getting there...
Chapter 9: Knees
The entire world had become muffled, the aftermath of a white, molten sound. The water had become heavy, alien, the blues had hideously curdled into shades of gray and yellow, and it was as if death had bared its’ naked self upon his mind. The whale had never known snow before, but felt something similar to being buried in an avalanche. He dreamed that he had become an aching wave, and, following the legion of white-capped soldiers above him, he headed towards the shore. (this is about Colombia University radar/sonar testing in the pacific).
The entire world had become muffled by the helicopter’s menacing arms, the steady rhinoceros-breath surrounding them. The water whirled by beneath them, and Ollie sat with nervous tension. The machine gunner was leaning as far as he could out the door, his face drained of color, curdled into shades of gray and yellow. The sun was a different sun than that which Ollie had grown up with. If Luke were there, he’d say that rather than Apollo, the sun that day was hauled on the back of Aries. Ollie missed Luke. He missed Savannah. He missed Sean. He wondered what they were all doing then. He wondered what they’d look like along side him, guns in their hands, solemn death tugging at their hearts.
The laughing spit of gunfire seared through the chopper, seared through their realities, and gravity lost hold of them. The reaper was rummaging through their vessel, looking for souls to hurl towards the earth. Bullets now had wings, all happy memories, tied to stones, vanished off the edge of the chopper door. They spun, as if spinning was the natural state of man, and the courtesy of angels maintained that life would end with the rapid snap of the neck, if one were to fall. Ollie, however, wasn’t spared such pleasantries, and remained in the helicopter until it nosed thickly into dirt, with a jolting halt, with a dousing of motion in one severe clap of noise and dirt and debris. He was alive, whatever that meant in such a place, and knew he had to run. Thinking stopped, movement happened, as if automatic, with the same mysterious force behind the thick pounding of blood in his body. His body became the surrounding world, he became only a part, and the cracking lines of lightning and fear played on through the day.
He poured the liter down his throat. Comfort somehow contained itself in water, with so much fire pouring out of a man’s skin. The machinations of ravaged thought and oblivion, couched in sweat and the unnerving defiance of goodness. This wasn’t hell. It was something less human than hell.
Escaping is a simple thing, the watch turning past the thought, the harbored tick is round again. The defeat rises, clashing soul, underneath the turning pull, the poles of light striking down to meet the fish in the water. Flight becomes of dancing scales, color comes in full-blown shine, the way forsaken by the bridge, underneath the dirge and kick, the witches roaming, silence in their eyes. Way back in the under-thought, I caused my bones to still and rot, and backing into bright red shots, the sun shingled the landscape in rug burns. Hold quickly to the heart that yearns, and steal away your moments. The taunt recluse of weeping hollows are static by way the tourniquet. Great shields block my running mind, great shafts expel the holy dress, and back from all the wandering sights, my blaring street song I’ll reminisce. Dark matters, forked from fortune and winged speech, the right to make, create, and beseech, the thought combines with the snaking hands, the deed becomes and is brought into reality. She stands as if in portraiture, and stands with need to be acknowledged. The searching tongue is heavy, un-polished and grey upon the cracking window. She stirred again, the strange widow, among the padded eyes of lore. I’ll find you this, I’ll find my core among the reeds and treatises. Youth, cooling in the precipice, the too-forgotten woe. I wore a coat of mighty snow, and in the light between the dusk and moon’s court, I stumble. Come back among the peace that mumbles, the larking meteors of the past. The stars flicker, first, then lunge towards a faded picture. The stitches are placed, only they ensure the safe crossing between the gap of skin. Heavy people wash themselves away in the briny song of Neptune, and the white courage trapped inside the pale expression of a young sailor. You are trapped in a whim, you are hitting up your kin for salvation. Come back to the place where you first headed out, and maybe I’ll recline with salutations. Notice my leftovers and how they think aloud. Notice the colors that come flashing from the crowd. Notice the higher tide, the cosmic superficial loud and the people who are crying out for their own nation. I would serve you up the winding clocks and piles of grayish dung, I would take away the everything and leave you with only none, I would tackle all the innocence that ever arrived on any ship in the god damn fleeting currents of the sea. Figure out where the hell you want to be and maybe we can figure this out. You sold the self down a rankling way, there are people who care to banish out those diseases. The great and reaching forest does as he pleases, sets fire to himself from time to time. The green flashes orange and the warmth becomes sublime, oh failure, I have loved you far too well. The people of the city and marching down a well, they are carrying their ammunition and their fare-thee-wells, and their tiny record players through which they will play their songs while talking to everyone but those around them. A pause of every doe and gaze, the loud clapping of regret, and the denting of the coursing rain upon our intellect, and the whooping joy and reverie that comes from caravans who have just wandered out from their anesthesia. Illusion sings lucky in the smoke of evening and cardamom becomes your subtle lover. Your senses they come around and you will find the graces of a garden filled with tomatoes and pistachio trees. Old trying casualties of flitting, sighing history. No, history is a heavy thing, and carries with it all its’ weight, and the conversations had upon the doorstep of our fate. Love and joy pass by here, and if they check out, if they’re clear, then maybe after that we can wish you a happy new life. Now come around the back of the house, where we hold our wishing grill, we will gather around the meet, that somebody else has killed. No, we have never met him, but I’m sure that he did the job in the best way possible.
