In quintessential triviality for years in this fleshcase a shesoul dwelt.

_{(short explanation. my mother died on March 21, 2008.)}


Let's forget everything that has happened before.

Not that I will forget it, because I remember it all. I'm just asking you to forget about it. Unless, of course, I'm the one bringing it up.

I believe it has been months since I wrote a decent piece of anything. I mean, a decent piece of napkin, for christ's sake. A decent piece of notebook paper. I simply open my car door, and close it. Sit down, and drive. I do this everyday to go, only to come back. The light in the early morning clings silver to every branch and patch of grass. It is that sharp edge that early light seems to have. That may be only how it appears through glass windshields, with light brought more clearly into focus, I am sure. Everything shines with the morning wet, the sky always that silver haze, neither gray nor blue, but lit, and it seems as if the edges of everything were illuminated. I admit I am not actually very sure.  It could be the smoke drifting off the wildfires, burning in the pocosins, far off.  I hear that repeated on the news, a daily headline:"The wildfires continue to burn in the Pocosin Lakes..." I remember the black snaky river I once canoed in. I remember the water so dark with murk it seemed to roll thickly off the oars, and the pines and cypress stands so choked with green needles that it seemed to blot out anything beyond that place.  At the time it hadn't stopped me from thinking beyond it.  Most every morning the smoke moves in from there, and most every morning they repeat that same headline, and it sets off a signal in some cavity of my skull where a light, enfeebled by fatigue, pulses and burns.  And always I continue on the road, and I see the news from far away slowly manifest before me, and smoke settles over shielding trees until it becomes something like a frightening shimmer, that edge that I speak of.  As if everything were a heat mirage, burning off the black, in some searing, thirsty afternoon. I continue on. My eyes are tired, and my head aches behind my eye sockets, as they do when I have remembered something too hard.

I pass by hills. Mounds have been dug open. Stripped hill-faces overhang a yellow backhoe. The clay has been gouged and spills downward. After rains have washed them, it is the iron and metals that are left. The earth rusts. Out in the open, under the sky, the earth rusts. I could never believe it.  However, the earth is not nearly as raw as blood, which is why I cannot really claim it to be red.  The hills are not really red either, and the smoke not silver. It is faulty simile, you see. They are merely blots, made distinct by light. These are loose forms that lend shape to formless things. These are the ideas that you are ignoring in your head as you drive. They appear without mention as the montage you see in the side window of the car. They go unaddressed. We have other places to go.

These are things that appear as if on the other side of some expanse of river, merely made out by the lines, treelines, floating foliage, like clouds converging on the horizon. It is hard to say how an opened plot of earth recalls feelings you never put into any formation of language. Perhaps this is why I recall things as silvery. It seems to be a glint of something, a spark in an instant, that one never has the chance or even the impulse to name. When I see these things laid under the sun, the big bull cow lying prostrate by the fencepost, there is some dissatisfaction, some sadness without reason, that it calls up from some recess in me. He lies in the dirt, dark lashes flitting flies, his horns dulled down to nubbins, licking, with complacence. His hip bones are sharp and triangular.  He licks, slowly. He is surrounded by junked cars. A toppled hunting tower, once used to shoot deer, now lies on its side littering the paddock with a few wood planks. It is still brightly painted but has not been fixed in the months since I pass it. The cows are usually standing all around there.

There is something like a rash of this expanse, spreading along every road.  The smoke settles easily over these open expanses. It is easy to say nothing and only to listen. "The wildfires continue to burn on the Pocosin Lakes..." It is even easier to feel nothing. I see it all but I only ache, for some indispensable reason, whether it is so many things tossed by the way side or some other reason, I cannot say. Or whether they are, the cows and fences and tossed cars, I mean, some sort of plaything my mind makes use of when I am not making use of my mind. It is all incongruous anyway. It only matters that what I see does not stand testament to any sort of infinity, written about or believed. The only thing we believe is what we see around us in instances. There remains some property of matter, some finite balance, that no matter is destroyed, only slowly and more slowly broken, and finally dissipated, into some other form. And goes on, continuing, but irreversibly changed. "And as we have borne the image of the earthly, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly. ... We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed— in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye..." (1 Corinthians 15:49 & 15:52). 

I do not often quote the bible, and many people say there is no use for it now; it's true these days I find little use for it, for a solitary God that uses misery to force learning, to give one unwanted apple for another.  We say we must learn through sorrow, that these instances happen for a reason, but it is no reason other than some fruitless knowledge that could have been gleaned some other way, had God the will to do so.  I do not agree that the bible is useless, as its symbols and image are those which become the body and the flesh of our thoughts, and to use a biblical phrase, to make the word flesh.  However, its texts are not the answer but rather only a system of which to express questions and glancing observations about the world that we, over hundreds and hundreds of repeated years, have looked about us and reacted, in instances, in the same, conditioned way, given to these impulse thoughts so often that they have become code, and they have become law, and they have become something to believe in for the ever-foreseeable future and beyond. 

It is with that I turned my back on God, for even he knows that no good can come of static ideas, as this world does not exist in stasis, and in fact there is no such verisimilitude as promised to children in tales of heaven and of love that remains constant.  And he knows that there is no good in a system sparked within a hollow human head that does not grasp the entirety of its vision, only half-perceives, and thus believes as wholly true the things it wrote down as half-truths, on impulse and with incomplete observations of a vast and unfamiliar world.

Perhaps I am too hard on God, but he has left me alone.  Perhaps God never promised me these things, only people, and people have always been steadily unreliable.   But at the same time, what has he left?  I barely find any relish in words or thought.  I seek to avoid them.  I awake to dread and what I see before my eyes leaves me heavy and tired.  I am so tired of others who believe in abstraction, who have not understood not just the mentality but the physicality of being alone, who have felt a heaviness weigh their body or auras spark before their eyes from migraines sharpening against their skull, who have felt apart even from themselves, who have felt the exhaustion descend more upon them a little more each day until finally it seems there is no reason to even draw the shades.  No reason.  No one has understood being lonely until they have felt death.  Until they have felt emptiness not as an absence but as a foreboding presence.  Until the things that are visceral become some effervescent gleam, in the wind, on the nightstand, glancing in, thrown from the street. 

You do not know me, and I hate to think that you do.  You do not even know yourself, for what are you but a few fleeting emotions and a bag of bones, waltzing in the garden under sprinklers throwing spray, every which way finding flashes between the leaves, looking to the thin man that you have inexplicable feelings for (no, not feelings, romantic notions, Lolita-esque, of old and young) and to the other man, trusted, marriageable (pragmatic, i don't deny), and the other man, so young, naive and flushed with fire (and self-absorbed, a liar), that you have inexplicable feelings for, and why not? Each is only more without reason than another, and all feelings must surrender, any way, in time, to the mercuriality of going, living through.  We must accept these as only things we see momentarily, eye to eye.  But acceptance does not mean we do not feel some heaviness, some yielding to something beyond ourselves.  We feel the same way, we react the same way, even if we expect it, just as the smoke rolls in, the same, every day.

playing? natural beauty. neil young.
a natural beauty should be
preserved like a monument
to nature.