Today We Haven't Woven Anything

Last night, we bought magazines and removed expired foods from the pantries. We held crystal trinkets to our eyes and stared at hundreds of candles. Then there was a single candle and with its reservoir of liquid wax we gave ourselves new fingertips.

 

"Now we can touch everything we're not allowed to," you said, and I said that I would do it. This time, I would do it. There was the closet with the heirloom ear muffs and the coat with an unpronouncable name. There was the porcelain whale and the porcelain wolf's head and the porcelain owl and the porcelain chilld wearing a tee shirt, carrying a lunch box, smiling with imaginings of the thrill of driving an automobile on roads of dirt under a round sun in the sky. And there were things not made of porcelain, there was the box of dog's teeth and under it a vintage magazine of radio stars.

 

Finally we had touched every forbidden object in the house and still there was not enough touching but there was nothing to be done about it, so what was there to do butwhat we did? We saw the quiet, cold television and we sat on the floor with crossed legs, we turned it on, we allowed ourselves to be brought to a comfortable stupor, eventual hunger, and a final buttered slice of bread before sleeping.

Shaven, I Purchase More Garments

As I stood in my home with my body oriented away from the 37-year-old man in my kitchen whose presence I wished to unconjure, I tensed all muscles and felt all of the interacting forces that served me. There was water pressure and rivers of electrons and gravity and the opposing strivings of wood and screw. I felt like an intruder and a weak pimple and a decomposing gourd.

When the 37-year-old man had been been unconjured and his face was a whispered description of a historical event I felt like something no one had ever thought of, like a person imagined by a writer or sketched by a teenage girl in a the margin of a notebook and lost.

Thus began the Quiet Months.

Help the One Under You

The 37-year-old man stood at my sink in my kitchen which held my shoes full of their diminishing suds. He was wanting more of my gruel but I did not feel comfortable feeding him more. He was never an invited presence. The day he was first present, it was due to an unlawful climbing over my fence and though I felt urges to care and comfort him in the darkness and uncertainty he bore, my feelings of charity were now faded and ratty like bad socks.

There was an incident in which the 37-year-old man sleeping in my chair was abductied by a creature-like woman with no face and incomprehensible strength in her body which had an appearance of weakness. In the morning I woke from an ugly sleep to find that her feet left a glittering trail, and my perceived duty in the life I would live that day was to follow her to ensure that the 37-year-old man who had been my ward was safe in a comfortable place.

Had he not been safe, had his comfort been eroded, had he been in danger of bodily harm or mental anguish, it would have been my somber task to pull him from the situation by whatever means necessary using the intellectual tools and physical prowess I had accumulated in life to that point, either by effort of will or chance and unchosen circumstance. The spectrum of possible outcomes I pondered was without boundary, and I thought of houses in trees, roofs of public high schools, and other places more unsavory and now a burden to conjure.

What I felt was that it was a greater confusion to come to terms with when I discovered that the glittering footprints took me to my own home, where the 37-year-old man was lounging in the same chair from which he was abducted the night before, perusing the classified ads for free pets.

Though the result of the day's searching was indeed that the 37-year-old man was safe and in comfort, his unwillingness or inability to account for his whereabouts, to divulge specific details about his day spent with the creature-like woman, struck me unable to feel a sense of relief and satisfaction.

So I did not want to give him more of my precious gruel, which was a source of sustenance and warmth in the soul's dark moments when thoughts of the inevitable erased the nuances of a life enjoyed and connected to a web of other lives. In such moments, all existence seems to be a useless parade circling a block of condemned buildings and never concluding; the ingestion of my self-concocted slurry of grains and the exotic blend of spices integrated into it is a renewed connection to the secret physical world and its sensations and pleasures I hide from the dark hand looming.

So I did not want to give him more, and I frowned with a hard chin and I turned from him hoping that his presence would cease and the impression of the light reflected from his body would fade from my eyes, my hardening eyes.

The Source of Ambulance Voices

I sat on the small blue stool facing the chair in which the 37-year-old man sat with the newspaper, perusing the classified advertisements, and pulled off the shoes. My feet felt relieved and cooled by the air and the day's worth of sweat, heat, and pressure resulted in a funky odor. The odor was tucked into the shoes I wore, the sneakers, but with no prompting it brought itself into the room and immediately it offended the 37-year-old man who lowered his newspaper slowly for comic effect. With his face, he displayed a lopsided frown and furrowed brows and I felt bashfulness on my skin and I apologized silently.

