2 Polaroids of the South, 2009

The sun hunches itself elderly over a line of oak trees behind the old storefront, while a man watches shadows grow sleepy and yawn themselves into the dirt. Neon stutters, abetting the twilight. Bats, like the dead of summer, dart above cricket drones from the darkening wild wood.

He stares at the Coke machine, at the cloud of insects around the bulb overhead. Not even they, in their heated electron swarm, can make movement on an evening like this. Resolute in its stillness, the air is a statue in the park, parting words you can't take back.

But in his head there are explosions in the sky, soundless and unseen and worlds beyond it with no idea what they have coming.

The Double Complaint (Laforgue Remix)

I.

"What comes, when all else fails?"

I thought it would be me you would come for. Instead, you tempted. Sure, Death. Ahead of your grainy caravan you sent your damaged angels in reconaissance. But you never asked them what they wanted. Seems they had grown tired of brittle hues, longed to embrace the defiance they sold. They found me waiting. I, so full of wet life. Of course they stayed.

In truth I never knew
Death needed needed so many.

So now you arrive, but you've wasted your time.
Your data is corrupt. I'm not fit.
Keep banging.
Hammer out your first complaint.

II.

"The dead are discreet. They sleep in a cool a place."

You had too much to do. I understand. Sure, Life. Before the heated angels' mutiny, I was also too cold. Perhaps I was too still for you to notice. I must have been nesting. Huddled beneath the racing level of the world, digging a little deeper for gold, I found sharp stone. I bled myself into a divine recepticle.

Sure, Life
I hated.
Unnamed objects and sections of time
reached for me. I felt my first friendship
with the nothing that lies beneath the lie
of the world.
We played elaborate games.
We both lost.

But that's old news.
One learns.
I heat it up.
I wrestle the sweaty bodies you abandoned, which now
abandon death. Now this is no cool place.
You are present only in the refraction of laughter.

Death has come for me.
Everyone here laughs,
moves closer. I tell him I'm coming
and we depart.

He complains I've no right to do this.
We just laugh louder as we sneak out the back.

We, his Angels, never told him.

The dead?
They travel.

*

P.S. Pic by Kristel Schneider (http://kristelschneiderphotographyblog.blogspot.com)

The Source

He wiped his brow with the back of his greasy hand before continuing his
walk up the hill. His feet throbbed inside his dress shoes, but the music coming from behind the wall of trees ahead pulled him. Slow and warped it sounded like melting glass. A redding sunset on the tide. A snake decided against him and slid toward a nearby tree stump.

When he exited the thicket he saw the house, a shack really, complete with rocking chair yokel on the porch. The music which had drawn him here was emanating from beneath a pair of glassy eyes staring ahead. A teen, by the look. There were no instruments he was surprised to discover, just a voice which stretched and shook and trebeled as if it came from an old '78 through bad speakers. The man stopped just to hear him better.

A large woman emerged from behind the slapping screen door.

"And what can I do for you?" She asked, half hospitable and half in warning.

"Afternoon. My car broke down on the road down below. I heard someone singing and headed this way."

"Well, we ain't no garage, but you can use the phone if you like."

Continuing to allow the boy's hypnosis to affect him, he had almost forgotten the reason for his trek.

"I gotta' tell you, ma'am. That boy has got a set of pipes on him. I ain't heard nothin' that sweet in years. You should get him into the city and cut a record or something."

While the boy continued to sing, staring off into the tops of the trees behind the man, the woman replied.

"Bobbie? Lawd, he ain't no musician. He's just singin' th' blues."

*

Toward the River

What is it that we can become
Allowing ourselves the long hours
Of the years?...

How small and sweet I was. At 10, a true maple leaf with feet and a tousle of blonde curls. Going to school was just a stayover. I would soon begin to shake my head at the madness of the world, but for now things made sense, and everything you needed to know could be found in a long walk in the woods toward the river.

My imagination could not have been legally separated from the fantastic, simple universe of nature. In private I always wondered why such a big deal was made out of leaving one to enter the other. To me each was merely an extension into a complimentary realm. Inside my most shadowed scenarios and personal fairy tales lay a dimension green with gold, where trees were to be felled or climbed, and bodies of water were sensual without being sexy. That was enough for the man inside waiting to be born. In turn -- a trek down familiar paths, past charmed stones initialed with secrets and following a small brook that emptied its fill daily into the mighty Mississippi. This pilgrimage was a regular one, but by no means common. It was an active meditation of movement within the cloister of the wood. With a grin I would navigate my thoughts, my distant and strange dreams, with a respect the forest deserved, a joy-filled reverence for the infrastructure of Eden. Looking back I realize that here the young heart was as it is modeled in Heaven. Love here is the kind that does not fade. Hope is made of something for which we have not yet created a word. This place is a takeoff ramp. It is a wondrous world in which to mold the things that sustain you for the rest of your life. It is unnatural anywhere to remain in the womb. If we are fortunate, we receive here the vitamins needed, absorbing the deep, invisible love of the mother, vital to our emergence into the harsher air as man and woman.

At 41 I have come so far from that dreamtime, only to feel the road begin to wend and the air start to arc back while still emptying out in the future. The path of life is not circular, as the adage goes, but spiral, placing us regularly on the same axis but on another plane. I have come to believe this is so we may repeatedly regard the pivotal moments in our lives from multiple perspectives.

