words through barsmoke
Thursday, April 27, 2006
To My Wife
Some things are as predictable as lesbians with dreamcatchers hanging on their car's rearview mirror. And the way we miscommunicate with these paltry words just adds to the thick soup of errors. It is like we are hanging in there in the late rounds of a boxing match where the punches are slights and the knockout blows come late at night over videogames. We grasp knowing that summer always comes for everything. Even us, beautifully.
Saturday, April 15, 2006
combat.
twenty six hours in a ditch.
"i'm blinking.", the soldier whispers to himself.
he is alone...for the moment.
"fuckin sun. come on! RISE!", there is a desperation
in his voice as his subconscious speaks without him.
the paranoia set in hours ago and any minute the air
could be filled with frustrated grunts and howls like
the sighs from a wild old boar as it lay suffering in
the night, dying.
the uncertainty.
the thin patience.
the 'fuckin sun' about to break.
"where the fuck is my cigarette!", he says, as he
starts losing more than just his mind.
"damn!"
the poor man stops to take a breath and realizes that
he's turned his back on his post, just as a tiny
crackling sound reaches the very edge of his ear.
"no.", he says as the words don't even leave his
brain.
the worst fear.
the worst possible scenario.
the reinforcements are late.
the sun, just about to surface.
the moment has come.
every nerve and muscle at maximum tension.
man confronting death.
the fear of god.
the crackle now a rumble ready to burst into a graphic
image of the ugliness and strength of a true enemy.
the soldier pulls forth every ounce of testosterone
and adrenaline he has in his miniature-feeling body
just to open his mouth and make an attempt to release
some form of battle cry.
a high pitched but guttural shrill starts emanating
from his every pore,
"grrrrhhrrggrrrrggggrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!!!".
and just then, every higher power in the history of
all the gods must have heard the ultimate pleading
wail from the pure essence of a single human being as
he went running, freed, into an empty field at the
crack of dawn.
a plastic soldier in miniature
compared to the vast space of mud before him
not yet dried by the sun
or clotted containing someone else's blood
but not his no
his was screaming through tired veins
and tired eyes too sick of rats and sunrises
towards barbed wire and men amazingly not running next to him
a twisted football game of field position
"MOTHERFUCKERS!", he cried, drowning himself in such
a completely malleable body with rubber arms flailing as
if the sheer sight of him would deter his enemy, and
for that moment he might as well have been seduced by
either listening to Blue Room with his eyes closed.
the slow-emotion cut off from cares.
sweat like the everglades in his brow.
his un-needed skin finally crumbled to the earth as he
rose up and out with clouded destination.
he soared closer and closer to the peace that the end
brings, brighter, lighter, forgiven.
just then, his overall blissfulness was cut short by a
truly uneasy feeling, brought on by the glaring eyes
of the entire 144th platoon standing and staring in
amazement at what they had come all the way there to
reinforce.
immediately back in his shell, he opened one eye,
to see familiar faces,
not enemies.
he opened the other eye, to see the field,
still empty.
to see the full effects of paranoia carried out.
he stood still.
confused and disappointed.
not a sound was made by any of the other troops, not
even an offer of a helping hand.
they were scanning there own minds, each and all of
them, for a drain, eager to empty out some of the
pressure caused by the good chance that that guy
standing in the field over there could very well be
any one of them.
the soldier took short breaths,
every other one, trying to slow the speed of his
heart.
an over-sized drop of sweat dangled off the tip of his
nose while he tried to bring the connection between
his mind and body back to functional, enough to get
his toe off the ground and attempt the first step back
towards his war-mates, but in the bottom of his sight
was a flash of white and red particles, leading him to
the acceptance that after everything he'd just been
through, right now, there was an excrutiating pain,
interrupting his embarrassment, caused by a bullet from
behind a distant tree, that entered the back of his
right knee and, in a split second, sent his knee-cap
dispersed in front of him, fragmented with a shower of
blood, this time his own.
he fell to the ground, curled into a ball, and
clutched his distorted leg, while the 144th platoon
scattered like cockroaches for any place to hide.
it was as if the lightswitch for the sun was in the
apartment of hell and had been flipped,
and no-one,
with squints and scared tears,
was used to it.
"I'm blinking"
he thinks again like an old movie
the picture thrown haltingly in basement walls flickering
but the lights are fluorescently on
causing whiteness
of knuckles, of enemy soldiers eyes in trenches this close,
of god, of cartilage splayed out like torn up end bits of notebook paper
floating in puddles,
puddles that contained his knee in bits near trenches,
filled with the reflections of day blind allies, or truth.
he's run this far and will never walk again
out of the no man's land between curled up agonies.
under a sleeting rain of bullets with his head in
the dirt, the man secretly gave up. the battle for
him, was over.
he did not have to pretend to be dead
for he was sure that he already was.
the wind picked up out of nowhere, as a messenger of
the certain fate which was a large black cloud rolling
in from the east, god's piss.
"(rub it in, why don't you.)", the pathetic, old,
one-legged man thought to himself as he shook his head
as violently as he could to get rid of the flashback.
"I'M NOT MOVING!", he yelled at the evil faces of
heaven as they relentlessly rolled toward him now
yelling back in thunderous voices.
"mr. randall!", a high pre-pubescent shrill came from
through the trees to the bench that he was not budging
from. the old man heard his name mixed with the roar
of god and yelled back at the clouds again, "LEAVE ME
BE!"...
"hello?", the young voice searched out for the old
man's ears, "mr.randall?
