Sense.

The man who could not speak had wandered in the snow for what seemed like centuries. When he finally arrived at the bar, he stepped inside swiftly and began gesturing at bottles of amber liquor. Although he could not speak, his drinking was unobstructed.

When the Jez arrived, Tom without words was preparing his instruments on the wooden stage. She was wearing a chartreuse nightgown that was far too elegant for the dive. She had been dropped off by her handler, a gaunt, shrouded man whose vulture nose stabbed out from beneath a hooded ebony sweatshirt. He stepped inside, walked the beauty to the wooden bar, and retreated to a bench in the shadows.

When Tom saw her, he leaned his cello against the slant of his thigh, crouched slightly, and began to play. He first said hello of course, directly to her. He then proceeded to describe the snow outside. He strummed of the long and frozen saga that a field mouse was experiencing underneath the very floorboards of this bar, the endless search for food and warmth and a continuation of the same. He spoke of those who knew the true meaning of January. He spoke of increasingly brittle whiskers, of a pale pink nose, and he asked her if she felt pity.

“Of course,” she shouted from the bar. The cello stopped on a dime. Patrons gasped and bobbed their heads in confusion. Mugs of beer were returned audibly to the glass surfaces of tables. “Of course I shall feel pity. But that does not mean I disagree with it. May it be gentle.”

It was a grace that she was not able to see the way the other men and women gaped. Their mouths dropped and sagged in confusion like baggy clothing. Somewhere in the darkness her handler twittered.

No, Tom replied with a few bracing high notes. There will be no mercy for the tiny and soiled rodents of the world. There will be death in the winter. There will be filth attached to the sides of their ribcage as they fail to crawl far enough. That must be accounted for. Shed tears, but it is the way things are.

She smiled, and obliged her consort. She imagined him in hale health, cleaving at logs outside a wintery cabin. She imagined him finding her buried beneath the leaves of an elm tree. She imagined anything. Liquid trickled from her eyes and down across her cheek.

Tom began a second movement. It was a trite topic, and one they had discussed before. In descending registers he made reference to his disability. He jangled and shook with anger as he spoke of the day of termination, that spring morning in the seventh year of his life when he lost the ability to generate words. When over a bowl of cereal shaped like letters, he lost his ability to form consonants of his own. He spoke of the decades of silence, of street corners and empty, leather instrument cases. He spoke of the day when he found a trampled ukulele in a subway car. He spoke of his christening, and his voice. He spoke of repeating the same sentences to strangers in stairwells of urine. Of saying, “Hey, come here, touch my arm. Hear this. Understand this,” over and over, and wanting just once, just once, for some sage or ocher faced monk of a man or woman to reach a bony arm from out of some tangle of rags and touch his weakened shoulder. He spoke of the confusion he felt at the end of days of work. Of not knowing what to do with himself. Of stumbling to the sorts of dark water holes that men seek to drink quietly and weep. He was never spoken to in these places, and it was a relief.

The lady at the bar had an inclination to shout, for she had her crutch as well, and every crutch has its very own ocean of shouting and punching and rage. But she knew how Tom without words would finish the song. She leaned her head towards the bartender. “Stay with it. It’s about to get good.”

The bartender grumbled in response and truly thought nothing.

Now Tom without words described a different sort of day, when from out of the rubble of subway grates, he asked the same question he always did. It might have been the case that the light was different on this day. That pillars of blank, yellow sun were penetrating more than usual, and that the smeared linoleum squares underfoot were experiencing photosynthesis for the first time. That roots beneath roots were devising an architecture fathomless. But in truth it looked all the same. It was indistinguishable from any of the other mornings on the subway corridor, and that’s why it was so surprising when, while reaching for an A chord to sound out a curlicue mark and articulate his familiar question, Tom felt a light pressure on his forearm and listened to the following words, delivered so lightly they might have been built out of fog.

“Why on earth are you asking? I’m a stranger. I don’t know you at all.”

Until Then

“The renunciation of lust is not the end of the event.” That’s what he said to her, leaning one of his stork elbows against the granite counter in the kitchen. “The renunciation of it is not the end.”

She turned and began to gather her things. Her mind was flat and without velocity. An empty mat of sand next to the ocean, being plucked and lifted every so often by a current that, if it had been asked, would have had the following to say about the evening.

“I could really give a shit about the whole business of ecosystems.”

Dennis moved into the living room and now grabbed the top of the doorframe. This was skill of his. The ability to, upon entering a new space, immediately bend his tall body casually into a corner. “I thought we had a word, or something.  That we’d agreed on. For times like this. To return things to before.”