The yawn of mahogany, my favorite smell. The forest sits, and is satisfied. The song is felt from throat to air, and from there, touching everything that air does. The song is everywhere. Come down through the notes of howling, the pause becomes an echo of defeat, but if closer listening proves for pounding, then maybe you will see, or seat this feeling. Come upon the dogs with rods and fish yourself out from the leaves. Harbor hindered dreams no more, paint me on the rocks. And in the science, the day is floored, I become what is more than not. She is gone, or so I’ve heard, and will prepare accordingly. The light prepares for its’ exeunt, and I do not wish for it to linger. Come, with your hands and fingers, come, with your words, as they are, comforting when they need to be, I need you to be your words. My head is out and so thoroughly searching, the meeting was had, and no enlightenment was found. He held his basketball to his side, proudly. He would show them all. And in the night the stars were weeping. The fog resided, a residual of the cloudy sky. We sat close, for luck and dreaming, warmth would come to us by and by. I know a soul believing, a sweet and calm memory gone by. You saw yourself as this story, kneading your family’s blood into the rye. My home is slowly going. My mind will follow by the fireside. But love I’ve know wont be so fleeting. I’ve made it me, no more to say.
We’ve returned to being old. You can see this, you can know. The cost of all our whiddled souls is soaking in the chips of old Wiley. Come this way through knee-deep pastures, where the grass has spoken clean. Come this way into my rapture, I will keep my self in need. Come with all the graces after and the sure release we’ve seen. Come with all the newborns after, I have not at last released. Some new ocean, some new rapture, some hawking thought coming down to its’ knees. I was made for love and laughter. I was made for this release. Come down to the waking river, where they sell the bottle clean. Come down to the boys who shiver, in the morning, bright and clean. I’ll trust God above my liver, and I’ll drink my wine, my wine. Soldering beside my father, I’ll be young when I can’t see. Whisky sold me as a martyr, and the night shed such layers off of my hide, that a new, quaking person was born into something, underneath the fruit, the bearings, longing, staring into the believing night.
Knockturn Wiley coming up Daisy, wanted to sit beside the lure. Naptime Cougar in the razing of a place I’ve longed to procure. Underneath the bath-time sermons, there’s a prayer for Captain Nemo, and all the ships he never felled. Beneath the bubbles roams the beast, the great squid you’ve never seen, imagination or uncouth reality, answer is unknown. Pass the grains across the grate, spin the tan paste across the ground. I have kept these secrets to me, I have spilled the sack around. Come to the beating thump, the light pounded through each hammering of the hale we’ve felt. In the past we shouldered our worry, now we dump it down the drain. Logs laid across our path, better footing, so they say, so we can go to all the places where there once were trees. Oh high seas calm for the time being, the thumb of the this child heeded on the creed. I will bring the bombs to the place where we all meet. Blooming key, hardening seeds in the ground. Come to the softening of all the world, in palming bright water, we become found.
It started in the wilderness, calm comes over his brain. The mild subtle continuation of life, come now aflame. I am happier here where the rain pools in her eyes. There is a place where golden bread comes to the lips, we are tipped with our happiness. Know now you have a place, a place you’ve always had. The steeping howl of all we’ve known continues in the sand, and in the sand there is a whisper, wound through with the soul, the twine of all the rivering dunes, covering in the holes. There is a place we need to be, we’ll need to be someday. But after in these thoughts, I can’t. I know I’ll run away.
I have written such violent angels into these chattering words. So full of fiery stroke and culling, so full of hatred for the dull. Like light, so keen to enter the cave, so disapproving of the eyeless and nocturnal.
The highway was born in the pocket of a guy, penniless and wandering down the sideways drives that once were tromped by the stomping of a war, back in the depths of a place we never worked for, oh, peace stop here. Lock away all the doors. Take yourself underground with the lepers and the fossils and the insurance men. Oh, didn’t you see all of this when it first began, didn’t you flash concubines past your man’s stalking words? Didn’t you see the light and how it curled around his chin, his smirk? Oh wait, that was his smoke, and that was your regret. That was the way these things tend to work. With the money in the ditch, and the gravel in the earth, the boulders meandering, the people unknowingly digging each day. The earth is pockmarked and I want to go home. Let me home, and let the roaming dogs of Loxley back into their nervous pens, the houses where the bald men chew on their pens, looking over tax forms and everything unfound is slowly ruining their lives. Oh money, oh collapsibility of all of this life, you cards, you who tilt so strongly into the wind, are bound to fall to your knees and stain your clothes. Now I get tired of all the defiant grays. See living through the doorframe, the roses when they burst into flame. The peace is loved and then parachuted into green pastures, into that great and happy hell where we banished the cave. Soldiering in the winter, commissioned by death and cold to sweep us up and through. I have been here, amiss, longing for another mission. I have been waiting for that crinkled paper, and all the wanderings of a collected management. I’ll tear up the walls and knock down the paper, and we’ll end up on the ground with the drapery around our hips. I’ll come back through the renaissance to show you your own rosy fingertips.
