What Falls Apart

(untitled working image, 2010)

Tear it apart, take the splintered limbs, fragments in your hands, and walk down this path. The river man calls the ferry over, and we take a ride with him. For a while it is peaceful, as sky turns to dusk, we speak of the passing night and rehearse our stories together. To be on the river until you fall asleep in my arms. I whisper to your ear that this is where we belong. You heal the cuts on my arms; the scars disappear like the stars above. I ask to a nameless god of what creature we are, and how cruelty is as natural as caring for each other. The river man looks at us, and then stares into my eyes for a moment. He knows.
The current picks up, a grunt or two wake you as our guild fights his control. Soon our vessel will run wild, our screams will be heard from both banks, and no one will come. The falls are just before us, and I doubt we'll reach the eastern bank on time. Our cargo, our burden, will be thrown, and our hands will fight the hissing waters. I can hear the roar of falling water, and it is grand, it is great, and much much larger than me, or all of us together. There is a silence in the air, and just before we can wish of another life; one to be taken from our past and reversed in our ways, and just like that we float off.
Of baby trees, of fertile grounds; rich with mineral and life, of spitting rain on the surface of bare flesh, and such laughter that follows. I cried, your smile as grand as monuments, drunk in a moment, fireworks explode unexpectedly, and I carry you away in my arms like newly weds without a future, without a home, and nomadic like the barbarians.
The surge stops, the thundering sound of water disappears, and I see your face, lifeless and dull, eyes screaming to winged creatures, asking to carry us away from this. I swear I see your soul leave you. In my arms you feel weightless, and I hold on for as long as I could. I can't remember the rest, I can't remember what happened. All I know is we are here, somewhere in the milk of dreams, of legend, and of the past, and that we can no longer change beyond what has been done. Those who spoken, tell of our stories, but know not of what follows, for nor do we speak of such moments. We reached something grand, beyond our memory, and who we were could not have spoken for such times, so we left who we were behind. Something has changed, our flesh as the shells of what once was, but to us, now forgotten, for future is in our feet. Each step is new life, each breathe our own, together.

Give A Little (Take A Little)

(faye, pine, and mel camino, January 20th, 2010)

I'll meet you halfway, where the getting gets tough, and we'll have to use our life jackets for fire wood. I'll turn my bed into a boat, and we could live there for a while (an evening). We'll throw records on the player, I'll pull the pulleys and put the needle on right; a drop as quiet as a mouse fart. With each rotation, with each hiss, crackle, and pop we'll melt before the lamp and a dancing flame. Remember this time, remember that time, and let it all come back. Before we were, after we weren't, and what we are now, who you are, and who I transformed into, with awkward shoulders and naked in a broken miniature house. I'll operate on your hand, I'll pick away at it until all the splinters are gone. I'll hold them before your giant eyes, and you'll lick them clean off, and swallow whole the history of everything that once was.
A broken tree is cut down; the sons of farmers turned to a lifetime of being lumbermen, a tree grows alone in a forest, and over hundreds of years it has made millions of friends. A son loses his arm but gains a family. The axe is put on a plank and raised to live over the family couch where it collects the dust of a daughter, of a son, of a father, and of a mother for what would be a decades and a half before the son of a son is old enough to fit his father's shoes on.
Outside, just feet from the house; upon the first strike the son's arm withholds a quake that rocks his shoulders and jolt the roots his teeth. The axe drops and the son of a son never holds an axe again in his life. Through the window a mother looks to her one-armed spouse who cuts wood humbly off only few feet from his offspring. The father sees his son walk away from his fallen axe, and looks down to the axe and see visions of blood and bone, and a tear forms in the crest of his eye; this one is for my dead arm his wet eye says (drop). The father comes around, grabs his old axe for the first time since his accident, holds it firm in his good hand, his only hand, and takes a swing at that tree with a cat scratch from the previous axe attack, and strikes not once, but a second, third, fourth, and etcetera until the tree has lost the fight. With a sudden release the tree falls, crushes the man, and runs a line to destroy everything this man loves. The house falls, the son, fresh from his attempt at his father's shoes, cries in his room before the ceiling gives. From her kitchen window, the mother witnesses her spouse be destroy and decides to watch her demise as well. And of the daughter, we don't know, she was off in the woods too far from this narrator's eyes.

Years pass.

More years pass.

...