Imogene turned and made a tisking motion with her lips. He felt motion in his pants. She noticed. “Boy, you are kind of an animal. You know that?”

In response he approached swiftly, and earlier events cycled backwards. There was an intense proximity. He looked as closely as he could at the junctures where individual hairs left her scalp. He tried to see if there was something in between pink scalp and brown hair, if there was some transitional layer, some mucus or, membrane, to separate the dead matter from the living, but nothing was clear.

She stopped and looked up and smiled for the first time in at least half an hour. “You’re crazy too.”

He smiled and felt proud. She saw this look of pride, and remembered. “I’m not doing this right now.”  She grabbed her things once more.

“Who would ever, if given a choice,” Dennis said. “Call hair dead and forehead life? Who would ever choose the skin of a person’s face over the texture of hair? Who in the fuck? If it came down to finding life.”

“What?”

“I did not mean to say that out loud.”

She sighed and made a movement with her head. He studied. “Why couldn’t you just do this right,” she said. “I’ve had a rough week.”

“What?”

“I said why couldn’t you be normal at dinner and then have sex with me in a way that was like cordial to both my existence as an agency-bearing member of the human race and my nature as an animal composed of deep, continentally shifting urges for strength and fury?”

“I don’t think race is really the appropriate word there.”

“Wow, you are looking for a verbal dropkick.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t need you to say sorry. I just needed you to understand.”

“I don’t.”

She turned to head for the door, but he leapt over the couch and past her to block the opening. “I don’t want our little back and forth to be done.”

“There isn’t anything honest about this,” she said. “This is an ugly consumption you are plotting.”

In his fantasy, he imagined reaching for her shoulder. He imagined his arm being brushed aside. He imagined her delivering a small blow to his ribs, and he imagined Imogene sprinting down the stairs of his brownstone and out into the street, and he imagined himself in chase. After several blocks or buildings, she would stumble or something and they would meet. But in this moment, she would turn and hold her arms straight and perpendicular to her torso, and he would do the same, and their palms would collide.

“I have more nice things to say,” he says. “I mean no harm. This isn’t what it looks like.”

And in response she would be calm and say “I know.” And in response she would be in fury and say “Leave me forever.”  And in response she would be in truth and say “I’m tired. I’m really tired.”

And when she said this, their palms would push away from each other with maximum force, and they would sail off, in opposite directions, untethered, into space.

He watched her retreat in his view, past the brick walls of the corner store buildings, past the Lego-Block skyline of Chicago, way out to the edges of the lake and further past that, to a place of deer and trees and running, of mushroom mouths and cellular growth. And there in a clearing she would lay down finally on the ground to sleep, and he would watch her from a distance. And he did not know this, but she was his mirror. From her position on the ground in this distant foggy world. She stared back with eyes almost closed, and what she saw was the same.

Acceleration.

Sometime soon after the song began, after the verse but before the bridge, he left the flannel shirted folks to his left and right and began to imagine himself a part of the jungle atmosphere. As a part of the first hunt a young cat makes in the woods, of that first instinct upon seeing a small rodent in a moonlit sphere of moss that declares to the world and himself most of all, hey, I will catch this. I can catch this.

As the guitar and drum flirt and dance around one another, accreting as layers of anxious soil, churning and roiling on top of one another, he imagines himself perched behind a large hooked root, his polka dotted hindquarters trembling back and forth with an as yet unexplored reservoir of agility, waiting for the tiny figure in his view to attempt an escape.

Suddenly, the guitar and drum recede into the darkness, carried away by an ocean wave.

Nothing makes noise for the longest time. The woods become silent. Frogs consider the temperature of water. Distant planets of gas move in orbit around the hot fist of the sun. Pluto, as always, muses about abandoning course, cutting its leash and wandering out into other realms of fused and blasted colors, where it will be at last forgotten by its family. A mournful humming is the only noise to exit the stage during these moments, delivered by the lead singer, now on his knees alone, rocking back and forth, offering a whale’s song for the morality of elements, for the senseless distance of space, hoping above all else that his youngest brother would make a clean break of it just this once.

And way down below, the cat remains perched on a coin of earth, focused now more than ever, not even within himself any longer, this feline, so intent is he on catching the small thumb-sized life form now marshalling its courage to run. He has become the space between them, the atoms of oxygen he will soon surge through and scatter like golf balls.

