Ahem.
Ladies and ladies
Sexy uz who read me
I have a wha-
D-frame
Mainframe
Call it what you
Will
Anyway
Message reads
As follows:
From me
To uz
I’m thinkin
Bout
TV
With a
D tree
Train that is
Love polish
Goooood
Standing on the train.
Hip hop popping by.
All the people hear
my music zipping by.
Though I make no sound,
the ears of all stand by.
So the standing man,
writes magic while waiting waiting waiting…
…for the sides of the car to burst.
From people stuffed…
…not bombs.
None in NYC since 19-something-three.
It takes like a good 5 – 6 hours
Get alone
Get there
And
By golly
Do all those things
That are good for you
And you have lived up to
And practiced off and on
And abandoned now and then
Those things that centered you
Those things that peaceful-ed you
Those things that healthful-ed you
Those once, or twice, or a million times
Things you do love you love to do
Get alone
Take 5 – 6 hours
Do it all
In a row
That is the start
Of taking care of
Body Self Person You
You need it
Trust me
I do too
It is rare
Because it takes
5 – 6 hours
Who has that?
If I said one thing
It would be
“The nature
And power
Of the effervescent mind
Is clear
And I can see it.”
How?
you ask
How?
I noticed myself
Coming home
Always forget my camera
And sleep through the
Movie
So there
Future-face
Watch, and wearied one
I too think
That thinking about it
Is harder
Than living it
But
Know
I’ll Suffer
To Think
Of You and I
In Forward
Time
And you
Can’t Stop Me
The famous Sycamore of Nebraska, where the noble Wonton once prayed, now sits, as it always has, sitting. You might think, as K-Box, Faith, and I did upon approach, that the famous Sycamore of Nebraska was sitting in a field of snow. Upon closer arrival, we see, as you would have, had you gotten out of bed, inflamed your curiosity, had your coffee, taken a shower, and traveled to this most noble spot in Nebraska, that the snow is really just many layers of meditating naked white people.
Faith asks me, “So, you imagine that legions of naked white bodies would make their way to Nebraska to meditate under a Sycamore tree?”
I reply, “I just did it, didn’t I?”
K-Box is in the midst of the holy people, stripping. I throw a giant mushroom top at her, and she catches it in mid-air with the shirt she just removed from her body. The mushroom top floats, and K-Box hops on top of it. She starts humming. People around her shift and dip in response, positively annoyed.
Faith leads the people: “As you sit, imagine you are holy. You have increased your stature and prestige, and you are better today than yesterday. The famous Sycamore Tree of Nebraska is the tree where Chi-Buddah claimed magnificence. So shall you! Just imagine it, and it will be true.”
I think to myself that no one would ever say those things, so why does Faith say them. I walk up to the tree and touch its peeling bark. Dead leaves hang from the branches as new leaves grow in to replace them. I pick one of the dead leaves, and turn to show the crowd, but they are still meditating.
Faith says: “Breathe in and you are breathing in; breathe out and your are breathing out. Touch the native land of your heart. Touch the rooted peasants of your soul. Touch the retained energy of the patience and love that sits in your feet and courses through your body.”
The sun dominates the sky, and I worry for the naked bodies that are burning underneath it. Yet, Faith’s direction seems to bring smiles to their faces. They are unilaterally punctilious, and are shinier for it.
More and more from Faith: “Do you see, do you see my friend K-Box there!? The one on the mushroom! The one floating above you all? Look at her!” K-Box doesn’t hear this, and is eating her mushroom bit by bit. It rises higher with each bite. “Do you see the evidence that if you destroy your seat, you will soar? Do you see her going up and up and up!? Don’t you want to go go go go go up?”
I wonder again and again why I imagine this shit.
K-Box is soldering a gold bar to a silver bar while eating her mushroom. Faith is wandering around the naked people touching each head as she passes. The Holy Sycamore is old, and sitting. The difference between the tree and me is I am human and the tree is me.
