Part One:

Are we really awake?

In the car,

Driving,

Inches away on both sides,

Death rides parallel.

Can you even feel?

The beat of your heart,

Against the wind,

Pushing through the speed of sound.

Is the rhythm uneven?

Of pulsing bodies,

Making whole.

The echoes of the boundaries,

Furnishing their home.

Was it ever even real?

Life as you believe.

Could you imagine a cloud before rain,

Or a step before a cry?

As water flows down a sink,

We will spiral back before,

An eventuality,

Could spit us out.

Were we ever really born?

I am closed inside a basket,

Floating down a river,

Pushing through the pipe,

To see the other side.

Part Two:

And so I begin,

Darting reflections,

Poised and peering.

From inside,

Why oh why?

Developing an embryo,

Holding on fast to an ideal,

Placenta.

Falling from a tree,

A dream,

To strangle an ounce of beauty.

I am starring at my pupil.

The retina glows.

In and out my breathing fluctuates,

Steeling a glance,

As mixed possessions stream across,

A bare back,

On my bed lying there,

Waiting while I think more.

All the secrets of the world lie before you and you wait to see. . .

A place,

So far beyond an imagined,

A destitute street,

Littered with hope,

Dusted along a crack of an un-pardoned crime.

Am I really starring into another body of is it just myself is there ever really anybody or just an imagination of the self my own hands form a bond with yours making us at unity and with that comes a secret far beyond the grasp of facts

And a dream is real,

The mother feeds,

The baby,

Nursed.

Sheets of black form a cavern in which I lie

No conscious choice was ever necessary.

And then I feel into it deeper to lose the ego of myself

In order to feel,

One must be one,

The eye forces a union,

Ethereally,

Unbroken.

Fingers dances on the windowsill,

Stroking the hand of the unborn child,

The peace within us,

The stifled urge to emancipate,

The self without bounds.

What truly brings us together,

What eventually drives us apart,

But no matter what,

My eyes see what my hands could never,

And my mind knows,

What everyone else could not.

And as the sun came up a glow rose above his face

Part Three:

And so it begins,

I am mortified by my own actions.

A rocky watery shore displayed.

Dark waters formulate a new experience,

They are entranced.

I was void of that personality,

But not the others.

Time ticked as I sat on a shore,

In between heaven and hell,

Numb to the icy abyss stretching before me,

Encroaching on my mind.

No one was around.

They revel in the visage,

As I sit.

It was jocular once,

The chiming of their voices like bells,

Echoing a dull excuse,

Never fully resonating in my ear.

I stood with a smile,

A fiendish one.

Would you like to see?

But that was too real,

To let everyone know,

What was never needed to be known,

To let them dance in the waves of my mind,

As they splashed on the rotten earth that circled it.

There was a film around,

Separating me from the world,

Ambivalence clouded my countenance,

As I smirked the same grin.

A lust overwhelmed my body,

One for revenge.

It needed to be satisfied.

Lost control,

Everything happened before my eyes,

I stood outside to watch,

To see it play out.

Damage,

Destruction,

Breaking down a foundation.

I am uplifted,

And numb.

I lost control.

Did I ever have control?

Sitting in a frigid space,

That I call my own.

I count on the fact,

That I am justified to defy a creation,

So wondrous,

To pluck love in its true form from the bow of a tree,

That dangled over the pool,

Which bred my hate,

And my passion.

The face is your face,

Her face is my face.

There is laughter echoing in my ear,

I cannot sleep.

Everything is a reflection,

I see in your eyes agony and malice.

I see myself in you,

You are me.

I cannot sleep,

The dream is real.

Part Four:

There is a loop,

Forming,

Webbing.

Constructing a mind.

Abhorring,

A set pattern,

Circulating.

Around an edge,

Breaking off.

Glass shatters,

Rubber bends,

Adapting.

While the perfect dignity of the glass. . .

Rebuilds,

Reborn,

Regenerates.

But it can’t under these conditions.

A man walks,

Barefoot,

Cutting his feet,

Blood forms rivulets,

Weaving.

Glass glaciers in a red sea.

There is a scream forming in my eye.

Would you like to see it?

Can you comprehend what I’m driving at?

I see pain,

Torment.

So my eyes scream.

What a better reflection?

My eyes scream.

If I could even begin to describe,

The wrinkles on my hand,

The flames of the sun,

The depth of a black hole,

I’d be god.

A never ending lie,

No beginning no end,

A universe on my back,

Draped under the false impression of humanity.

The answers are in front of you,

Barely hidden.

There is a marriage between chaos and the blind,

Forming a beauty,

Steeped in a power,

A light beyond a light.

That makes this real,

While destroying another foundation.

Loving our inability,

To know an abstraction.

I cannot loop the way you do,

You engulf me into nothingness,

And rebuild me the same instant,

The scream is lost,

Left inaudible in the twinkle of my eye,

You bring me no pain,

Unless it came from trying to break down my formalities,

The way I tried to know you the way I know myself.

I could never understand you.

Only in melding with your abysmal void,

Being nothing and everything.

I love you.

Smile

You there—

Raising your lips

Pinning them to your cheeks

They bulge and hide your eyes

Rows of white exposed

You ask me why

I do not do the same

You speak—

Here they are

Enjoy

This is to tell you I am content

I like life I like my life

It is good to me He is good to me

Whoever he is

I am lucky

And I am stable

And so—

With reluctance

Here are my white rows

My busting cheeks

My bright red encasement

Framing my ivory towers

Here is what is left of my sight

My pupils strain to peek over these rounds

And yet—

I feel these obstructed realms

Of light, these cradles of color

Say so much more in the way

They are held there

Then these perfect sets of precision

These lined up little beauties

Could ever get across

Rocky Mountain Canary

Warm September day finds self

Riding, life in which there has not been

Another, a second elegy penned for Jane

That’s not to say we have never fallen




Conditions pardon quite the opposite

Yes-- she’s still not here, and me?