******* CHAPTER 2 *******
"You know what kid..."
"what mr. randall?"
"when I was your age I was already working, and I didn't go around all day pestering old men arguing with GOD while they were sitting in their serenity spot!"
"huh?"
"you're sorry."
"I'm sorry."
"yes, i know."
The small one starts to cry about 4 steps into running away.
Randall looks more at the rain and less at anything else.
His mind gets cluttered but strangely blank with the thought of war...
and reason... and... hosiery.
The way they'd dance you'd think it was the end of the world. He wasn't so much captivated by the whole thing as much as he was transfixed by the sight of twenty four nyloned legs kicking a Can-Can in Coney Island. His eyes never made it to the s-curved hip lines of those sequenced beauties but lived for the spot on their thighs where nylon leg met with three inches of skin and then two garter straps. He was watching the way those three inches were framed. It should hang in every art gallery in the world he thought. Twenty four of them in a row.
It used to be that nylons did that to him. Now he wears two of his own. One for each stump of the legs he left behind in no manÂ?s land. WhatÂ?s the use of a serenity spot if you can be interrupted by any punk orderly that comes along. He had been doing alright. Progress was being made. Progress.
It was an age of expectation of miracles. After the war it seems the whole world was trying to make up for lost time. The woman seemed suddenly easier. He liked to think that it was the combination of going without men for a few years and a newfound awareness of how good their legs looked all bound up in those nylon stockings. Everyone had a job, a girl, a welcome home parade, and a story. People were inventing things besides new ways to kill each other. His first moving picture show was the night he got back to New York. Got there a few minutes late and tipped the usher to wheel him down close and not use the flashlight for fear of calling too much attention.
The usher took the money with half a smile and got slowly half way down the aisle before letting go of the handles. Randall's limb-challenged bitterness almost expected it to happen but he still couldn't believe it. He didn't even get mad as he crashed into the screen while the giggling usher yelled from the back, "Is That Close Enough For You?"
The black and white characters too close, the charging of laughter barreling down the slope and crashing into him just as he had with the screen, the god-damned bitterness... everything was grey and blurry as Randall and his still working top limbs did not do anything. He thought he should just leave. He thought if his legs were still there he would run out the fire door just to the right, but quickly concluded that if that was the case this sort of thing would of never happened in the first place. The only come-back was to do nothing. He closed his eyes, listened to the story and imagined his transistor. So there he sat, motionless and emotionless until the laughter died, the movie ended, the joke was over, and everyone in the audience left feeling shitty about themselves and sorry for a man so used to embarrasment even Randall himself felt the whole fiasco was wasted on him.
***** Chapter 3 *****
He ate in the cold. That punk kid orderly had the windows open on the first nice day of spring. It created a draft. Drafts made him cold and that sonofabitch had no respect for an old man still lost in the trenches of a soon-to-be forgotten war relegated to history books like the march of Nampolean's army through Egypt. His son had called again. His eggs were getting cold. That useless fuck.
*****Chapter 4 *****
No man's land standing right there waiting to get hit and nothing. But on the march back from the front they had been hit by an artillery shell. Randall's legs lay wasted on the side of the rode eight feet from where his body wound up. Randall passed from that picture into one in which Mitchell took a last gargling breath and expired in a mouthfull of blood and a look that said both help i'm sorry remember and momma all at once. They were about to go to paris on leave. Six days off.
23 possibilities concerning how a bra wound up in this alley drenched in a puddle and soiled.
1. it could have been a drunk couple. a guy with real class taking his date behind the dumpster for one from behind real quick.
2. maybe a garbage bag broke and it fell out. but then why isn't it surrounded by used paper towels, cigarette butts and milk cartons.
3. a girl, gnashing of teeth, flesh on bone.
4. maybe a bum had it with his stuff, taken from a former wife's bedroom drawer and savored for it's safe warm smell.
5. liberation just short of burning it.
6. it was born there and was now in the waning years of its existence.
7. the lady upstairs saw it flutter down like an angel yesterday as she pulled in her line-dried laundry.
8. it sprouted from a seed that fell in a crack in the pavement and was tended by an undersexed adolescent.
9. there was no bra, no puddle. just an alley, alone, in mid-mastubatory imaginative delirium.
10. it was a cry for help.
11. the white flag of surrender and abandon after an ignored truce and a long night of drinking.
12. the moon cried it out, like salt in tears.
13. it was an improvised sling for the wounded.
14. somebody somewhere had the matching panties, like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly.
15. the neighbor got it switched up in his laundry and tossed it over his shoulder in a fit of loneliness.
16. a message intended for a spy.
17. it used to be a dove before the spell ran out.
18. as part of an elaborate hoax meant to befuddle anyone who saw it.
19. it was painted in later.
20. it was an omen, a sign of things to come.
21. the bird had perched on her window all night long waiting for it to come off. at just the right moment it swooped in but it was too heavy to carry it all the way back home.
22. he couldn’t keep doing this. what if somebody found out.
23. it was raining too hard for it not to.
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
all the things i used to live to make have been killed out of me and replaced by the things that i live that make me kill. the things that used to kill me are now the things i live off of. who i am is not who i was but who i was is not who i was but am now. and what those things are don't matter as much as what they aren't anymore. what has replaced those things is now irreplacable and the irreplacable things that came before have been discarded. nothing is the same anymore. it's all the same to you but to me you are all the same and not me. i used to do this now i just don't. i keep discarded things somewhere where things were easily discarded before. i've let go and hold on now even tighter.