Should we succeed in this, we may just piece together enough to understand the whole of our journeys and laugh as we each make our own way toward the river.

Flesh Out

Her hips navigated the crowded formica deftly, banking high at the turn and counter-balanced by three or more bowls of the vicious-looking stew they served. Rare brisket floating face down in the deep end of something eternally referred to as "the special." The rest he could handle, double-barreled egg rolls steaming atop rice noodles, green onions and cilantro.

His eyes held her a little longer than usual in his sleepy gaze, giving anyone watching a hint as to his next pleasant dream. A regular who ate everything on the menu with a fork, he'd awkwardly strike up conversation with Gina whenever possible. She'd learned his preference for S151 over S150 and why. She'd heard bits of his life story between the holy basil and the fortune cookie. The fact was she felt she had probably gleaned more about him in the last six months than his own mother knew about her boy now. She feels him watching her even when she is preparing the Cafe Sua Da behind the counter, her ego waffling between flattered and disturbed.

He'd spend countless meals downing Asian Fusion and working out why her lower back hides behind what will eventually turn out to be a Rohrschak dragon. At $7.25 a pop he gleans everything he can about her. He'll use up all the rules he ever learned in bars from Frogtown to Uptown, from the failed parties that never stood a chance; and not once will he see that here a whole different set were in play. It's like war. Each side throwing down not the best card, but the next one, either to be taken prisoner or to prove that the value of what you have is wrapped up somewhere between chance and timing.

With her it wasn't so linear. With Gina it was a complex network of connections, visible and opaque, which branch out and double over like the family tree hand-drawn in her uncle's room. Rules of clan and color-schemed bloodlines. Infinite walls to keep the in in and deviations of body logic outside, out in the world better left to its own.

Great Experience and the Next

The Vita.mn Summer Fiction Contest reading event at the Brave New Workshop in Uptown on July 29 was a great experience. I met Christian, the host along with other local figures in the local lit scene. The cafe area was teeming with small cliques, darting eyes taking mental notes. I half expected to see Capote in a corner holding a group of fans hostage with his effortless tales of the scene.

The top ten finalists read their pieces throughout the evening, and they were all enjoyable in their diversity: from dour and earnest to laugh-out-loud funny. I was in extremely good company.

Yesterday the new issue of Vita.mn was published. I was the 2nd runner up, and my story was published along with four others. You can read them here.

The whole experience, a rare one for me, has been heartening. I feel I have the confidence to put my work out there the way I should have been doing all along.

What's next? Walrus Magazine's "Guilty Pleasures" writing contest. Participants are encouraged to write a gripping/titillating/action-packed first paragraph of a novel in one of a list of genres. I submitted something last night. The genre? Western! More here.

VI. Cirrus

On the side street to my left, Locust Avenue, I see passing thoughts gather in corners to be swept away by street cleaners and the violent storms Autumn has coming.

A group of teenagers approach with the scowl typical to those who know how much life hates them. They look cirrus, stopping when they reach me, and their communal angst recedes into comical interest. A small victory is needed and making a stranger uncomfortable is as good a win as any. I do not fault them for this. It is a trait I can almost remember.

"What's your deal, dude?"

"You. All of you. The street you're walking down."

A look of confusion crosses them, except the speaker - the apparent alpha - who tries another tack.

"Reading books, huh? Let's see one."

I can see it in his eyes. Rumors that smell of arson. Dogs kicked in face of defiance.

"I can't." I reply ruefully. "It is not the way."

He pauses, silently finding his way between my clear refusal and the notion it might be for good reason.

"These are the words you may read, but this is not how you are to encounter them. This is the short cut in the woods best left untaken. You are the future, the whole future, and you have to come upon these things at the right time or not at all. We can't fast forward the natural progression. Us meeting, right now, is the clue you have to make due with. It may be three, seve, or even ten years before you discover the connection. But if there is any hope for us at all, you have to be the ones to figure them out. It is a slow riddle told over the course of time and only as a result of your own actions. I just figured out one meant for me, just now, before you walked up. I discovered the last part here on page 73. Let me show you..."

With that I read them the passage aloud, ensuring they understood all the words and the meaning of the word 'coda' before closing the book.

"I first discovered this notion when I was 8, while on the playground. It stood, as it were, on the other side of the street, and I could barely make out the colors of its clothes. It wasn't my time to understand, just start the process. Only today, today, do I make the connection meant for me. You look at me now the same way. You see my suspenders, my linen pants. I look like I'm from another time. It bothers you, ever so lightly. But now the connection has been made. Now your fuse has been lit. Now you are to walk to the end of the street, take a left or a right and continue to countless more years before the circuit completes itself. Only then will the light catch and shine for what you have been waiting to see. Thank you, and good luck."

With my monologue finally over, the lanky leader laughed a single breath before ushering his platoon further down the strip. With bravado and headshaking I watch as they catch themselves in each storefront window they pass, checking for biceps warped in the hope of glass, a carriage rooted in backbone, wondering perhaps if in the next or the next they might grow older or at least a find themselves little closer to becoming.