When the kick drum finally breaches the silence it does so like a military blast, and several things happen at once. The mouse rockets away, and the violin follows, moving at an incredible velocity. A thin willowy white arm emerges from behind a curtain, whirling like a manic painter, somehow touching chords with a chestnut bow. The guitar and bass, returned from the depths of the ocean, again apparent on the shore and chasing the others with renewed energy. And of course the cat, the young cat, definite as a boulder, hurtling with them. All of them sprinting like madmen, headlong, as fast as their muscles will take them, like drunkards cast loose from the swinging stomach-high doors of the saloon, glancing through alleyways of root, dodging under a roof of fern.

Things continue this way until after many minutes of pursuit, they are faced by a wall of rock directly in their path. Both pursued mouse and its predator are forced to brake suddenly at one hundred and ninety degrees, leaping and then landing, in an instant, on the side of the edifice.

As it does this, the cat feels literally the entire weight of the earth’s crust suddenly appear in its shoulders and move down its torso and into the bottoms of its calves. But the cat knows this to be a wicked force, and he knows that to submit to it is to be still, so he bottles that fire and holds it tight in the joint of his ankle, where it strains but does not escape. In such a fashion the guitar and violin reach a moment of inertia in the chaos, after minutes of dead sprint, where a turn is necessitated but heavy, and in this moment it seems that the very wood of the instruments will explode under the activity, and the skeleton of the cat along with it.

But they do not. They hold the stage, and pivot, and shoot back towards whence they came, alive once more.

On this stretch there are no obstacles to stop them, and minutes of blistering activity seem to stretch and warp in texture. A maximum thermal temperature has been reached, and certain instruments begin to loose their shape. The neck of the violin becomes softer, composed of a thick wood jelly that is bending towards the floor. Flakes of paint from the face of the kick drum cover the stage like dandruff. Specific organs and systems in the cat’s body begin to flutter and signal distress. Its lungs fire off adrenaline surges towards its muscles. The cat recognizes the urgency and moves faster still, expending everything in this final attempt to secure a meal. Something that is not located in any organ at all is issuing commands in a deep baritone. A second hungrier shape emerges from out of the sweet mist surrounding the first. It is becoming ghostly in its desire, and the mouse finally reveals its failure, and slows ever so slightly.

The lungs of the cat constrict tightly as it prepares a final leap. On stage there is no sense of whether or not the violinist is actually conscious. Her arms are continuing to move but she is rocking back and forth violently, chanting, eyes closed. The singer stumbles forward but catches himself on the microphone stand, steadying for a final yelp. The drummer has abandoned culture, striking the cymbals like he wants to kill them on the spot.

Finally the moment of attack arises as the majority of systems are spiraling out of control. The noise of the music is too loud to isolate whether any of the players have collapsed. Portions of the cat’s muscular system are locking up. His calves are cramping. He is not taking in oxygen. Blotches of color bloom in his visual field. He has not felt his paws in minutes. But then he is in the air, propelled and surging forward, and the music bursts through the hall doors and envelops the street. The planets spiral swiftly now, yanked by a leash.

When the cat lands, the ground falls away beneath it, in large chunks of continent, and the musicians are suddenly in empty space, revolving in perfect circles of disorder. Forms and colors lump and gurgle around their progress. Before they faint, they see images of brilliantly colored fish swimming up the sides of mountains, of building-sized candles relaxing into butter.

Let’s Call It A Missed Connection

I am riding the subway and this girl gets on, and she is like shake-the-binoculars cute, with a big plume of brown hair and the cutest little doll face in the middle, with like impossibly unblemished and smooth cheeks and these big brown doe eyes and this scarf that is like a bunch of album covers stapled together and dropped in a bucket of paint. And these girls are always wearing scarves, with like the prettiest colors and designs, and only sometimes are they about Palestinian freedom fighters (although aesthetically those scarves are immaculate). But this little girl’s scarf is like Jospeh’s Many-Colored Dreamcoat. Like she yanked that off his back and high fived Jesus and wrapped it around her throat for a trip to the farmer’s market.

I am looking at her with the holy-shit-are-you-cute, dumbstruck kind of glance. She looks back in an open way that tells me that she is not often the recipient of this kind of fawning look. Those who are frequently adored give a quick, cold smile. They look at you while they are doing this but they are not really seeing you at all as being distinct from anything else around you, and that includes the subway chairs that are made out of mystery fabric. For these models, these looks are as routine as a credit card swipe, and they plow forth into the rest of the compartment and the world at large.

