SIGNALING THROUGH THE FIRE
1.
There is a sad tune playing in the melodica of my heart. You can blow air into me. It is not a toy, though, it can be used as one. It is an important organ.
I touch the hard green shell, I say, ‘This is a soprano,’ pointing at my chest. I am hard green where air moves through a space.
I stood in the shower until the hot water ran out, then continued to stand in it.
This is an old story, you’ve heard it before.
2.
I contort myself to the point of release. It is almost a release to watch my body from outside. I don’t have a body anymore, how can I?
I want to be annihilated in an expanding cloud of shapes. No one has observed a point. I will be observed as triangles. Onlookers discern what I was with careful inspection. An eye, the curve of a forehead, come in and out of focus in the pitch and yaw.
The bottom half of me is there, naked and intact for the purposes of humor.
3.
I passed by the train station earlier today. I thought, ‘I have enough money to take a train somewhere far from here. When my last direct deposit comes through maybe something will have happened.’ I walk the rest of the way home with a rock in my shoe.
Later on, I stare down at the pavement so hard the glasses fall off my face.
4.
The ceiling, no longer an object of contemplation.
A flash of yellow snake at the ankle.
My desert is empty desert.
5.
I walk outside in the light of the moon.
The phone denies me three times.
I lock and unlock
the screen door.
6.
There are places just outside the house. You can look up to a nearly purple sky. Through the fall colors of leaves just for an instant, a shadow.
Some things are not ephemeral on the human scale. The sun, the moon, the hurt that follows are three truths. I sit waiting at the edge of dusk, without expectation.
7.
Today I made nothing, I was there for it though. I lay down on the floor trying to get as close to it as possible, feeling surface between the room and the rest of it.
The half open window above me. The surface of the face with cracked eyes staring out vacantly. The blue glow of the laptop at the other end of the room.
Where I just was, eating a hard pretzel feeling the mashed up grunk in my teeth for what seemed like hours, but was only a few minutes.
8.
I ask my debt collector if the money I owe is holding us both hostage.
‘If you don’t pick up the phone,’ she says, ‘I will leave a message.’
9.
I walked past the prison downtown. Nearby people stood outside the homeless shelter, moving from one building to the other. I throw out my cigarette. I hold my coffee. It’s warm and my hand is cold. The coffee is something I have.
As I pass through the crowd a boy navigates it, approaching 12 o’ clock on a mountain bike.
10.
I’m reading the Little Prince. At the end the Little Prince dies of a snake bite in the desert. Earlier in the book, an elephant is swallowed by a boa constrictor.
11.
I’m walking to somewhere far from home. I have some lines, nothing to write them with. I reprat them silently to myself, I get to where I’m going.
By then I’ve started to believe it. When I get a pen in my hand I throw it out, I keep repeating them. I’m doing it right now.
12.
A fire alarm goes off in my house. I look for the fire escape but there isn’t one, the house is old and close to the ground. I close my eyes and listen until it stops. The sound contained no lessons.
13.
In the dead cornfield none of it is really dead, it’s just the off season. New shoes I wore through it caked with mud and breaking. What is left snaps into the sole, not really dead, and sticks there.
14.
Out by the old house is a pile of rocks which is the foundation of the house. It is hard living in a house that exists in parts. That piece of a door over there leaning against a tree.
In life it is hard to speak outside of human measure, unfortunately I must speak. This is a house I have visited over the course of my life in stages of disrepair.
15.
By the side of the road I watch the car crash. Not the one in my head, or my heart. This one involves other people.
Someone pulls someone else out of a crushed piece of something.
My head says no, my heart says no, not about the crash though, something else.