"Where were you today?" I asked him.

"You'll see," he said. He rose from his chair, took my shoes gently like puppies or bunnies, and put them in the sink and sprayed water in them and squeezed a big dollop of dish-washing liquid into them and stood over the sink staring at the foam pouring out. He looked up at me, standing in the doorway of the kitchen, and with a rakish smile asked if I had any more of the pasty grain concoction I recently fed him.

Held In Chapped Lips

After leaving the cemetery, the glittering footprints of the creature-like woman, who presumably still was carrying the 37-year-old man who had eaten a slurry of grain with me the previous day and returned to my home the previous night and then had his slumbering body carried away by the creature-like woman, spread out and lost their habit of forming graceful curves and loops. Past the Serbian laundromat they led me, past the Mammal Rehabilitation Centre, past the home of the retired comedian. Finally, they led me to my neighborhood, my street, my walk, my porch, through my front door, and to my living room. The smell of cinnamon was thick in the air.

The 37-year-old man sat in my recliner, reading a newspaper. He had flipped out the optional foot rest, and bore the attitude of a well-leisured gentleman. He looked up and smiled to me nonchalantly as if he expected me, spoke the customary monosyllabic salutation, and turned back to his paper.

"What are you reading?" I asked.

"Classifieds."

"What are you looking for?"

"Free pets. I'll let you know if I find the right thing."

"Okay."

"I'll let you know," he said in a sing-song manner.

The soreness of my feet after a day of walking around on varied terrain was acute.

Snow Loop Origami

The glittering prints of the creature-like woman's feet now led me to the cemetary, and I was awake in its placid greens and the ripeness of its floral gifts to the dead. Here the tracks took on sharp turns and knotted up near graves as if the creature-like woman had stopped in confusion or elation, to wonder or to dance, or to do both, for all I knew.

I touched these grave markers because they were smooth and hard and polished to a shine that wasn't dulled by the elements. Polished stone is one of my favorites. I have polished stone bookmarks that I adore and I dream of a coffee table made of a polished slice of petrified tree, but I do not know if there exist any undiscovered petrified trees of adequate size. They have all been found and cordoned off or cut into morsels for souvenirs. Souvenirs are proof of the world because memories are not.

With the enthusiasm of smooth polished stone on my finger tips, I continued my following and my feet bore the beginnings of soreness but still I continued my following.

Deathly Bargain Bin Scarves and Gloves

The sun in the afternoon brought its protons to the earth with such sincerity that my hunchbacked, crook-legged gait was no longer necessary to adequately follow the glittering footprints which it was my voluntary duty to track. It was a fulfilling feeling to engage in this research and fill my mind with possible outcomes. Here were my favorite imaginings:

1. An apartment in a brick quad-plex, warm with radiated heat from a seldom entered room nestled deep within its body.
2. A wooden house built in the boughs of a fine old tree scarred with the marks of lovers eager to leave evidence of their deepest passions in the moment they were felt.
3. A barge laden with pastries from recently renamed countries across oceans.
4. A serious blackness in the depth of the Earth's wounded mantle.
5. A high school with a rooftop greenhouse where a popular but misunderstood student with athletic proficiency seeks solitude for introspective times.

I awoke from a daydream looking up at one hand at the end of my arm against the richness of a blue sky and the involuntary smile I felt on my face receded as if its hourglass was up and a new smile on a new face was summoned somewhere else and my time for smiling was over. I walked and soon became aware that I was following a great arc and it was looping back on itself and it came to an intersection that wasn't there before and with calculations I figured out that I was close to the creature-like woman, whose progress with the 37-year-old man in her arms was slow, slower even than mine. My daydreams about my destination were doing me no harm and it was here that I opened my first granola snack bar and gratefully felt its sweet nutrition in my mouth and in my body.

All Juice, All Juice Is Mine

I walked through the whispering place, and the flowered park, until I came to the last of the food vendors, the brothers with the blanket covering their radishes. I found them on their knees, dirty rags in their hands, furiously scrubbing the concrete. But though their hands were raw and their rags were shreds, the footprints were not disappearing at all and glittered on the concrete like they were new and fresh.