But this girl, right now, totally doesn’t know that she is as bogglingly cute as she is, and she is like actually nice and maybe even pleased to receive the dumbstruck attention that unfortunately can only be delivered with about zero elegance or charisma. And she is actually reciprocating a look of at least passing interest in the shape of my face, and I am heroically resisting the urge to look behind me in the shameful way that a shy person does because they expect some attractive totem or like George Clooney dwarf to have situated themselves directly behind them, standing on the top of their backpack, generating this unquestionably-at-least-friendly-look from this girl of seismic cuteness.

And I am of course already thinking about how I would describe her in a paragraph, at this point, and am additionally happy that she does not know that I am thinking this, because it is admittedly a totally weird thing to be thinking, and literally something that could never be spoken without annihilating whatever it is that is happening right now.

As we pass the next few stations and enter Brooklyn, people enter and exit and this songbird and I continue to shoot mischievous glances at each other at sort of regular intervals. Of course the most exciting of these are after people have been standing in between us for several minutes, because once they depart, and both of us immediately search for each other again, it is almost impossible that we will not look at each other and at least know some of the contents of the other person’s brain.

I should make it clear at this point that we will almost certainly not speak to each other. That is an absolute given and is sort of a sacred part of this human agreement, and even the idea of this boundary being ignored seems uncouth and like a violation to the whole strange gambit. I am sure that if we had a nationwide vote on this, that we would all agree on this judgment.

The time draws near when one of us is going to logically have to depart the train and reengage with the structures that we have chosen for the day. This could be work of grocery shopping or something that has by definition no boundaries, like lolling around a neighborhood. The metro doesn’t discriminate activities, only travel, and a difference in these things in no way affects this totally strange and elegant transaction that this songbird and I have been orchestrating for the past eleven and a half minutes.

A point of interest to me at this juncture, and really the only thing I wonder about the whole situation, is whether or not the songbird also has a sense of melancholy at the departure that is about to happen.

My partner and I have not spoken any words to one another, so we could be classified as strangers still, and legally and logically this is correct, but we have also danced this totally complicated and elegant little dance with our eyes and our glances and the shifts of our bangs and whatever paperback we are holding in our hands but in no way intending to read, and that feels like a pretty intimate engagement.

That is something. Right?
Right?

And a synonym for the word “something” is “connection.” But now let’s think about accuracy, like envision what it means to be accurate. I am thinking about the cartoon version of Robin Hood casually hitting the bullseye of a target that is swinging from a chain that is connected high in the air to a huge boat that is both on fire and exploding at the same time.

Now think about the opposite of that. I am thinking about a totally sober and non-drugged out person missing their mouth with a spoonful of food.

So now think back to this eye dance that the songbird and I have just completed on the metro. Which of those two would you classify our dance with, if you had to choose one?

Totally obvious, right?

Any reasonable person knows that this kind of interaction, (by the way on the metro, let’s not forget the setting, which is like the mating savannah of the city, by the way, by the way.) But Ok, so this totally organic and blooming thing that has happened without any preparation. Everybody has to agree that the fact of this happening without mistakes and weirdness and god forbid actually conversations or even worse pickup lines, god forbid – we can all conclude and agree that this is totally difficult and in no way, shape, or form – missed.

It is completely accurate and would be totally impossible and insane to suggest as a way to behave if it wasn’t already literally bursting at the seams of every L train all around the world.

I look up and she is gathering her things to leave. The final glance always hangs a bit longer, always, always, always, and it is pregnant and full of liquid and movement and the millions of minutes we could spend together and that you really could spend with anybody if you tried.

Then she is gone and we do not ever see each other again. And it may be sad, but it is also happy and definitely, definitely, not missed.

This is a thing people accomplish, I remind myself, on cloudy days when I have looked at a bunch of photos about the atrocities of slums around the world. We are not just chopping up rain forests and hunting for money and sex and being big selfish creeps all over the place.

We do some genuinely innocent stuff too.

The Fly and the Television Set

The television screen buzzes. Reflected into the cramped and untidy living room is the image of the nation’s president. He presides with lips loose, smacking and bouncing like a ventriloquist dummy. The many, multi colored pixels of the old, boxed set arouse the façade of a pressroom, of an always starched suit. Were George to look closer he would find the suit to be a mirage, to be instead a collection of diamonds. Closer still, he would find those diamonds to be increasingly fuzzy cathode deposits. Lines that are not lines fade into buzzing auras of color. The TV up close is like a plane inside clouds that looked beautiful from the ground below. Up here, it’s just condensation. Its just water, just ordinary tap water.

The president is announcing a war on war. He is announcing a changing of the tides, a sacrificing of the old. A step from forest into field. Platitudes bounce down his chest and into newspaper columns already written in the minds of the weary, coffee drunk spooks in the first row.

