freak show

what do you say to a man with no hands? that is, no fingers but two fleshy crustacean-like appendages that he used to hold his cigarette elegantly. eleven years old in the era of bad bubblegum one hit wonders. pitifully self-possessed & painfully self-conscious. before shrugged off black mass & clever retorts. all roads lead to dust & cardboard. it was one of those traveling carnival sideshows that used to hit town about the time school let out. my grandmother took me. she would be dead in a year from cancer. the two-headed snake & the book of job shook me up but they were no preparation for this wrecking ball of biblical fire & spit them out. i shuffled nervously into the tent, slipping my hands into my pockets & felt my nostrils flair involuntarily. time flattens out & different approaches are called for eventually. christ deserved a purple heart, a sleeve where he could wear it & a shoulder to cry on. i deserve transcendence. we all do. the next year i spent all my time at the carnival playing beat the rigged odds & won two cartons of tarytons.

death bed confession

if you drive far enough to where life gets smaller but the stories get bigger. you might find what appears to be a shallow grave out on an abandoned piece of farmland. filled to the brim with hastily scribbled forget-me-nots. torn tickets from long forgotten events. a pressed flower from the family bible. broken heirlooms, broken bottles, broken treaties, broken clocks & broken bones. you might come across singed around the edges documented evidence & brown brittle highlights from someone up to their chin in the language of loss. someone sworn to memory for seemingly no good reason. someone who's muted cries for attention & staggered stains seep from the ground. someone who's mother warned them to leave the monster in the box. told them how those black marks in heaven add up. how the cards don't lie. how the dead always get shoved to their side of the bed. the muddy details of every story come dragging their heavy feet through the kitchen. along the dotted line, that once there was an ascending arc in the story line. leaving scratch marks that are sure to draw judgment from the good church folk as well as the festive bottom dwellers. that will coax anger from the sunnier side of life. that seem to scream out-have you heard one single word i've said?

scarlet fever

one hundred five degrees & rising above the black veil between life & death to a world of porcelain glaze & gelatin consistency. where television squeezes out ghosts & schoolbooks are burned in effigy. a world of arrogant isolation & superimposed wholeness. running the gamut from lamentation to ecstasy in under ten seconds. too new to ever be taken for granted. too high to be mistaken for even a bird. it was like looking through a viewmaster times ten. i was exorcized of the ordinary at any early age by feverish hallucinations that kept the world at a quarantined distance. blessed me with an ambidextrous logic, a precocious insight into abstract thought that gives true freedom of expression. my frame of reference stretched wide open to surrealistic possibility that let me riff off not only the profound & absurd but also the hidden & unnoticed. let me test the limitations of rational thinking & correct punctuation. but it also gave me an exaggerated, hyper-sensitive response to even dull innocuous sounds & colors. at times an overwhelming counterpoint. little tolerance for lowest common denominators & banal cultural checkpoints or icons. part black elk, part john the revelator & part absent- minded trickster. all attempts to indoctrinate me into the ways of never-everland failed. my roots weren't all that deep but my antenna more than made up for the distance.

columbia drive

sometimes i wonder if i ever left that backyard. on my knees digging in the hillbilly dirt with plastic spoon for night- crawlers, bottle caps, .22 shells, & the lost scriptures of saint ishmael. dressed much as i am now-in white t-shirt, blue jeans & fifteen dollar tennis shoes. with a string tied to my wrist. a sparrow attached to other end. a feathered facsimile of a guardian angel circling overhead on the lookout from one end of gravel road to the other. watching for copperhead snakes, runaway automobiles, any potential black marks in heaven. koans in secretive manila envelopes are covered in wet leaves. any school of dead presidents & their sharp-tongued flunkies who scold birds simply for being birds. i stand on the river bank thinking those diamonds on the water aren't any more shiny, any more beautiful than the broken glass littering the empty lot across the street. i run through waist-high weeds as grasshoppers explode in front of me. the seven year cicada drone are like what i imagine an alien invasion would sound like. i get to an oak stump riddled with potshots & loaded questions that go against the grain. i sit wondering how to overcome altar boy guilt. how to turn the tables on ahab, abraham & other hierarchal protagonists. cut my way out of white whale belly with only a pen knife & an alias.

a trip to the end of the world

the sign says victoria motel but it may as well say the end of the line. a dog-eared gideon's bible is in the top drawer. i don't have to read it to know it's an accusation, to know that i'm guilty of everything. there's no clock to tell me if i'm rising or falling. when you're caught in an endless cycle of misbehavior. it's not really an issue. i jam the knob on the television in between stations to tune in some ambient white noise. the walls & bed sheets are stained with a consistency though-that makes it almost feel like home. i pull the curtains & strip down. turn around in the mirror, looking for a scar to validate my faith-show me that i've pulled through worse. but there's not a mark on me. no one knows i'm here but the phone rings. annoyed, i pick it up & spit out a dangerous proposition. then slam it down before they can answer. i'm still trying to bail myself out with hard-hitting confusion. i lay my license on the bed stand along with an apology. i kick back with a heavy sigh-at least the hard part is over.