The younger brother looked up to me and with tears in his eyes said nothing at all and I shook my head at him to let him know that he was a pitiful person attending to a futile chore.


"Your radishes are creating a moronic humidity under their blanket," I said.


"In that case, they are similar to the brain in my skull."


"Stop before there is nothing for you to do but languish here forgotten by all whose love you've let fall away like flakes of dry skin."


"Sir, help us. My brother is mute and deaf and nothing else will bring his current madness to its end."


"You are not mine. No."


I stepped around them and the interminable trees were hushed around us and as I strode away with unblinking eyes I balled my hands into good fists and let myself regret my lack of useless charity for only a few seconds before swallowing all empathy in my mouth, swallowing it into my throat and into my abdomen where it would be converted into fragrant pellets to be discarded quietly in a sweaty moment out of the sight of other human eyes.

Coleslaw Shoveled Into Truck Beds

The town in which I live was full of sunlight and food vendors. The tall grass in the abandoned lots was full of chiggers and the gravel under the soles of my shoes was dry, grumbling, and there was not a breeze to be felt by my skin, nor the skin of the food vendors. I heard their catcalls as I passed and their aromas wound tightly together but I was not deterred from my task and I kept my eyes trained on the footprints on the ground which glittered like sugar.

 

My knees were stiff and ached so when I came to a cool spot under an awning I stood up and put my hand to my brow and looked out upon the street and the picturesque courthouse square with its cardinals and finches scattered like fallen Christmas ornaments on the lawn. I heard the clock tower chime eleven times and that was when the mayor and his entourage of drowsy braggarts approached me with the musk of nicotine hanging around them and the mayor's top man clutched my arm in his hairy hand.

 

"Never hurt the mayor," he said, with sincerity in his eyes.

 

"I never will," I said.

 

"Nor will I," he said. The rest of his party continued shuffling on until they reached the hamburger restaurant. But he held my arm, and squeezed it. "I never have and I never will."

 

"I believe you."

 

"You should."

 

"I agree."

 

"Why?"

 

"Why what?"

 

"You agree that you should believe that I have never hurt the mayor and never will. Why?"

 

"I can see in your eyes that you are a trustworthy ally of the mayor who deeply believes that his policies are correct for our town and that he has the resolve to make the decisions that need to be made, and the strength of will to resist the temptations of power."

 

His eyes welled up with tears, and his death grip on my arm released, and he embraced me like a father, and let me go like a healed thing.

 

"Thank you, boy," he said.

 

"You're welcome. You go on to the hamburger restaurant and I'll continue following these glittering footprints to where they lead."

 

He winked and gave me the approval finger and we parted with lighter souls.

Slogan Barter

I spoke to myself in the mirror, still fogged from my recent shower. I spoke to the blur of my face.

"I need my jacket. My jacket and my sneakers, my briefs and my jeans, my baseball cap, my socks, and my wristwatch. I need a canteen of fresh water and my backpack with beef jerky and powdered soup and granola snack bars. I need hopeful thoughts in my mind and good intentions and a certain optimism about my face which will cause all who encounter me to feel a sympathy and not fear."

This was why when I stepped out into the rising sunlight and saw my neighbor, I was not obligated to apologize again for exposed privates. Instead, I wore my blue jeans and a red tee-shirt tucked in and a tan windbreaker and white sneakers and my digital wristwatch with compass and timer and thermometer. It was 68 degrees Fahrenheit. I wore a bright green backpack containing the soup and jerky and the granola snacks. The canteen of water I wore clipped to my belt with a carabiner, a strong one I trusted not to break if I needed to jump or run.

The glittering footprints were dimmed by the sun's light but still visible and I crouched low to find a good angle at which to view them, and I found it, and I proceeded away from my small brick cottage-style home with its kitchen still stinking of scorched gruel which masked the fresh soapy smell of my recent shower and there was the house behind me and I did not look back to it but I knew that unlike the void of death and hollow despair the previous night, the good brick house stood firm on its foundation, on the bedrock of my town, on my continent and my living planet tethered to the sun and it would be there when I returned. I did not look back.

