Braggadocio

I stand on earthquakes and amplify my voice through the hollows of logs, make great meals from what is to be stolen from under rocks.

When I am 150 years old, I will be the stringiest thing alive and the children of the village will take wrestling and singing lessons from me.

As soon as I step into a house, it bursts into flames. That's just fine. How to proceed from ruined things is a great aerobic technique for the health of belligerent and infinite vascular ropes of veins.

I have made love in at any number of outdoor places, climbing out of various states of incongruous dress to proud, pale undress. I have never been embarrassed there, nor ashamed.

I am sweating and type with squalorous fingernails. My teeth run away from my terrible mouth. Your roof, I got there, I fucking climbed my breath. I wrote this there and gave it to a creature with a burning head.

I have congress with monsters and devils and they are sweethearts. I put my hummingbird tongue down their throats and we talk about the state of things.

I sucked electricity out of the wall when my heart stopped briefly and my dreams, whenever it is that I sleep, are all about the terrible treasures of the humming seeds that bust forth from my defeated body. The seeds are poems.

All the music I know is being baffled by beauty that is prevented and it syncs in perfect time with the rhythm of what I know to be desire. All the refusal is accompanied by an equal acceptance and you to whom I'm calling and have never met, you know exactly what I mean.

To this end, the world I know is a piano I am kicking out of and these are the sounds as it breaks.

Weed Inside Mirror Inside Mirror Inside

I've lost sight of my original intention coming in here. Most likely I thought "The Vortex" was just an odd name for a pub, with "The Abyss" being more fitting, if melodramatic. Since I've been in here, though, it's been tough to hold onto beginnings and all I'm left with are memories that are leaving me. The hole I'm crawling into and out of is just behind the bubble hockey machine. I wouldn't even be able to recognize where I began if I tried.

These are the things. I arrive every time with some amount of money in my pocket and order beers. People mill in from outside and climb from the portal. No one says much. The bartender changes, but it's the same kind, surly. I would fawn over the prettier ones until I realized it gets you nowhere.

What I remember.

I climbed a mountain once, a low one in the Adirondacks. I hated the whole experience, my lungs constricting, my blood pounding in my head at my temples and sinuses, how easy it was for my friends to dash up the switchbacks. But the view: a long valley with a lake, another hump of a mountain on the other side. Once my heart stopped rattling and my sweat started to cool, once I stopped feeling like I was gonna puke, I was able to appreciate it. My friends, too, we got quiet and just sat there and looked out at it and stopped trying to talk.

My family, too, they disappear. I don't remember my grandparents, but I remember my father. His rituals: before work and after, his various styles of facial hair, but nothing he ever said. I remember my mother trying to console me after getting my ass beat at school when I was ten or eleven. When I was older I'd have to sneak past her when I was staying out late. This bar is erasing them, if you can believe that. I have no idea how long it's been since I've seen them.

Why I came in here was a bad week in which someone died and I want to say my wife was not so supportive, but I'm fuzzy on the details. I forgive anyone involved, I will say. And I believe I wasn't so much depressed as curious, because the portal is in this big cubby, near bubble hockey, like I said. You climb up, stoop into it, go around a corner and it's just a circle of green light. It looks fake, but sure enough it resets everything and you get back right in the bar with most things changed.

I was accumulating what I thought to be clues, reading coasters and people's t-shirts, looking for commonalities, sequences, grabbing a newspaper and seeing what had gone on wherever and whenever this was. I didn't see any order. Phone numbers don't work. I started writing basic details down on napkins, once I figured out what was happening. But I could have written anything, as much as it will mean to me. I don't know if I'm aging, I don't know if there's time. I don't know if there's a version of me still in the place I came from.

Yes. It is funny to not know, per se, if you exist. Something I'd never have considered. I took a lot of things for granted.

Now it's the intercession of things that have happened, or happened to a version of me. I won't say they're definitive. I believe I have children, but it doesn't seem real. I just get pissed, get up, walk into the back and go through the portal. It's always this shitty bar with a mumbley jukebox and these regulars who I could know, who could be anyone, who don't talk or stay long. In the event that it's not this bar, I will stay there. I will open my heart to whatever law and sense that applies there. I will stay.

