return only movement and the sound of waves trying to leave the tide. They'd said nature had the answers, if you knew how to listen. So he listened. And in the end he concluded he'd listened every damned way a man's ear can do it. If they do have secrets, they're sure as hell keeping them to themselves. And he knew with every passing year, his hearing would only get worse.

Dinner and a Movie...

“But you’re a preacher’s daughter,” he said.

“You’re a preacher. So what? Have you ever done it?”Nancyworked at her buttons. Mooney sat and watched. After removing her blouse, she turned her back to him and lifted her hair. “Unhook my bra,” she said.

Mooney reached and fumbled with the clasp. Then he tried with both hands.

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