Faith reaches the Holy Sycamore of Nebraska. She stares at it for three hours. By that time, K-Box is somewhere near the exosphere. I wonder again, why imagine THIS?
Particles of nothing smack me in the face and tell me to stop asking questions.
Mmm. Hmm. The chocolate seems to seep up and down, it’s glowing veneer calling something, perhaps a name, perhaps a food particle’s nightmarish decomposition. Yep. Another day. The apple she holds in her right hand is preferable to the orange she holds in her left for apple essence is joy and orange essence is recovery. Grapes, also available to our hero, are the essence of divine failure so it is natural that they are held in abeyance for the time being by her left foot.
In comes a man, in the shape of a box-shaped passion, perfectly rotund, carrying with him a bottle of fine champagne, ready and eager to make love to our choco-fruit eating hero, and ever-pleasant, so ever-ever-pleasant. As not a thought in his mind knocks, he approaches our hero, grabs a grape from her foot, dunks it in the chocolate, partially burns his finger, and eats the grape. The man, suddenly, and expectedly, feels ready to quit.
The woman, moaning a bit, feeling a bit sweaty here and there, grabs a strawberry, heretofore not mentioned, containing the essence of yeah-yeah-yeah, and feeds it to the man. The man feels a bit better, and he kisses her, though not too passionately, because he is bleeding from his fingers, and now his upper lip, and later his thighs.
Chocolate and fruit do a little dance, and hero-fruit-eater dumps all the chocolate on the fruit at the same time she dumps all the fruit in the chocolate. The grapes are forgotten, downright smooshed upon, as hero-woman and man-who-enter get on top of each other, and roll, and kiss, and sweat, and they make love like bitter tired enemies, with chocolate and fruit swirling around in their stomachs, and box-fruit-woman trying not to fart.
Rotund-man loves this woman, and he rubs his hand on her naked belly after he has cum, and slips and slides his fingers back and forth and around her bellybutton, and says the first thing that he’s said in a long time, which is: “Nice.”
The fruit spent, the chocolate, its effect, verified, the box-woman-dealer-fruit-lover, she is happy to have had that food, and that sex, and that comment, and that thing, are all grand like a royal outmeal, but a sneaky little desire to use the bathroom spoils the fun, and she leaves him alone farting on the way out.
They never talk about what happens when he is alone and she is in the bathroom, but we are present, sitting in a chair, bearing witness to the whole rigamarole. He covers himself with his blanket, picks up a remote control, and turns on the television. His face is suddenly lit up like firefly, but he is paralyzed by the fruit addition to his fat belly with hair. He worries that tomorrow he will have to do this again, and tomorrow he will have to do this again, and tomorrow he will have to do this again.
Our hero returns, clean butt-hole, and says, “After fucking you, I feel like I had one more day to die, but I refused to take advantage of it.”
Man, sleepy: “Sounds complicated.”
What he doesn’t know won’t wake him, and what she doesn’t know won’t spoil her, but in the end, the fathomless experience they both shared was similar to the feeling one gets when one puts on an old pair of shoes that one forgot had that weird thing that caused it to dig into your foot oh so so so subtely, but oh oh oh, after a day, a fucking blister, and you hate those shoes, and wonder why you keep them.
So they sort of hold each other, but, oh, eh, so, nicely tentatively, sort-of just barely awake staring.
I think the worst thing about all this is that the fruit was left out all night.
The very next day, he yells at some people. They look at him strangely as if to ask, “What is wrong with him?” She hates Monday, but doesn’t tell anyone, but she does treat everyone she talks at as if they were the reason she were unhappy. The worst part about this day-following-bliss is that the fruit was still left out, and so was the chocolate.
Eventually they make their way back to the scene of the passion, but neither really wants to say anything or do anything or speak anything. The worst part about this is that the rotund man eats the fruit that was left out, and the woman stares at the chocolate and regrets her life.
I’d scream for help,
But what good would that do,
What is wrong cannot be helped,
And no one is listening.