George huffs in his empty room. Another president, another sunrise. They come and go like lunch. Sometimes they upset his stomach. Sometimes he forgets to eat at all.

The cat bounds into the room. It is chasing something, a black dot that moves and fuzzes. Thomas is an aging boy, but a cat never loses its quick step. Crouched, lithe, ears flat back against the stale air of the living room, the feline eyes its prey. George enjoys these dramas more than those that unfold on the television screen. On his carpet, sometimes the fly escapes.

For a moment, the insect rises and comes to a stop on the screen. It happens to stop on the president’s pixilated cheek, creating a mole, like a supermodel’s beauty mark. George smiles. The fly begins to move, and with him moves the Commander in Chief’s blemish. It is a mole on his cheek. Now, a studded nose ring. It is a bit of spinach on the bottom of his left canine. A cut from shaving. A bite from a mosquito on this bottom of his chin. A renegade blackhead from forgotten teenage years. George’s mind wanders, drifting with the fly that has become a transient tattoo on Old Number 42’s face. The president frowns, as if he knows that an insect in Indianapolis has just made him the butt of a joke.

But there is something about the fly’s blackness that is not quite the same as its background. Something about the tenor or quality which catches George’s eye. Something richer, realer than the hues of the president’s tie. Something that begs inspection. George moves forward out of his chair and to the wool carpet, peering closer. Thomas hisses and bounds off.

When his nose is almost at the set, George realizes that the fly has green eyes. A tiny torso and wings emerge into clarity. With a microscope he would see that each talon contains twenty-three fibrous bristles, and that the eyes themselves are covered in a thin fur. This fly is not a dot. It would be a shame to reduce it to such.

The Pictures We Have

Once upon a time, there was a girl who wanted to write for a living, to be an author. She thought that if she asked a famous writer (who will go unnamed) enough questions, and copied his habits, that she would become a famous writer too. So she attends a book signing at a Barns & Noble, and pushes her way past children and mothers and men with plastic bags. Finally her elbow makes the right sort of opening and out of the sea of flesh emerges a pocket, and in that pocket is the author’s face. He seems older in person.

Of course, she thinks.

A series of questions burst from her mouth. Where do you write?

Doesn’t matter, he says. Maybe in my office.

Do you face a particular direction?

I face the direction where coffee comes from.

Is your house cold?

It’s normal.

Do you have pets?

Irrelevant.

Do you have wives?

Exhausting.

Do you listen to music?

At this point he smiles wider than before.

“What was that?”

“Do you listen to music?”

“I listen to Blink 182.”

The girl who wants to be a writer gasps. She grasps at the many synapses clamoring in her brain.

Blink 182.

Isn’t that the band that writes songs about stripping naked and making prank phone calls? Isn’t that the band that laments the gas mileage of their SUVs? Isn’t that the band that complains about not having the right words? Isn’t that the band that her brother listens to because he is still in high school and believes that slow dances are more important than the millions of starving orphans in 3^rd world countries who get diarrhea and wiggle like dancers before dying finally in anonymous buildings of white? Isn’t that the band with the tattoos?

How could this man, this writer of fine sentences, this articulator of human subtlety, allow such noise to enter his brain as he writes? How could he hold a preposition in his consciousness while such drivel is clamoring for his attention?

How could he?

From out of the pocket of flesh, the author smiles again.

“It’s never looks like what it should.”

The girl who would be an author walks away from the table slowly, without a picture in her head, not knowing where to start now.

The Shovel Song

 

I let the hippie man tell me about a shovel
I let the joker man tell me about an angel
But it was, the preacher man,
who promised me a devil.
So when that bastard came,
I tell you I knew who to blame.
And where to pound the gavel.

Boy I hope it hurt.
I hope it crushed his nose,
I hope it made it spurt.

I heard a suited man tell me about a machine
That’s big and quick and sharp and green
But those words spit shells and sawdust dreams
And I was left without hills and without streams
I was left without hills or streams

But I told him mister,
I already heard it from a sister,
That trinket you got there
Is going to turn into a blister
It’s going to break your whole arm off
like a Kansas summer twister
Leave you red and crooked
like an unwrapped movie Twizzler

I heard a suited man tell me about a machine,
I heard a hippie man tell me about a shovel
The suited man told me I’d be slow as sin
That I’d never find the coin to feed my kin

And I’m in trouble.
And I’m in trouble.
And my son, oh my son,
He’s in trouble

That they’d starve on crusts and what would I do then
But I shot back at him
Asked him what he thought he’d do.
When he pays the man his due.
And his wickedness accrues
And sticks in his hair like glue.
And as I drink my whisky
And think, how could you be you so risky.
He’ll just rust and die

Cuz after all those crooked deals
Look at what is now revealed,
starvation bombs and trouble,
Unshaved chins of unclean stubble.
Empty stomachs, bourbon bubbles
And from out of that big rubble,
Of what had just been your machine,
Now its broken, gutted, cleaned.
I pulled out the splintery handle
Skinny as a bedroom candle
Out unblasted in the rubble
My old, trusty shovel.

