shapes, new and imagined

Twas dazzling. That yawn. And now I’ve sat down on steady ground to get my bearings straight; made it home through the scarlet maw of city pre-dawn. Out all night and feeling it, too. This’s no time or place to call up family but there’s a feeling I might want to— family ties feel more snug in the early morning. But now yk there’s work to be done. But coffee first… Bald jawn sitting by the window reading a crisp Gravity’s Rainbow… Lady visibly shaking near the wall of Cassette Tapes for Sale, on iced coffee #3 or #4. Barista is an older man with more nose rings than fingers. Very cool. Sincerely.

And now… Home now, after the weekend. Coffee in hand now. It’s a solid feeling. But every cell in me wants to be in five different places at once. I walked into my apartment like forty boots—that’s twenty men! or nineteen and one quadruped. And in a life we all come back to the feeling. I was 40 boots this morning. And good god—it’s a New Day! New Start. Heated up some rice dumplings in the microwave, set out to recompile my code and run it back through the machines I have laying open and highlighted around my place. A nylon string guitar. An open window. Morning air peeling in.

I commuted to work on Tuesday on a city bus filled with schoolchildren returning from their schoolday. Overheard talk—ICE raids, AirBnBs, Jack Daniels—on this bus of backpacks and YA books on knees, speech bubbles flying allovertheplace, and then, later at work, chef told me one of the dishwashers, Manuel, was nabbed while dropping his kids off at school by two clumsy men dressed in ninja gear slinging pairs of handcuffs and plastic zip ties, one on the left with a large tattoo of Dan Bongingo on his bicep and the other on the right a legal dwarf with a severe beer belly trying to wave his arms to stop pedestrians from filming with their phones. And no one’s heard from him since. He’s been eaten up. Swallowed by the fading american darkness. A small Honduran man with a clean-cut look, small eyes and small posture in a clean polo shirt tucked into khakis, posing no threat to anyone. Just like the Tamales Guy they got. Dare I say that I care quite a bit more about Manuel and the Tamales Guy than I will ever about Jimmy Kimmel’s show? I do. And I care more about the babies thrown out screaming with the bathwater from that apartment-wide raid on the South Shore—blocks away from the future Obama Memorial Library—where tepid, COD-brained stormtroopers broke down doors and ravaged the place looking for “illegals”… I find myself feeling illegal too, now and then, texting the gc we should get drinks and find some ICE agents to harass.

Never did have a conversation with Manuel. We don’t speak the same language outside a colloquial bump o’ knuckles. Nor did I want him to speak any English; didn’t want him to take up the forced tones to find the language, arching his accent to fit in with words so foreign to his cozy spanish. I only wish I knew Spanish. All the stupid contradictions feel like they’re being swept into the same dustbin which is looking more and more like a soup (oh no) someone might soon expect us to swallow.

This notion rattled around inside my own soupy self as I went behind the restaurant to track down some napkin refills and my eyes steadied on a great pool of rainwater in the back alley reflecting the sky and the power lines and the transformer humming soft like heaven, all the threads of the world converging, a chorus breaking out en noggin… broke my attention to detail down to shit… ran food to the wrong tables… tripped on the stairs and shattered a handful of glasses into my palm… not bad enough for stitches but bad enough to get let off for the night around 10pm. Went home, poured hydrogen peroxide, isopropyl alcohol, and neosporin all over my palm…

Went to sleep early that night, dreamt of contradictions, dreamt of sweatpants and dreamt of the fear of losing control. Carlos Bringuir’s ghost casting Stephen Miller’s shadow at a bar, and a conversation, mid-dream (what’s new?): “He just imagines shapes and puts them out there,” said someone with a hundred faces and bad posture, explaining something to someone else at a bar. “Gh!” the other person clutches their head. “I’ve imagined so many shapes, too. Why did I never think to put them down in writing?” I suppose he started making up shapes himself. What else is there to do? We look out to where the people we know have disappeared to under the hand of some great mechanistic yin-yang of consent and outrage and we can only imagine what sort of shape they’re being forced into.

I woke up to my alarm clock walloping, bounding off the bedside table yelling yelling yelling the time the time the time. Is now. Get up. Make coffee, nitwit. And a neighbor’s voice is coming from the alleyway like smoke: “-without adding collagen, the tweet said not to add the collagen and I didn’t want it to turn out bad.” Now that it’s cold out in the mornings, I shut the window. There’s a pile of dishes in the sink.

The dreambearings of my last couple (more nocturnal than usual) months have passed and I’ve given them up. I handed them over to you in my two hands but now I rest here on the open palm of the grass’s carpet, writing away this thought, this fleeting little speech my fingers are making. I am sitting beneath a bur oak, a gooseberry, and a mulberry all planted in the same bit of grass, in the park, and they’re all dropping their little parcels on me sitting stupidly below. The autumn air is sweet if one dares smell it, but it’s sweet like mulch or old wood. Every falling leaf is a new world grown old, trying to forget itself. The blue past the eyelashes of what’s left on the trees was unanticipated, unhoped-for, actively growing greater than it was only two weeks ago. As the trees shed, the sky only increases; eats the world. What am I going to do about it?

Spend more time untangling dreams? No, no. I’m past that (for the most part). I’ve moved on… parts 14-21 of this series, assembling together the contents of my dreams and nightmares to see out what’s happening in there… was not enough, it turns out. But now I’m awake. And now… Sips drink… Now… Adjusts seat… Now I will… Swats fly hammerheading past ear… Think of something new… Yearn an aspiration at all of you readers like a first-cast stone—but I am not so pure of sin. I was at a party two weeks ago in a backyard in Logan where the birthday boy puked so hard small vessels exploded in his face and gave him a diabolical look but by the time his shirt came off, thirty beers for thirty years, I took a sharpie and my friend and I drew small penises on his back until I drew a massive one with its shaft going down his spine, balls bumping up to each shoulder blade.

My friend, vape dead in the morning, you now approach a crossroads. Unfortunately the only way to quit is to do nothing. Worst part about it. Sit at the intersection until the craving leaves and the leaves have fallen and the seasons changed; then once the craving is out can we move on down these dusty roads. More dusty than we might realize. A winter realization. Hold back the quivering and be present, my friend tells himself. You know you want the deferment of pleasure, don’t you? But the deferment of pleasure feels daunting when old age looms like a dark terror and all the romantic poets died so young.

-gbe