So, there, inside the face-crawling,
Pain-inducing,
Body-murdering,
Shell,
I wait, until, it passes,
But, oh, how I wish,
I had just
__________.
Face it. Face it. Face it. Right there.
You know, you can turn away, without actually turning. You can just turn. Just a little bitty turn. You don’t face it. But you should. You should face it.
But who am I to moralize? Who am I to preach? No one. Face that Robert. Face that.
The child, wily, smart, and loving, hovers over his mother, playing with his toys. His mother, Soda-Love, marches through her third day of deadly loss of normality. Has she eaten? She does not know. The child, thankfully, has had food, though at irregular intervals. Has she slept? She does not think so. The child, thankfully, has a child’s positive hopefulness. “Mommy, mommy, can I have an apple?” Mommy does not know what the child has said, but she says his name, and the child responds by saying, “Yes, what, Mommy?”
I stand there with Faith, wondering if there is something to do about this. Faith holds my hand, for once sympathetic. It is not time to debate her love for me, her birth, her life, her story. It is time to watch, wait, and learn.
The phone rings, and Soda-Love hears it, though barely. She breifly wonders if she is supposed to be somewhere. The child has opened the refrigerator, and Mommy offers up a measly, “Close-close-close the d.d.d.d.door honey. Make su-re, you, close it.” The child complies, and goes to a corner of the living room to eat the apple. Faith wanders over to the child and takes the apple, walks to the sink, and washes it. The child runs to his mother, but Mommy is rolling over on her side, singing some song softly.
I don’t know what happens next. Mommy gets up and smokes something, eats something, injects something, does something, and she stays up up up up, and the relief is palatable, because suddenly the room is filled with softness, and the colors and light are washed out. I don’t want any part of it, but I wander over to Soda-Love, and for the first time in a long time, I do something. I touch her shoulder and ask her how she is doing. Soda-Love looks at me and mumbles a greeting I cannot hear. I ask her if I can get through to her. I tell her that her child needs her. She smiles. Faith is listening, I can tell, but has started to answer some question the child has whispered. I see that Soda-Love has fallen asleep again.
“Faith,” I say, “have we not realized that nothing can be done? This has been put on the earth to steal awareness and to destroy, nothing more. Even the smallest comfort is a step away from here and now. How do you teach people that pain, death, failure, and loss is…”
Faith, concerned, from across the room, asks, “The loss is what?”
I shake my head. I don’t know what to say. Soda-Love–God, how I hate calling her that, the entire situation seems so idiotic–is staring through me, giggling and singing here and there. I wonder why why why why why?
Faith asks, “Why what?”
“Faith,” I say, “If I do nothing else in life, I will spare my child this. How old will he get before he discovers what his mother is? Who will he become?”
Faith sighs. The child has thrown the apple across the room, and is asking his mother if they can have some macaroni and cheese. Mommy grabs him and pulls him to the ground, hugs his small body to her, and says, “I love you, I love you, I love you peanut.”
Love. Heh. Funny how that word can veil the vilest poisons and the deadliest relationships.
K-Box, standing all alone, stares at a box on the ground. She is wearing protective clothing that will keep her safe from a detonated nuclear device. The box is covered by a purple dress, with instructions on how to dismantle inhibitions written in some ugly font on a torn piece of paper taped to the dress. K-Box yanks at one small corner of the dress, and then leaps back one-hundred feet, doing three flips on her way back. She lands without a sound but the “Heeeeeeeeeyyyyyyaaaaaaaa!” that she bellows like a falcon. The dress falls down to the ground shortly after. K-Box stares at the dress, though I think she should be looking at the box.
Fire erupts from the sky, and a cadence of music soars from the dress as it is burned passionately.
“Eat that purple peace maple beam. Boxes will never defeat me.” And with that K-Box takes a hammer from her back pocket, lifts it into the air with both hands, charges the box, and, with all of her might, smashes the hammer into the box. No resistance meets the hammer, however; both the hammer and K-box, the latter shortly after the former, hit the ground. They both lie there shaken.