Look At That Boy, He’s Got That Cheshire Cat Grin

I found him on his couch. Sunk sun drunk deeper than a human being’s body ought to be sunk into furniture. Pipe in his left hand, chunk of half-chewed brownie in the right. Dirty, corduroy bellbottoms hanging limp around a skinny waist. Pants bought from a store where people lay down their ketchup-stained burdens. Sebastian is his name. Olive colored soldier hat with a red star in its center. Oil smudged on his fingers from the grime of the untended trash heap in the corner of the room. The sparkling red, white and blue packaging of the real face of America, fifty odd bags of Cool Ranch Doritos. The detritus of a hundred sessions of the munchies, from that Bacchanalian pizza slice of the night when your appetite becomes the entirety of the wilderness, unchained and feral, ready to rend and tear into raw meat, ready to put aside the Puritanism of an orderly American life in order crack bones and drink marrow like milkshakes and just eat and eat and continue to do so until your jaw becomes exhausted.

But all the while, as the eating of cookies is pursued with the physical eagerness and insanity of like some of the more vigorous sexual behaviors, Sebastian is thinking literally the most stratosphere level thoughts about living and breathing and continuing to do so at all. I dare a priest to send off in the direction of a moon such an intensely felt blessing. To approximate the perfect orb of gratitude that a washout feels upon reception of that first, glistening, bite, of pie. And when it hits, when that morsel of food winds its way down the often traveled path of a man’s throat, Sebastian’s brain is clear as an August desert, and his whole entire self is consumed with the task of becoming a word, intensely, and completely, one word, and the word is this: yes. Yes to the world of ice cream, yes motherfucker, yes to this world, and that is something rare in a time like these, where kids who are still babies are summoning the depression to throw themselves off of metropolitan bridges.

Back in his house, Sebastian stares goggle eyed at the room, trying to match eyes with another peace drunk soul who will meet his frantic glance and say that yes, I too am having a feeling of like the most Jesuit sort of recognition.

And when the sunlight winks, Sebastian is just so ready to go off travelling dope high to every last suicide ward in the Western world, where he will sit Buddha style in the middle of a padded room and look in the eyes of every last withered soda straw of a person in say man, man, man, why you would leave a world like this? How could you? Why would you leave a world of food, and hunger, and its wonderful, wonderful reciprocal? Where the consumption of chocolate is like birthing an additional and recklessly smiling mouth on the inside of your stomach. And he is like not feeling an ounce of judgment then, but trying moreso the sort of thing where a person helps another to look backwards at the shapes behind them and to say, oh yeah, there is a structure over there.

And when he sings he sings his peace with the guitar string, and he is battling the carrion crows from the dismal days of October, trying to correct the ailments of a New England winter, of a broken heart, and to say, you man, you man, are not deaf, are not broken, are not lost, are not done and spiraling but are in fact held, and living and can kiss god with every little bite of every little snack.

And like the farmer, stoner Sebastian has a chosen hygiene upkeep of basically zero. He is the finder and the grabber of hands, the welcomer of new arrivals into the ever flexible diameter of a circle. Puller of all of ancient China out of his knapsack, kneeler and prayer of earth, tiller of soil, hummer of songs, swayer of dances. Yoga master with the opposable spinal cord. Doo rag and some bud in the sack. Eyes like a picture of Finland. Ready to get peaceful like angry men are ready to start war. Ready to be consumed with a radical pleasure at the temperature of the air in the sky on the porch on this night and not another. Truly present like only drug users can be, or animals. Ready to clap the shoulder blades of just about any life form that sidles up to the painted and chipped rickety tick wooden steps and say, yes man, be you crazy one eyed hobo with a paper bag of piss, be you Irish freedom fighter with a bomb on your stomach, be you sloppy child with gruel on your lips, be you literally the dirtiest and most certainly sexually diseased meth lab washout on the planet, be you a motherfucking businessman, the very figure of death itself, and Sebastian will still smile like you are his brother and invite you to join him in the sky. And his smile is full and wide and broken and warm, and it is on the exact opposite side of the field from a politicians. It is genuine as the ocean and as free as a sidewalk, and for no reason other than peace and kindness.