Coin Soup

When I finally slept, I slept hard with my knees and feet on the floor and my wrists and face upon the cushions of my couch. My dreams came like knives and chisels, and in the morning I awoke with the cold light to find myself still as a doll among shattered images and memories and emotional refuse of dreams and a glow in my eyes. This is different from other glows because this glow was in the eyes themselves, in the globes of them. I could feel unnamed heat and my vision was restless and new and I showered and reheated the discarded slurry of the previous night and encouraged its taste to strive for glory with exotic flavors in plastic containers. As I waited for my breakfast to come into its own self and be ready for the business for which it was intended, I held the belt of my robe in my hands, an end in each hand, and lamented its failure and the exhibition of my genitalia to the creature-like woman and that was the first I thought of the 37 year old man and his being carried away by the creature-like woman.

Upon reentering the room in which the events occurred, I saw faintly glittering the tracks of her feet on my floor, and I walked to the door and opened it on its hinges, and saw again on the ground of the outside world the faintly glittering tracks of her feet, her footprints. A neighbor of some worldly renown loudly derided my genital display and I apologized with my hands and entered the house again, and I thought that what I would do was tend to the gruel scorching on the stovetop, and follow the glittering footprints, and along the way perhaps purchase a new, more dependable robe.

A Lonely Form of Punctuation

Whistles sounded from the outside, through the windows, back and forth, one after another, like a morse code alternative or a stereo test. I rose to my feet tightly, feeling the confusion in the muscles of my ass and legs, still staring at the 37 year old man in the chair with his feet like hiding lambs and his impossible knowledge of an ancient language and his lack of similarity to any person I could remember. As I listened to the whistles with my body quiet, I had my first fear that my memory was unworthy of the trust I gave it. It was as if I would turn around and behind me there would not be a couch with a blanket and a wall and a kitchen beyond. There would be a yawning void and blackness beyond darkest imagining and I would be dissolved into it with a sigh and an absence of sadness.

But entering through my front door came a creature-like woman with white hair and a clear voice and I knew then the source of the whistling; it was a product of her many voices which convened around my house, gathering in the cold night, slowly and in harmony. I watched her with stillness and did not turn around. With her glassy eyes she carried a basket I recognized and approached me with no face and handed me the basket and in it I saw several plastic wrappers which at one time held gift sausages. She held a twig to her lips and I obeyed, and was silent, and with strength not possible with her body of sparrow bones the color of rice she lifted the 37 year old man with her arms and like an infant bore him from my home and into the cold outside. Then was when I noticed that the belt of my robe had become unfastened and I felt the embarrassment and forgot about the void and therefore stopped believing in it.

Linger Like Citrus

So it was like this: with a bowl of cold gruel at my side I sat in the mode we call "Indian Style;" that is, with my legs tightly crossed before me, knees pointing to imaginery spots on the walls on either side of me, and my hair was oily and in need of hot water and shampoo and the confusion of my mind was heavy and a difficulty for handling, like a large batch of bread dough. I do not know how much dough is typically handled by the average person at home, but I imagine it is close to a very small amount and therefore the handling of a very large amount with the hands and forearms would be a vexing problem full of the probability of a temper tantrum.

 

Amongst this a 37 year old man found a peacefulness in his sleep and from his person seeped an odor of fresh water in the shade and air laden with gnats for whom a man struggling to transport a large amount of bread dough from one location to another would be something akin to nothing. 

Magnetic Soil Carrier

I was awoken in the night in my nest of secondhand comforters and blankets by the sound of the 37 year old man's knuckles repeatedly making sharp contact with my front door. His eyes had some ragged light in them and his collar was soaked.

 

"Friend," he said, "may I again impose on you to feed me and provide me the comforts of manly company?" I cinched up the tie of my robe and ushered him in and sat him in my most comfortable chair. When I returned with a piping hot bowl of tasteless slurry, he was asleep. His muddy boots lay discarded and pathetic on my Looney Tunes throw rug. His feet in their sweaty socks were tucked under him like frightened lambs. His calloused hand, I noted, lay in my ashtray, a drunken sailor in a life raft. The contents of the bowl in my hand rapidly cooling and solidifying, I listened as his dream-stained voice delivered falsehoods and obvious riddles into the room.

 

When he began speaking in the half-invented tongue known only to me and the forgotten siblings of my childhood, my lungs became excruciating confusions in my chest as if all oxygen molecules spontaneously swelled into lime-sized chunks.