The house falls to legend, and told over campfire for years to come, but those days are no longer. The house has been taken by trees, and until a year ago hasn't see a human in what could be ages of Aquarius', and all the discoverers see is a lone oak that is cut perfectly and ready to be processed. The discoverers call their truck over, use rope to secure their bounty, and off they go to a plant where the tree will undergo a complex system of formatting only to be put into separate trucks and delivered to several lumber yards (four to be exact).

Where we bring you back into this story is when you are walking through a warehouse and spot a piece of wood that, in your eyes, is perfect. The piece is taken into your hands, and it's curse is cooled to your touch. In the next few days, what you end up doing to that piece of wood is rather graphic, so I'll omit the details, leaving you with splinters, and those splinters I end up having to pull from your hands, under a magnifying glass, the same glass I used on my father's splinters, and now your hands bring me joy in the act I call smoothing your hands once more.
The licked and consumed splinters travel through your body, and eventually they are disposed in means I would like to not mention, and that your unmentionables travel through a complex system of plumbing before they end up in some plant where they are filtered, and another complex system occurs, and a few more vastly interesting and complex things happen before we end up at the conclusion to this story.
Three, four splinters after what-could-be-the-worst-way-go-to, are reunited with the earth again. They make sweet-sweet love to the earth and as a result for their act, they form life, and this narrator comes to his conclusion by quoting Elton John.

From the day we arrive on the planet
And blinking, step into the sun 
There's more to see than can ever be seen 
More to do than can ever be done 
There's far too much to take in here 
More to find than can ever be found 
But the sun rolling high 
Through the sapphire sky 
Keeps great and small on the endless round

It's the Circle of Life 
And it moves us all 
Through despair and hope 
Through faith and love 
Till we find our place 
On the path unwinding 
In the Circle 
The Circle of Life

RE: Questions Dealing With People

(The White Knight, 2007)

Open Letter In Response to:

Open Dialogue: Questions Dealing With People by Christopher Heller

Dear Mr. Heller,

(How do I say this without sounding like I am delivering advice)

As humans, we are given too much choice, even for how we breathe. We can choose to fill our lungs through the mouth, or through the nose, and recently, I have been noticing when walking down the street of how my face would appear to strangers around me when my lips are slightly parted when gently breathing via my mouth. I have since switched to breathing from the nose, in the same sense of eating with my mouth closed, something I have grown accustom to since childhood. I ponder the act of being closed-mouth, and ask of you, how different being physically closed-mouth on a daily basis, whether in eating or breathing, from being closed-mouth in the sense of being reserved of opinion and verbal response.
In terms of appearance, the modern human has come a long way from the cavepeople lion cloth, or ropes of Paganism, but what does the modern human trend to wear? Falling into category, the choice is what feels best, and what is best is often socially adapted. On some days I'll put something on, take it off, and put something else on, and sometimes even further, I'll lift my flesh from the muscle and replace it with another, until I find the right appearance to embrace the day. But I ask why; why must I carry out these laborious measures to please viewers of I? Does my demographic determines who I am, and what social grouping I feel like I belong to.
Can we scratch off all this sociology and just talk lamesman for a moment? I am adequate to say I am an honest person. For example I correct myself, I tell others of my own corrections to their ways, or at least advocate it. And more often than not, I experience awkward and frustration from my honesty to myself and to others. But as I talk of self-benefit in a complex matter, I see open-honesty as a challenge; to say what you mean, and to stand by your words. I guess we all have our goals and admiration, and to be honest, to be well-spoken, even to the point where you reveal your flaws to perfect strangers, is something I see as the only way to live with myself. I mean, we're all in the same boat here, we're adrift, and as those sad and lonely existentialists would say, we're all lost causes (or perhaps I got the wrong message out of Existentialist 101). I guess what I am trying to get at here, after all the bullshit has been spoken for is, you. are. not. alone. and. we. are. all. in. the. dung. together. getting. dirty. being dirty. and some are having fun, and others not, but what's the difference really. There is no reward in living, only in surviving. At the end of the day, it's all about living with yourself, are you satisfied (I hope not, because if you aren't satisfied that means you're still thirsty, you still got fight, you still got kick, and goshdarnit, people like you)?
For some humans, freedom of speech is the climax on the tit (pronounced in this case as, teet, for the sake of rhyme), for others is about simply say what is, and that's about it.