The End

“And we sat out together, the five of us, next to a fire that kindled and chugged underneath a blanket of stars that drifted among orbs of gas that boomed and scattered deep into the universe, and we followed their path with our fingers first, balancing on tiptoes so as to not disturb the general movement, deep out into the pure ebony sheet of the galaxy, peeling back the years that put hair on our chins, the nations that put water in our bathtubs, the rib cages that put roofs over our hearts, to a land of deer and trees and running, of diagonal angles, and winks, spiraling blackness and cellular growth. It was a land without weekends, without emails and debt, a land without memory, and the people of this place sat and sat and waited for the world to digest their shapes and become something further.”

She Would Shrug The Infinite Names

I remember something about Christina that stuck out. Even as she spoke it, I felt like I was inside her blonde head. I remember it now. It was dinner on one of the first nights here. We were talking about leaving America and starting a new continent without boundaries and with all of the niceties of the Northwest, and she said the following.

“I want to be able to go everywhere whenever I want.”

It was a startling comment, full of unrealized dreams. The sort of thing someone says if they have no idea about society or rules or family or responsibility.  The sort of thing somebody says if they have never bought groceries.

After rolling it in my mind for a moment, however, I realized that she was talking about travelling. She was revealing what was so attractive about travelling to her. It is an access to freedom. To run and swim and dive off of the sides of cliffs that stand empty in fields behind farms that see few young faces. To be able to shake out of a system. To resist the clampdown of debt, of the pressures that invisibly and insidiously work to tear the feathers from out of a bird’s wing. She was twenty-four, but she was also five in that instant, and perhaps five hundred and older yet. All she wanted was all of the control of her verb. All of the agency.

Let’s take her back. Let’s wind back the tape on this road rebel in her twenties, firm body in dusty blue jeans. Clichés tinkling around her neckline. So we go back. Rewind. She is a child again now, being told about the boundaries of the world for the first time. It starts with her house. “This is a room and not a space,” says dad and mom. “This is ours. That is your sister’s room down the hall. Finally, here is a combo. This side of the room is yours. That half is your brother’s. No, we don’t know why he gets the window, but it’s his and that’s that.”

Baby girl Christina can see all the special regimentations – names that were also spiders racing and reaching into the young girls brain. Fastening themselves to neural connections, making webs where open paths had been before. Where before there was naught, names boom out across the prairie. “This is the living room. That is the den downstairs. You can watch TV here, but not in your room, or else you are White Trash or a professional football player on MTV cribs. This is the dining room. This is the kitchen and the food is here. You cannot sleep in these rooms. You cannot shout, and if you begin to cry, especially if we have company, you must bite your tongue and run up to your side of the room and finish crying there. These are the spaces, and this is what a home is.”

“Wait, wait,” cries the child, eyes wide. “I don’t want these names.”

But there is no escape, and she cannot plug the holes because she cannot see from whence the names are crawling. She searches the walls, but there are no cracks. They come from your parents, who love you the best.

It does not stop here, the naming. With years it radiates outwards. Spider arms poke out from holes and corners of places you are just visiting for the first time. “This is a school. You learn here, but you can’t sleep here or you’ll be arrested. Here is your locker. Nobody else’s, so keep some secrets here. That is your neighbor’s backpack, which you may look at. That is his test, which you may not. Those are not your lips. You may not kiss them except in certain situations. This is where your body begins. This is the end of your finger, and this is where you end and the world begins. Permission flies around like festering fruit flies, ripping and tearing at the undifferentiated whole the child had been experiencing.”

The hounds peck out parcels and yards of different colors. We carve the world for our children with these names, just as we will carve their meat at dinner. Home. School. Ah, this, this is the road, dear. Spelled R, O, A, D. This is where cars belong. Over there is the sidewalk. This is where shoes belong. Field trips happen, and vacations, and exciting temporary treat places get named. This is the zoo. These pens are where the jaguar belongs. This walkway is where the tiny hearts belong. There is also a thing called a park. It looks like the zoo, and has some natural things, but not the jaguar. He is not allowed to be there, or else he is shot and killed by the state. He won’t know this, but you will. You are allowed to walk around without any gates at the park.
OK, now we are in a classroom. This is your desk. This is your neighbor’s desk. That is his lunch. That is not your own. Rules rain down upon the child from every direction. As she ages, she meets new places, each with their own nasty regulations. These are the woods, where people get to pretend that all of the spaces are still wide blasted open. But you cannot run out here in the dark, because nasty people like to dwell in the shadows and will remind you that this is also a space and has been claimed like the rest. You have to be back at your own home then. Ah, if nothing, the American child is regulated.

