Alien climes (Washington Park and downtown)

We lunch on what's left of
a child's birthday party--

a bag of Ruffles trayed in
an empty box of copypaper
set by the trash can

The remnants of a picked-over
fruit platter, pineapple baked

through the clear plastic garbage bag
in front of the old elephant house

Its dented sheet of steel bathroom mirror,
its snug, just-elephant size

Down the hill, we skirt a young mother
spanking her three year old son

She asks him, See, we don't yell at each other?
and we cross the street to pass her

The same fallen dolls left on the lawn
of the park have risen into red dresses on our way
to get donuts and a woman, mouth spattering,
throws a lit M80 at our feet from her speeding car

Worlds explode. Ask the girl with the
tree branch we met the other day and invited
into the pizzeria. She can only say

murdering me, it's not funny, my boyfriend, this music,
they are killing me, hot poison. Chews breadsticks

Boils over with tears and wants our numbers, holds out
her phone, says The phone is real, see? What's more real?

and we have no answer and you will revisit us later,
though we'll never see you again

We pray you stay away
from the cops and your mother

We can only repeat no no no and
turn away and leave you

Rites

Right now it is still freeboxes belching out soaked jeans
and musty baby jumpers, Frommers guide
to Italy bloated and wavy

When the sun proclaims itself
in August, I'd imagine, it is the garbage
that is the dazzling flag and bolting lettuce and for
a few weeks, we get to parade around our tits
frisbees, park books and kittens appear

Oh sunny paper napkin closed around
the orange-seeping bones of chicken wings
set on the power meter mounted to
the dumpster enclosure
near the eyebreaking collage of
festive color on the county elderly rec center

Looked like an old diaper
or a greasy flower peeling open

Automotons

He saw her on the mover, slouching in her sling, the suspended piece of cloth supporting her weight. Her face was blank and rubbed out. Her eyes showed nothing.

People took up all the slings in the mover and the ones who didn't get a sling velcroed themselves to the walls of the car with large, rasping straps. He wondered why they didn't make all the automatons take the velcro straps. Or ride in compartments above, like old skis stacked into the rafters of a garage. Or separate cars altogether. Merm was an automaton himself, so these thoughts didn't upset him. It just seemed like it would make sense.

The woman he was noticing was an automaton as well, one that was run down and in need of rehab. She was positioned awkwardly in the sling. She was rangy and in an uncomfortable position. Her bones were sharp and looked like broken wood. She was breathing evenly, but looked like it was hard for her to do it. The people near her were uncomfortable. While an automaton had never attacked a vitamaton, vitamatons were generally uncomfortable with automatons, although they never directly said this.

The mover was gliding into a stop and jets of air billeted the car. People were wobbling around in their contrivances. The woman didn't appear as if she knew that they were stopping, or that this was the last stop on this line. Her hands went to her scalp and she smoothed back her hair, pulled at it slightly. A dull hum came from her. The vitamata around her looked at their shoes and gave her a wide berth as they got out of the mover, down the steps that led from the elevated track and to the pods where their bubblecars were parked. When vitamata left Terrestrial, they ascended up to their great masses of podclusters that floated up in the high atmosphere like spinning diagrams of molecular structures. Automatons went to the tenement cities that looked like the waxed cardboard takeout boxes of Chinese food. Then morning came.

They were the last two on the mover. A little recording of a bell was being played over and over. The doors were open, exposing the night. He moved the slings aside and walked towards her. Her eyes ballooned and he saw her faded, pink irises. He thought she was going to scream, but she just said, looking him in the face, “I'm dying.”

Humane is a Sentiment

There's a cat in my neighborhood that I call Gruddy. He's orange and white, with a mis-shaped head, like his skull slopes down one ear to the other, not quite a dent, but certainly something. He is filthy and his eyes are a misty yellow-green. I always see him at this house with boxes and old trash on the front porch, hand-lettered signs taped to the screen door. I sort of want to pet him, but in reality, I definitely would not. He's not into the idea, either. Every time I come around the corner of where he lives and he's there, he just sits and stares, intensely. Because he's so fucked up looking, I can't tell what the look means.

I've lived in more well-heeled neighborhoods and in those, you get well-loved, almost disturbingly friendly housecats that run off their porches and flop around under your hand and squawk when you crouch down to pet them. Up here there's an abandoned house on a lot where a whole colony of strays live. People leave tins of wet food down there and with what they can glean from rats and garbage, they maintain some sort of population. But they're a bunch of skinny, wormy, skiddish things. They stay pretty well hidden. A bunch of old, derelict property has been torn down around here, so their range has been shrinking. But as long as there's food, there will be kittens, tucked away in the grass and old car parts on that lot.