There is cause, there is freedom in the forgiveness of the ocean, when he stands on the coast, his head bent in shame. His banner and his trumpet lay on the ground beside him. His pride lays in splinters, floating out with the driftwood in the bay.
The bleached-out gamble of a wobbling story, bent out on a drug that induces glory, fell down the stairs through the negative stories, and beyond there was a battle of phantoms. The strung-out numerals of all our deaths, our kerosene in tow, our machinations spinning so, the soil so tilled beneath the snow. And back in the dusty library, where the gruff and musty scholars croon their nasally faces out from between the stacks, there hides a small iguana boy, they named him Jessie Loam. He had bamboo blood, and slate rock skin. The lawn was filled with bawdy sunshine and the people there reclined, and Jessie looked out from the basement windows of the dusty library.
The petrified shiver of the attic ghosts, the iced emotion, and I’ll come and go with a spent conscience. The howl is never-ending, it shackles these limbs in regret. Don’t worry me past my living, don’t drag me beyond where I need to be. that portrait is going to lay cold and stale. That epitaph will not breathe. You can keep me in your memory, your actions, and life. But do not project me to be still here. I will be no longer life. Old gosling, terrible defiance, and all the copper breath expressed. Up the mountain, and through the city, this is a place that we see bereft. So scary are their faces, so imagined are their homes. Jangle of the raggedy man walking down to the ocean. He wants to find his health as he stumbles along. The milk and honey he won’t find down by the ocean. But he thinks he’s going to find his song. Hey love, hey stranger, hey all the wind going by, I want to kill those sicker thoughts, and ride the by and by. She was my love in the country, and me found ourselves, faces filled with wheat and rye. The walk down the road is crazy, and the heads of state will concur that the hedges will love hedonism in the backyard of the trip and pull. Lands around the highway are just there for whatever passing whims. Oh great movie grinder we have found our cheeks, beneath the water and sieve. Longing for the daylight where it went, I don’t know anymore. They played the ships out from the shore and the tune was their current out. Thumbing away on the ancient day they renewed the sight and sound, the people were coming all out of their caves and the shouldered deliverance was bound. The moon spoke them into bed and the sun unraveled their courage, their breasts were filled with daisy dregs and their feet were solid and stuck to the boards of their mighty and sea-loving vessel.
Come out with the beckong breath the child is drifting off the wreaths and I will find myself at least a mile away from you. The true state of where I am begins with every sentence maimed, contorted pushed as I will, and all the science contained. So grow and push and see your light, dancing from out of your lips, your nose, your eyes have contained a beautiful sight and the world will around you enclose. be a drifter and so brave, roam among the flotsams. The people will come and dance in rage, the heels will tap and damn. And in my solstice, my old age, my crying light from my bedroom stand, the places where we find ourselves allotted and crusading with one hand, out in palm or out in fist or out with searching fingertips, call it where you need to be, the strings making sound over the eaves, the places where we seldom go. I rode the bike to Mexico and there I found the sun, sitting by the well where the younger boys would run and they’d stand as close as they could, before afterwards sweating away, and condencing into clouds, they’d fly, and in the sky they’d play. Their mothers, they became outrageous, and cried themselves the lakes, the fathers bound their palms to rods and flung them at the sun, feeling honor bent downwards into disgrace. The uncles thumbed their tacks in their mouths, hammers in hand and ready to build, the aunties sewed their red, red dresses, watching for the snow.
Heavy beaded blood upon the wind, the beginnings of a story finned with gnashing teeth and quarrelsome gin, the stuff of imperfect men, and the perfect men don’t exist. Pull this through your wits, you crazies, love the art of being hazy in the hollow grumbling wind. We came upon the camps of direness, the defeat became us in the poison of our tones, the after dinner thoughts out loud within the walls, with microphones within our throats, bull horns going through the hall, vibrations and the thunder all collapsing the mind of a child. This was the future, whipping wild and bearing new people, husking old shells off of them. Sometimes so green, sometimes so brown, some times so black and rotten. And here I stand in my nevers, my days completed by no large measure, and so much left to do. Electrocuted by the few and belligerent nothings. There is a small and tackling loving that comes upon my senses in the gruff and raging night. I know these words, they are my flight, they are my kingdom vanished. And in between our worlds, diminished, there is something like your light. Sell your music down the whining yellows, the truck loads of hats worn by brighter fellows who were felled and fallen, dirt-soaked in the Mississippi history. There is a theory that binds these cubs, the fate that falls upon us like drunken clubs, the men in white starched shirts, coming home from church with red faces, flared in anger at the graces He forgot to bestow. And so they pull their arms to action, making this and that from woe. They hear hatred, speak woe.
I kicked off the road in San Luis, and tipped up into the mountains. The history was elongated, splayed out upon my doorstep in fury, unknowing of the world, head tossing with sweltering dreams. Volcanoes dripped from beneath his sleeves.
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