Blink.

The thin man in the white button-down shirt opens his worn Bible, thumbs through the thin pages until his finger stops, his tongue briefly touching his lips in concentration. “Here it is, Isaiah 37. This is the scripture…” he begins but can’t get any further before Jack is on top of him. Big heavy fists on white flesh. The Bible falls, lands askew on red-inked passages. A low, hoarse mewl comes from Jack between the thumps of bone on wet, split skin.

Jack opens his eyes and the man is sitting next to him, Bible in lap, finger steadily moving along with his voice. “And God said unto man, go forth from the land of Canan, and make unto your self a Land.” He pauses and swallows audibly, like a filter gurgling in a pool then continues.

Words on St. Stephen

He shook a cigarette from a crumpled pack and lit it with a match, shaking the flame out with a flip of his wrist. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this, except I tell everyone. I’ve learned very little in this life, and most of my words aren’t worth the spittle that comes from my telling it. But listen to me if you ever gave a damn about something.” His Irish drawl hung in the air like the smoke around his face. Behind us, the sun was setting, our shadows stretching out before us, pulled toward the creeping dusk. “Tell your woman what you feel and allow yourself to feel. Feel hard. Be passionate. Allow life to knock you ass over tea-kettle. Because everyone one of those times that you're left reeling was precipitated by something wonderful, something that makes colors exist. Something worth living for. I see men go through life stoic, straight-faced, like something made of granite. And I think to myself, which one of us is missing something?" With that he stood up and walked away, toward St. Stephen's North, where the shadow of Fusiliers Arch bled back into the hedgerow.

Phases

I go through phases of voracious interest,
Consuming news articles like barroom peanuts;
The bland, crusted shells crushed and pulled apart,
discarded on the floor in the search for the fruit.
Words of experts and personalities,
Partisan philosophers,
Ideologues,
demagogues,
charlatans,
They all have their say, clouding and muddying
The same story. I’m left with shadows,
A light bulb burning out, a moth fluttering
Against a glass shell, seeking the spastic filament inside.

dream girl

dream girl

'when the sun comes up in the morning
(I sleep on my belly so it's always from my left)
I awaken to
that lovely golden light
and
I'm usually alone
and I sometimes (but not always) wonder why the most
beautiful woman in the world is not sleeping there next to
me?
I deserve her, I think, I deserve
her.

then I get up
go to the bathroom
splash water on my face

look into the
mirror

shudder a bit
in
disbelief

then

go sit down on
the ivory
stool

let it all
go
except for the reality

which

no amount
of
efficient
modern
plumbing
can

whirl
away.'

Distraction

"You have to lower your standards," she said. "It's amazing how easy it is once you stop caring." It was meant as dating advice, though I didn't ask for any. I wasn't really sure where the statement came from.

"I'll try," I responded. Not sure how to tell her that for the last eight months I'd been in a concussive fog of relative apathy.

The last woman that I'd felt the earth tip for had left me on my ass, with a stiff right hand to the chin - unseen though deserved. It was the type of punch that lingers, that takes you down a peg; the punch that you feel every time you chew. For months after I was reeling, unstable. I would get drunk and invite people to punch me in the face, unwilling to start a fight but eager for wanton, mind-erasing violence. I wrote feverishly in notebooks, wrote songs, listened to broken-hearted crooners. I secretly wallowed in my broken romanticism. But like all passions, it subsided to embers, smoldering in a shell of nonchalance.

I tossed myself into bachelorhood, slept with more women than I had in my entire life. Distractions and possibilities - even something that hinted of potential. Ideas not yet put to paper. But still, nine months gone and it still came back to her, a strange addiction. And so I thought of far-away mountain streams, city streets flickering in foreign dialects, island beaches, strange accents. My thoughts lingering after her like dim shadows.

"I'm serious. Life is too short to worry all the time about love, lost or future. It'll happen." She drank from her wineglass. "Or it won't."

"It will."

"You think so?" She looked at me like a child looked at mall Santas, wanting to believe.

"It happens all the time," I said and kissed her. "Every day."

Life in a paragraph.

"I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing through and wonder. Humans are caught - in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too - in a net of good and evil. I think that is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feelings and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well - or ill?"

John Steinbeck
"East of Eden"

Perhaps this is simplifying things too much, a world of lives and thoughts boiled down to a pair. Or perhaps it's true, when a life is truly looked at, the magnified parts finally scrutinized with a keen eye, things truly do boil down to those two. Good or Evil.

Personally I think Steinbeck has brought out the dramatic side in me. He tends to do that. For the next few days my mind will be filled with the philosophical implications of every moment, every thought, breath and action. Great books do that to me.

This is when I recede inward, after the last page is turned, the last sentence read. A world of words, Steinbeck's canvas splashed with my paint. The outside world fogs over as my eyes go in, reliving and contemplating what I just read. So many people I've just met, new souls. They exist as real as any other soul I've known, perhaps more so. Cal - I don't know if I've ever truly liked a character more, a bird of a similar feather.

In parting...

"Thou mayest rule over sin,' Lee. That's it. I do not believe all men are destroyed. I can name you a dozen who were not, and they are the ones the world lives by. It is true of the spirit as it is true of battles - only the winners are remembered. Surely most men are destroyed, but there are other who like pillars of fire guide frightened men through the darkness. "Thou mayest, Thous mayest! What glory. It is true that we are weak and sick and quarrelsome, but if that is all we ever were, we would, millenniums ago, have disappeared from the face of the earth. A few remnants of fossilized jawbone, some broken teeth in strata of limestone, would be the only mark man would have left of his existence in the world. But the choice, Lee, the choice of winning! I had never understood it or accepted it before."

Timshel.

Girl Dancing

She danced across the floor
the way a cloud of dust twists itself into a cyclone,
briefly swirling before melting away.

Her hips moved rhythmically,
throbbing.

Her thin hands, like thawing icicles,
massaged the air while she sang softly.
There was no music, only what she heard in her head.
Watching her,
I listened.