"I'M FINISHED IT!"

Sincerely,

-b

[original letter from Christopher Heller]

Why can't I look at someone and smile at them? Why can't I tell someone, "I like looking at you. I wonder how you spend the day"?

While walking down the stairs commenting on another man's shoe, why do I feel so judged? Why can't I say what I want? Tell jokes that I want? Tell people, in my humble opinion, what the right thing to do is? How come I have to try so hard to be seen as an all-right dude? Will people have the temerity to say what they feel? Or do we not have a clue as to what to feel about another person? How come I can't cum on someone's tits?

How come people don't give a shit about giving a shit? Well if not, does it really matter to all of us to be among one of us?

How in the hell can you tell me what it means to be me? Maybe I have too good a sense of who I am and not a suspicion as to who you are, is that what I'm all about? Figuring out who you are? Or am I lost completely?

I hear too often the phrase, "All I want to do is..." This limiting, narrowing, simplifying statement tries to get at the meaning of what makes us happy absurdly sacrificing the complexities of happiness. I am thrilled to ask socially noxious questions as long as their grounded from a firm stance as to who I am and what makes me happy. Why should we hesitate about getting on together? It's all within our little windows of communication to share who we are with other people. Isn't that expressive? Shouldn't it be rewarding? But really, how come I cant cum on someone's tits because who really is the embarrassed one in that scenario? Do whatever makes you happy but please, lets be happy together.

from the Ontario College of Art & Design (University) publication, CadMium (in illegible font, the title that is).

The Right To Be Wrong

(December 4th, Wake, from Nocturne, 2009)

When I was richer, I used to take my son out on long walks through the forest that surrounds my estate. The forest would eventually gave way, opening the view to a vast field of all the shades of green, I would tell my son that this is all I have to my name. Of course, he was probably too young to realize the double meaning in my words, and only I hope he still remembers moments like that, especially since I am no longer by his side.
Memories of battleships and the first submersibles, my company had made for the war efforts, flash by as I cruised down the country road. My first wife is buried somewhere out there, her ghost rides passenger for the first five miles and vanishes before my house. She knows I have a new life; our time has passed, and I haven't visited her grave since the last century. I whisper her name over the whiskey and under the stone she fades beneath.
Josephine is my last attempt at a second son, my wife could not bare another. Elisabeth cries alone, takes trips down to the lake, and imagines drowning some day in those murky waters. I hold her hand, I tell her she is all I ever needed, and then I start by kissing her; the rest follows suit in my will, and her duty as my wife, to me, to me I say. I am not fit for such decency, I have taken something once beautiful and turned it plaid and ordinary.
In the garden, my son and daughter discovery the world of insects and of small and fancy plants, unnatural to the environment. My wife reads them Darwin, and I listen from behind my pipe, the sun is swallowed by the clouds today. Timothy, seven years old, to take care of his younger sister now, as I watch from miles away. Across the ocean, in a field of stars.
Elisabeth, you have grow with our children, you have taken my body, and sank it in that lake. I wonder if you imagined my body as yours, with each scar as your own, my eyes looked to the skies above, my body limp to the touch; sinking with stones tied to both hands and feet. What fitting words should be said to a man who profited from the restless arms of war, who showed his love in abstract ways, and carried the weight of his guilt before the weight of others.
To my son, to my daughter, to my wife, and to the one from another life: the sea wakes, the storm surges; beyond this port to the field of white crests, let the world fall to your toes, and may the landscape before you now fade to your discovery of new lands.

Look upon my banks, I'll be here for a while.

Through The Night Softly

(Bastard Image from Nocturne, 2009)

March 14^th, 1988

We hit the wall. We have fallen from the grace we once knew and loved; now it was tension and between us both existed too many words unspoken. The guilt in my gut, the words on the edge of my tongue were too much. I was going to drown her as soon as I started with, “It’s the way you, it’s what you do, to me”. The night fell silent, we slept like sheep, drunk from a night on the town, I was tired and in her arms like a broken bird. The feeling of flesh knew of the words I wanted to say, and she was there, absorbing them like acid. What dreams did she have that night, again, I thought of the tiny universe that existed just beyond my touch. Tonight we’ll be one, sucked, rubbed, burnt, and toasted, moaning utter nonsense; a language of lovers.

*Excerpt from The Way You Make Me Feel (of Coyote Blues)