Corn Without Friendship

A 37-year-old man climbed over my fence to see the shivering lather. After bringing him into my domicile and feeding him heartily, I felt a kinship. I divulged my creeping ambition to undermine the potential of lip-synching. But he was too focused on the act of consuming the slurry of grains in his bowl to listen. I stopped mid-sentence and allowed him his shy narcissism.

 

"The molecules I digest make their way into my reluctant cells by using an unorthodox game plan" he said, "and the hairdos I've sported are known as the bad boys of their respective sports."

 

"I have the ability to get laughs at mom's expense over multiple conversations," I said.

 

He shrugged. "With the weight of several hundred broken childhood promises, I am forming a virtual creature in the sky. I have the internet in a frenzy."

 

We hugged and I let him out, with a parcel of gift sausages to distribute as he saw fit. Or devour senselessly in the cold.

Pale on the Playground

The man in the car is someone we knew and when we parted ways we expected, and hoped, never to see again. His eyes are set on us; clearly, his memory is moving at high RPMs to determine our identities. Are we movie people? Are we clerks at an establishment he frequents? Are we, indeed, two with whom he has traded words, opinions, and drunken vulgarities and slaps? Maybe my well-manicured mustache is throwing him off the scent. Maybe your formerly shabby appearance is effectively negated by the designer apparel you now wear. Maybe my throat is swelling and my skull is fracturing and my intestines are waking up and angry.

His car is idling. The cardboard box he set on the roof was completely forgotten when he saw us. The food in the box is full of something we knew when we were in school and swore never to taste again and now its in us again, the smell of it is, and the steam is backlit by neon lights and it is garish and we are menaced and we walk to our destination unsure if the hands we hold are hands we have ever held before.

Pretzel Shirt! Pretzel Shirt!

The tree's leaves lie like ripped parchment on the ground, but still their canopies are full of captured dreams, and derive nourishment from them. The purpose of dreams is debated by men and women full of wonder and fear but the truth is that they are a simple way of dispensing of the souls of consumed animals. When an animal is slaughtered and eaten, its soul cannot be digested by the human stomach and its chemical arsenal. Nor can it be properly dealt with by the excrement-producing organs. Therefore it is sent to the brain, where the knotted memories it contains are converted into a vapor, which produces hallucinations as it is expelled through the ears. This is the truth. There is no other possible explanation for how trees don't die in the cold of winter and fall to the frozen gray turf.

Gadding About With a Man and a Teenage Boy and Their Pet

Me, I'm just a fellow in an inside-out sweater. People think I'm a little bit loopy because I have some dietary restrictions and also I am a confrontational person with authority issues who cannot hold a job and I prefer combative conversations. Last autumn I was fired from a retail store for throwing paper airplanes around one of the departments. I've also been fired for climbing warehouse racks, for constructing little alcoves out of discarded product boxes, and for carrying on with one or more female coworkers in unprofessional ways.

This is all because I am a man at discord with the world and the culture I was born into. I touch money and it becomes a stiff and unspendable thing. I speak to mothers and they lose the ability to recognize their offspring. I speak whispers full of germs, I have stolen hats and coats from hotels, and I distrust soap. I do not believe people when they tell me their names. I give them mine, instead.

Play It Laying Down

Wait with unblinking eyes, with dim breath, with a feeling like your head is wrapped in gauze and hidden and warm. There is no source for the sound in your ears, like a screw, like a portion of stiffening foam. This is empathy for the aggregate breakfast meat and the interaction of its fluids when heat is applied. In this chest is a heart. I know because I see it through the strata of skin, muscle, and other unknown tissues. It is bright like a needle.

Our Collection of Grappling Hooks

Literally, I know the language of eggs. It is formed of the sounds of yolk's thick viscosity, vibrating proteins, and suspended liquids, all echoing in an oblong carapace. It is a language without nouns and its music is a slow as a dying lawn. This is an utterly useless knowledge in this world but I know it, it is mine, and I belong to it, and this is good and right, and I hold an egg in my hand and feel the music in my skin, and I consume it with my mouth.

To do this and know, simply begin by breaking an egg. Then start getting it real hot in a pan, and fold some vegetables in it, sort of like a burrito. But it is called an omelette. The spelling is disputed, but I stand by it, and I am full of this food and this unheard voice.