Spared, so unlucky as to survive

Murder’s black eyes, the final stare




It was a mistake, being born a woman

I should be found more useful as a horse

Fancy, I do-- playing the company anyhow

An eternity left to carry strangers in circles




White braids unravel porcelain hours

Hoofs ticking down more fruitless vine

Perpetually, humanity tries to displace

Such lives, a little too in love with death.

Man Chained to the Sky

My last client was a retired astronaut. He said he was looking for space, so I gave him a model ship in a glass bottle. It did the trick. Before him was a woman who missed the 50s. She was born in ’78. Nostalgia for a decade in which client didn’t exist? Easy. I got her a Lichtenstein print and a photo of a street lamp. The client before her was an old rich lady with Alzheimer’s. She said she wanted to be reminded of five minutes ago. I gave her a jar of colored sand and a broken watch. She liked it so much she gives my card out, though she never knows why.

I own and operate a business based entirely off my sixth sense. The part of my brain that produces nostalgia is three times the normal size. I have the ability to know what produces nostalgia for anyone I meet - strangers, clients, et cetera. They tell me what they want to be nostalgic for and I find them something that represents it. Something that without fail triggers that thing within them that makes them remember, that gives them the special feeling that maybe they’ve found a grip on something that’s been lost for so long. It’s a real gift. I do a service for people that genuinely improves their quality of life. Humans have a fascination with nostalgia. A fascination with their past or a past they wish they had. That’s why they call me.

A few days ago I got an anonymous call about a new client. The voice on the other end said there was a man who needed something, a service that I provide. He gave an address: Ory Tower, Roof. The next morning I met my new client there, on the roof. He was a Man Chained to the Sky, the first one I’ve seen in years. Ten years ago we used to get them all around the city. It seemed like there was a new one everyday. The papers would report each one; give their location and approximate height. They captivated people. It was a cultural phenomenon.

These Men Chained to the Sky all kind of looked the same. Their arms outstretched, their wrists in iron braces, chains extending that wrapped around the world. Sometimes the chains would overlap, creating a network of iron. The Men Chained to the Sky would appear from nowhere with long hair and bleak faces. They would mumble and twitch, grow their hair long and bleed from their eyes. Those that went high enough to hear them said their mumbles were more like whispers, like the quiet sounds of moving stones in water. After a while the papers lost track of them. People stopped wondering and stopped caring. The Men Chained to the Sky began to disappear too. Eventually they stopped appearing altogether. No one noticed.

My client looks like the other ones: naked with long black hair that falls thickly before his eyes. Cuts populate his body. Dried blood runs from his eyes to his chin, a pair of desiccated streams. This particular Man Chained to the Sky is different in one major respect, though: he speaks. Not much, but it’s intelligible. He tells me he needs to experience nostalgia. He says he doesn’t know what it feels like to be nostalgic and he needs to know. He says I have five days. Five days. How do you make a man feel nostalgic who has no memory, a man who just appeared out of nowhere a fully developed adult? How do you remind a man of something who has had no previous experience? How do you remind a man of remembering itself?

It’s been three days now and nothing I’ve tried has worked. A quiet dove, the smell of leather, a telescope pointed to the stars. The only response is a blank face. The Man Chained to the Sky breathes heavier. His speech slows, his muscles twitch less. When he cries there isn’t as much blood. He is beginning to die.

The part of my brain that’s three times the normal size isn’t helping. It’s only good for someone who misses something, not for someone with nothing to miss. I’m cycling through objects and images, scents and sensations that have helped my clients. None of these work. What is the essence of nostalgia? Time began with this Man Chained to the Sky. Time will cease for him when he dies. He will disappear like the rest of them: gods in captivity - timeless prisoners in their own historical void, living outside the river, just a puddle, an incidental splash on the bank. Nostalgia has no essence. Its only beneficiary is time.

My client died today, on the fifth day. I couldn’t understand him on the fifth day, he could barely speak. His hair had grown down to his chest and his eyes had become glossy. The roof was covered in things I had brought to him, things I’d hoped could birth nostalgia. Things pregnant with memory. How naïve. Nothing worked. Nothing could work.

Epilogue

Ten years after my last client died, I started accepting work again. My first client back wanted to feel nostalgic for the Men Chained to the Sky. Some coincidence. The guy was nice so I took the job, though I admit I was a bit apprehensive. I brought him to the roof of the Ory Tower, where my last client had died. My Man Chained to the Sky never made the papers. No one knew about him but me. Either way it did the trick. The guy fell silent and tears welled in his eyes.

And What of God?

God had nothing to do with the sepia portrait
of a long-haired, muslin-wearing stranger
hung on the wall of my grandmother’s bedroom
behind a hall tree of polyester pants and spent undergarments
who looked akin to my father and Uncle Ronnie. God
was not in the torturously stiff pews of the Congo church on Sundays,
not in the names used in vain followed by mouthfuls of soap.
God was not in the space between folded fingers, not
in the cupped prints elbows leave on the edge of a bed,
not in the clutching hour before slumber,

but in the white belly of a trout, in the elusive bobbed-tailed
doe disappearing through dark green, a pale salamander
under the silk of wet moss. God lived in the slippery space
between the pine and its bark, in the music of water
over the spillway. God, neither Green Man or Mother Nature,
but some combination of both—leaves growing where pubic hair
should be. God was me. God, numb and naked
in a thunderous spring stream. There was no book, no word, no voice—
just a dome of sky and the endless reaching.