I'll tell you. The first time I had sex, it was awkward, but once I was alone, taking a shower, I felt every drop of water. I saw everything, every surface. Distances, the taste of foods, for a day or two, everything was so intense, it almost hurt. I remember my drive to work, though I have no idea what that was. When I was fifteen and decided I liked cigarettes, it was like bringing a dog home, in a way. There was a new presence to look after and with them, I would climb inside a private cave or something, out in the night, my night. In the country, where I grew up, there was this incredible blanket of stars and the hazy fog of what? They floated in it. Galaxy?

I've been outside the door to the bar, gone a few blocks, but I am so afraid that this world will shift and it will disappear. I will be trapped in the world that isn't real. It throws perspective on the one I've known for sure. But you have no idea, it was real to me.

I hope I was kind to people's children or my own. If I stopped moving, would it matter? Why would it matter where I am. These worlds are labyrinthine and bunched like an onion. If I've reached out to anyone, I don't remember.

Do you have any idea? Do you hear me when I talk to you? Who are you? Are you different every time I arrive? I imagine you like a little recorder, a tiny, hidden shell that everything coils into and proceeds out of at some hidden other end. My voice, my thoughts will just get slowly sucked up into you and you may take notice that I was here. To hold you in my hand. I know there were girlfriends and teachers that I'm combining, tying them up in you. Why do I do that? Do I need someone to talk to? What stays the same. This voice. I just keep talking to my chest, into a glass, to no one, to ears in the sky and I keep asking and asking, asking what?

Another Aphorism

You know I hear God never opens a door without shutting a window. That's God; opening things, shutting windows, unscrewing lids, turning switches on and off, levitating things, making walls bleed. No, shit, wait. I mean poltergeists.

I'm No Expert on Women

I'm no expert on women. In fact, I'm probably one of the last guys you should ask on the subject. I just don't get 'em. And not because of "misogynist" things like I don't understand "emotions," or that I'm against women's lib (though I will say it's gone far enough). I think it's just because I don't take hints and I really don't temper what I say, ever. I'm just honest, okay.

So this whole rigamarole with the dragon and my wife, that's on me. I understand. I understand she got upset, but I'm not clear why. Not what she wanted, I guess. Honestly, as poor a husband as I am, I'd be a worse father. I mean, you should see how I treat the dog. Not well. Although I have no idea why I would. Fuck him.

So my anniversary, the fourteenth, the traditional gift is ivory. Ya hear that? Ivory. A dead elephant's tooth. I don't even think you can get that shit any more and for some reason, it's frowned upon. As if there aren't enough elephants.

So I bought her a dragon. You know, spice things up. It wasn't a dishwasher, but it wasn't what her sister, Ida said, a trip to the spa. You know, a gift for both of us. She can raise it to adulthood and it can keep her company when I'm away and keep her secure. And I can use it to get these bastard neighbor kids out of my yard and get some of this damn sumac out of the back lot. Because it breathes fire. These things were also a sign of prestige, back in elden times, or killing them was, anyway, but here we are, the future. Can't kill anything anymore.

Is it a status symbol? I don't know. Do you have a dragon?

I picked it up at that new store, Wizard's Menagerie. It was smoky inside and there was elven piping. The wizard who runs it looks like this old pothead in robes and a floppy hat, a beard and he's got all sorts of creatures in cages: a griffon, a wyvrn, a baby minotaur, some creepy little imps all lashed together at the wrist and, out back, warming in a brooder, some dragon hatchlings. They looked like goddamn bloody snakes with legs and tiny wings, but you know, all babies are ugly at first and then they grow to look like people. I bought one. I won't say for how much. None of your goddamn business, that's why.

So I find an old lunchbox and punch some holes in it with a screwdriver and keep it in there until it's the big day. Me and the wife go out to the Troll's Diner and get some pancakes and femmy morning drinks with wine and juice, I don't know what they were. And then I give her the package, which I had my niece wrap, so it'd be neat. She opens it and is kinda scared by the hissing and scurrying coming from the box, so I tell her to open it a crack. She refuses and has this look on her face like she's disgusted and I say Happy Anniversary. It's a dragon. I bought you a dragon.

She got up and left. Walked out to the car. Refused the thing. I let it go behind the restaurant. It beat ass towards the bushes and was gone.

No one else's husband would have bought them a dragon. It is not because I don't know what I'm doing. You get around someone for so long and things start to feel too familiar. Too sleepy, if you get me. I don't like to travel abroad, as I find foreigners sneaky and we'll never have a big enough boat or flat enough TV, or children. So I said fuck it, a dragon. Spice things up. There's something you don't see every day. Women want to nurture things. It could be anything. Ida said a cat. Fuck a cat. We already have this dog and the thing doesn't respect me. A dragon says something. I don't know if that something is I love you, but it definitely says something.