As they grow, they learn about social studies and the big community boundaries we draw. This is America. You belong here. The Mexicans used to, and owned most of it, but they do not anymore. This is France over here. They have their own history and their own culture and they do things their own ways with champagne flutes and famous philosophers and romantic men in black tights and red berets. You can go there sometimes, but it has consequences and you might not be OK actually so do get some traveler’s checks won’t you? Even later, you learn the final and most iniquitous lines. Gender. Sex. Power. Class. We’ll spend the rest of life talking about these names more than any of the others, but the older ones are the ones we lost sight of first. The difference between sleeping next to a fire and sleeping next to a wall. We can’t know this at the time, but the experience of childhood might be the downward extension of a million different colored bars. The smashing of one piece of glass into a million smaller pieces that think they’ve all got nothing to do with the others.

I watched Where The Wild Things Are this afternoon, and I spent the whole time wondering: What does this kid and these beasts think they are accomplishing in the woods, rampaging and rollicking about? What is the essence of that fun? Then I realized that being in the woods was the whole point. All the rest of the verbs that describe the scene might as well be burnt silly putty. They shape nothing. The point is the space, and the running. Wind blasting on both sides. Knocking down trees because why not? The woods are the last place that reminds us of that childhood mentality. That’s got to be why kids wind webs of stories out there in the hours after lunch and before dinner. Why they spend their Saturdays slaying dragons down by the creek. Why every northern child’s heart is drawn by the length of cedars that extends past the horizon in his backyard. The woods are unclaimed space; one of the only ones left. The last thing that’s singing out: Come, rejoice. Take diagonal angles. Hem and haw and flip backwards in unexpected directions. Be a wild thing. That’s what you are. Well, what you used to be.

“But wait, wait, wait,” cries the child. “Why do all these places have rules? Why does every space have an invisible black line drawn around it? Why do we name the edges of spaces? Why, why, why. Why can’t I just go anywhere whenever I want? I didn’t agree to this. I want to go everywhere whenever I want.”

I hear the child asking then, and I see Christina asking it now. She is not railing against nationalism. She is railing against space, against the enclosure of space accomplished by the rapacious glut of naming. The spider web of culture. She denies its conquests. So she becomes a traveler, which just means someone with little enough stuff to run when the water turns from clear to black. Someone who can pick up and go if the guy starts to hit her.

Let’s say something changes in the living situation or the relationship that threatens the bird. No problem.  She leans back and kicks her chair away from the dining table. She rolls backwards onto the carpet. Standing, she grabs her purse. The table is in uproar.

“What are you doing? You don’t belong on the floor,” we all say. “Its dinnertime. And you don’t even have a book down there.

What are you doing?”

She says, “I’m going.”

And they say where?

Where.

And she says, I’m just going, and she smiles like she is carrying a briefcase with God’s heart in it, because she still can run, and there are many who can’t. Pulse racing, pushing the truck into fourth gear, driving out into the night, skipping stones and shoelaces as you sprint down illicit train tracks into another urban center. Give me that verb in a shot glass tonight. I’m on the move.

Racing up and down the coast. To and from the same cities. Off to palaces in India that she dreamt about in PE class all those years ago. Back home again to cities that she just lives in and has no narrative thoughts about. Her friends and family tell her, “my dear, it appears you are going back to the same places more than once. Another trip up and down the coast? What’s the point? Another trip back to NYC, which she already seen thrice. Haven’t you already seen these, they ask?
“I am not going linearly,” she says. “I am not going between cities. From start to destination. None of that, I am trying to blast space wide open. To crush the names and the very letters that form the word “travel.” To get back to the unity that used to surround my brain in foam.”

“But aren’t you better off,” yells a philosopher. He’s late to the party, but he has some power. “Aren’t you happy to have named the things so we can have peace and society,” he asks?

“But I’m curious about the unity,” the child asks.

“Waste of time,” says the other.

“It isn’t. You don’t see the truth. Can you run?” She says. “Truly run.”

“No.”

“I can run.”

I, me, Sam Need, is not sure whether or not this is negligently whimsical.

I can see in Christina’s heart a mad desire to run. To loosen the old chain a bit. It is all of rock and roll in a single, solitary girl’s mad brain.