I was on a trip abroad with my family. I was reading Amy Hempel, coincidentally. We saw a spectrum of stray dogs (I think stray cats would just get eaten-we didn't see any) and everyone really responded sympathetically, although it was apparent that, where we were, there were different values at play on how to deal with animals. Where we were, I met one person who had a toy poodle as a pet. Mostly, you kept a dog in your courtyard for protection and ignored the packs that roamed the neighborhood. I never saw anyone being cruel to any of these dogs. Most were acclimated to people, too. These same places had mothers sleeping with babies on cardboard, on the sidewalk. People with fucked teeth and open wounds begging around the ATM, which was manned with guards holding semi-automatics. People we see at home, who became more vivid because we were not.

I think I recognized that you can pet a dog and have a more immediate, straightforward interaction than you could have with a person. You see a stray and have a clear concept of what it is. You never question a dog's values. I've been around too many drunk discussions about poor and homeless people, so I know the assumptions that get trotted out about how and why those people are the way they are. In this way, too, animals are entirely innocent, they make no choices, whereas people are not. You can openly empathize for the hard life of an animal, which is easy. Wrapping our heads around the sight and pervasiveness of human poverty is different. It requires rationalizing the continuation of an inequality that is central to the makeup of our society. We bemoan the kind of welfare we have to extend to people, giving pocket change, for example, and our solutions don't go beyond shelters. Sterilization, which we use on animals, seems like a sound solution for poor people if you're far enough from the problem.

I wonder what happened to Gruddy's head. Did something fall on it? Did it damage his brain? Does he go out into the neighborhood at night and stalk, like other cats or does he stay on the porch? If he got really sick, would his people take care of him? Why doesn't he clean himself? I mean it that I wouldn't pet him. And it's not about love or attachment. I've taken in strays before that I've given up (or they ran away). I talk to people I know and they assume that I'm naive, that I have a pulpy, gloppy heart with no goddamn sense. That it will leave me awash in the world, prime for the exploitation of meaner people, and worse off, possibly homeless, worthless. Because of what I don't seem to understand. This is not so. Gruddy doesn't want me to touch him and my hand would smell disgusting all the way home if I did. I am not blindly in love. I understand a great many things.

I've had so many chance encounters with people, with animals. Some were fucked up and will evade detection and capture. Others will not. I'm getting at the idea of a world where the life of animals and human animals is valued and where problems are deftly and (whatever this word means), humanely handled. Going further, a world where exclusion is not a given. The necessary path to which I would love to be gentle, but I know will not be and I am preparing my heart for that. And I don't want my sympathy to be appropriative. I want us all to stand behind the conviction that the forces meant to lock up or drug, to prolong the condition of or destroy the remainders in its human equations should watch their fucking backs, whether it's you or someone else they're coming after. That is they don't stop, we would make them. I would love a society that sets to work doing this, one that doesn't presently exist. So if I don't know where to place my love, I certainly know where to place my disgust.

If "humane" is a sentiment, how do we concretize a compassion that is divorced from mere pity?

Live and Let Live

These sewer monsters are some bullshit. I never knew they were down there. I mean, I didn't believe in them and they were pretty easy to ignore. After the flood, though? Oh man.

It rained this winter. And I mean it rained. It rained and rained. The sewers were getting full of rain run-off and people were talking about pets going missing. I was out on my porch one night, arguing with my girlfriend on the phone and I heard my garbage can being kicked over. I thought it was the neighbor's kids, out in raincoats, making a mess. I jogged out to the street and saw a bunch of strewn garbage and some dark, hunched shape straightened up. It's gnarly face was lit for a second by the street lamp. It looked flat with creases and bumps all over it, like a moldy waffle with tusks. I stopped and wanted to yell, but I couldn't think of what and honestly, I was petrified. The thing was big. Black bear-sized, in rags. It was soaking and this low growl, deep like a diesel engine idling was coming out of it. Then it just turned and blew down the street. It jumped the fence to the burger place, I mean it vaulted and was gone.

People always talk about the monsters in the sewer, but then people talk a lot about a lot of things. People around here are religious loonies and there are a lot of bad drugs around here. I don't know how many times a band of people has run down my street, sprinting from some sort of Armageddon they're just hallucinating together or the times I've had to get preached to by some strung-out wacko wearing a religious sandwich-board and talking about soap. I have a fucking job, thank you and I keep my vices down to a 12-pack of Old Steel Beam on a Friday night and one doobie when Steve Miller plays the fair bandstand every summer. I guess the monsters live in the sewer because the people who settled this area chased them out of the woods when the valley cleared to build the city. Is that a nice thing to do? No, but that's progress.