Don't Kiss Me Through the Bars

She had gotten from Raton to Taos and that would do it for the night. She had lost Tripper Jay and was posted up in some cantina. The house band was playing a rendition of "Red Red Wine" and she looked up at a plaque that informed her that the table she had been sitting at had been filmed in a movie starring Clint Eastwood and an orangutan. A man, some shitkicker with no eye for obvious cues that he signified nothing to her, had bought her enough drinks to form a bridge between feeling annoyed contempt to bubbling hostility. Now it was this woman, who, if she was forced to choose, would be the one person in the bar she could have fucked, but, within seconds of opening her mouth, the woman had erased any possibility of that.

The woman's name was Stacey and she was fucking stupid. Stacey had asked her where she was from and she had said that she was born by a river, in a little old tent.

Stacey said "You were born by a river?"

Any goodwill had plummeted off a cliff from there.

Stacey had asked her name and had been told it was Indira. This was true. From a mother who somehow got it into her head that Indira was the daughter of Mahatma and that such a child would be some marvelous angel. Who had never bothered to check and when she found out, had been deeply disappointed. Which was fitting. Anyway, Stacey didn't know who the fuck Indira Gandhi was, nor really Mahatma. And although she had a lot of energy, this stranger, and spunk, and used her hands to talk, to Indira, her stupidity was on par and it negated her.

The band finished up their set. Around them, ranch hands and bikers monopolized the pool tables. Everyone was connecting invisible lines to the few viable women in the bar and trying to come up with the correct formulae to get them to blow them in their pickups. The jukebox started up Charlie Daniels.

Indira had asked Stacey what she did. "Waitress" was the answer. "Waitress" in Indira's head was "wench," in the same phonic ballpark as "bitch."

When Stacey asked what she did, Indira told her she had thrown her backpack in the weeds out back, because she didn't have a job and was hitchhiking and currently hustling for drinks.

"I found a vacant lot to sleep in, under a semi trailer, in case it rains," she said.

Stacey hadn't felt right about this. It had shown on her face and it gave Indira pleasure. She imagined dragging her back to that lot like stunned prey.

Stacey had mousey hair and some interesting necklaces, hemp bracelets. It was obvious she was some sort of work-a-day hippie. She talked about a string of fests she was at, a litany really. Perhaps friends with ten thousand new-grass bands and a slave to those jam-electronica outfits that were both reminiscent of the Dead and neo-tribal. Stacey had maybe flamed out any part of her brain that could carry something admirable: an independent thought. Indira, with the onset of stomach upset she attributed to the Manhattans she was wrestling, had been at the table flipping pages of an old Dell paperback, Hesse, methodically folding down the pages and breaking the spine. She wondered, for an instant, if she was too rough on people and then concluded that she was not rough enough.

After her day with Tripper Jay, she was sunburned and scorched out and now she was drunk and she wanted, really, to fuck this girl violently, not against her will, but to shock her and rip the veil out from around her. To impose herself and to show this other person something new, to leave her someplace unknown.

Stacey said "I'm not coming on to you. I'm not a dyke or anything, but you can stay with me if you want, just for tonight."

Indira stared straight at her, would liked to have bludgeoned her if she had had something sufficient at hand. There was silence as the jukebox stopped and the band went back to their instruments.

Stacey asked "What are you reading?"

Indira held the book up and it fell apart in her hand. She got up and went out the back door.

A Trap

I caught the faerie because I am a mythical primate and my mouth resembles the orchids they take naps in. She crawled in there, so sleepy and my jaws closed.

An Anthem of Rot

Our Ranch slick is a rich biotic community. We're here, on an oval plate, dropped behind the bus station and we will never be found. And here, we are the causes and solutions to, so many diseases. My god, the city, it is a foamy swirl of bruise purple and banana yellow blossom of filaments, because buttermilk breeds so much hot, tropical life. And you used it for your tots, lined your stomach with soothing, gaseous waves of animal-fatted pleasure. It is our Mother Ocean. We are a coral reef, an intermingled ecosystem and in days we will develop motive appendages and walk and walk and we will curl into vibrational chambers to talk and sing sonorous songs. Thank you accidents or the determination of some god. We are down by the heating vent and under a cart. Moisture was caught and expanded by heat and no server picked us up. Please let us be a jungle, the miniscule civilization of collective microbial spirit. Our flag encrusted spore and flower.