Faith, at an ice cream stand close by, offers some advice: “Never shake a shimmy. Never laugh the lot. Never open it sideways. Never bop the bop.”
Why no one, the millions who walk by on their way here and there, do not stop, I’ll never know. I stand there hoping that one of them will see me. I am across the street. K-Box and the box are near a wall near a building across from me. Faith is on the corner not far from K-Box. I am stealing top hats as fast as I can. I imagine that I will run across the street and introduce myself, and I will be hit by a car. A fitting end for someone who has good news to impart. So I remain standing.
K-Box gets up.
Faith sells ice cream and eats ice cream. One for her; one for them.
I scream.
The world stops.
I hold up my phone. I say, “See! My doing! Fuck you Faith!”
You know Faith. She isn’t disturbed by things like that. K-Box wanders over to the ice cream stand. Faith serves her ice cream. A demon appears down the street, screaming, tripping, and breathing fire. Faith and K-Box look up. Faith throws ice cream like a martian into the mouth of the demon and that cools the fire and the rage. But what K-Box does is tremendous. Defying both the laws of gravity and Faith, K-Box walks up to the demon, spits on his toe, and jumps into his bellybutton. A head, through the shoulder of the now-paralyzed demon, starts growing. It is the head of K-Box. Fire erupts from her eyes and mouth. I yell out that there is inconsistency here, but K-Box turns her giant head to the head of the demon as if she does not hear. The head opens her mouth so wide that her head is split in two. She swings her open head onto the head of the giant demon, closes her massive jaw, and eats the demon’s head in one gulp.
This is too much for me. I’m neither ready for ice cream nor demon murder. Or am I? Why aren’t I up there doing that?
Faith: “One step at a time. One step at a time.”
I spit: “Fuck you Faith. Trying taking yourself from negative 50 to 500 in the same amount of time as someone who starts at 400 and reaches the same point. I’m standing here, across the street, observing, sure. But I’m standing here no worse for the wear. Judge me all the same, if you wish. Where would your precious clarity be without the advice that was imparted to you?”
K-Box is wiping her giant head with a napkin.
“I like this body,” she says.
I want to have a meeting, but I’m afraid that people will think I’m being political, so I just walk away and the let the demons sort it out.
So, I’m having this discussion with K-Box, but she keeps building stacks of colored blocks and dancing around them. With every stack she makes, a new sun appears in the sky, and she seems as surprised as I that I am not joining her. My muscles are…hmm…I was going to say weaker, but, they are actually stronger. Somehow, standing around this intriguing person, I am suddenly thrust into balance: I find myself looking, feeling, and speaking confidently, walking around with my back straighter, and not wondering or worrying about success, because somehow just standing here is enough.
There is, at the end of any paragraph like that, a fall. Here we screech as we notice that the number of suns in the sky is too high. Our bones break as we wonder why we cannot stop K-Box from stacking stacking stacking. The color of the air is too fuzzy, and we cannot breathe. So we do, so we are, so it goes. We expect it, so it happens. We want it, so it disappears. We chase it, so it chases us. You and I, dear reader, are closer to the patience that we seek than we first imagined when we jumped up and down and wondered why.
Faith is there and asks me why I do not stack blocks. I say I prefer to write about stacking blocks. Faith wonders why the sun scares me. I say many suns scare me, but not in real life, just when I write it. In fact, having something to write about comes more from whimsy than care, I say. Faith kicks me and asks me if that hurts. I say that it is easy enough to pretend like it does not because it never really happened.
But you know what hurts, I say, to an audience of millions. To write. To say. To speak. To share. To do. To create. And to have silence confront your words.
Faith says that sometimes silence is the most powerful response.
I say that sometimes is not enough.
K-Box takes cover as a million stars fall from the sky.
My last thought is about karaoke.
And then I have one about stew.