After I saw the monster, I went back inside. I was soaking and my girlfriend was calling me and calling me. I answered and told her I saw a sewer monster and she just got quiet and said she'd pray for me. Did I mention that? She's tied up in all this stuff, too. I don't think it's gonna work. She took me to a service at her church once and we stood in the dark with flashlights someone had passed out, waving the beams all around yelling NOMONSTERNOMONSTERNOMONSTER and shit. I started feeling a little funny and then I remembered eating the little pills they passed out. Everyone was eating them and my girlfriend looked over like "come on...," and I took a couple. A priest of some kind started walking through the crowd, jabbering away about the monsters and signs and signals, being watchful, something about holy combat. I didn't catch any of it. After the service all these wide-eyed people with bad haircuts and worse teeth converged in a courtyard behind the church and we all chased each other around and when we caught one another, you had to pretend like you were wrestling for a couple minutes. This was a re-enactment of I have no idea what. I woke up in a big pile of people, naked in the church basement. Men, women, hairy legs and bodies tied up together everywhere. I'm pretty sure some sex stuff went on, which I wasn't happy about. I know I wouldn't have done anything. I'm not like that. I told her I wouldn't go back there.

So, admittedly, I thought monsters were fake, but as it turns out they're not. This is not making me question anything.

I'm doing two things. First, I'm breaking up with my girlfriend. Second, I'm buying a gun. The world is prettymuch going to shit and if these monsters don't get back into the sewer, they're gonna be working government jobs and TV shows will have to be about them and they'll be allowed to play football and everything. And then these religious loonies will have something to really set them off and I bet, when people get fed up with the monsters, they'll join the religion. I might even side with the monsters on that occasion.

The night I saw the monster, I came inside and changed my clothes, dried off and wrote a letter to my kids, apologizing for not being there for them. I packed a duffel bag and put it in the back of my closet. I'll send the letter out if I can't take it anymore and have to leave. My guess is that this will all blow over, but I'm getting pretty sick of it all. There's got to be a place for, regular, decent people to just be left alone.

Eternal Victory for America

Hands up to lights, holding wide, golden belts or diamond-encrusted women up. Spray-tanned fat roll over tights, thinned hair a mess, cut on forehead channeling blood around white of beady eyes popped, enthralled, neon-laced boots full of sweat, glory. A plateau of continuous flying elbows, titles, the shots that make each bench press feel like coming inside your arms. Figure-four leg-locks and hair-pulling, protein shakes and oxycodone. The same urge toward staid stories of disgrace, loss and the road to triumph, its dazzling electric pulse. The words that get peppered onto the adversary are incomprehensible, but livid, calling enemies Brotha! Like Brotha, do you understand, you've broken my back and disgraced me! But Brotha, you can't keep a snake in a box and take away its light and then not expect that snake to BREAKFREE AND STRIKE, cause that snake's got a fire inside! A raging fire that is OUT OF CONTROL And this Memorial Day, Brotha, at Nassau Colosseum, that fire's gonna take you and BURN YOU and that snake will become a RAGING DRAGON with WINGS that BREATHESFIRE and it's gonna be OUTTACONTROOOOL!!

It is the same spirit who is portrayed in vivid, awful tattoos, the basic idea being A SCREAMING EAGLE IS COMING FROM MY ARM, who rides with victors through every shooting of the man who fucked your wife, the bellowing Drill Sargent who kicks your worm ass through basic and gets you through bloody sand and mortar a man, back to Fort Collins, a stream of montages with crunching guitars, about running and punching red-gristled sides of beef in a meat locker, in your infinitesimal personal squalor, rising. The blonde spirit crouched on the hood of a Dodge Charger with breast implants and a banana yellow bikini, holding AKs, whose mouth is fireworks and threats. The spirit who leaves its charge one night full of slipped disks and corroded knees, swimming in dope and reading the family Bible, seeing the final angel as a serpent coiling through the words and his message is written in smoke, until the realization in deafening light of what it means and he goes to raise himself and his sleeping family to the enrapture of the highest glory of all.

Lineage

I thanked everyone. There was peanut butter enough (though we put it on chard), and a flowing river of dogs and acquaintances with humility enough and vast reserves of patience, enough to grow something fragile as compassion, from which justice is apparent and not the threat of a cage. I have been faulted for dwelling on parties, but there were sufficient ones in a crepe-paper chain we bound ourselves to, the only thing. And we took the marks and cuts welted to us and applied poultices and spoke them off and when we were becoming rid of them, we walked better, our senses came in and the oaks and pines climbed into our perceptions like names we had forgotten. And if ever the feeble old goblins we knew returned, we gradually learned to surround them and shoo them--watching croaking birds, we learned this. I thanked everyone for learning the old tricks and ruses that would set us at each others throats, how dumb that sounds and dancing around them like the greatest fighters knew how to. Kids go in baths. Potatoes come out of the ground. Forget shoes and talk to the things that melted into the land. There was no exodus. There was no escape. And when we found we had one choice, we learned we would never be alone. I thanked the ones who spurred us here. To the eye I was talking to nothing. I was talking to the ones woven in.