The Mummy

The Mummy

Et ceci vient de au dela du Fleuve Lethe.

Gauze all wadded,

linen in these strips,

Shake out the dust,

Stitched up so serenely

The seams lined up in peace

In pieces, all spread out perfectly.

The pattern is old, all wrong

Wrong and tattered and torn.

Dinosaur cloth, it covers

The buried bones,

All rough,

stone.

Scarred up hands, shrunken to shape, dyed and stained

Covering over the face, scarred,

Worn out teeth, short and charred

In the inbetweens,

Dyed

Stained.

Scarred from eating all this stone

And digging up bone.

Hair miles wide, sticking out,

Completely gone,

Matted down

Like oil to the head,

Long long long

Like stretched out days

and

Daylight

Used up over too many dark nights

Spare sparks

All spend up.

Dyed and colored 

the dead things 

turning to powder 

to the touch

Leaving fingerprints

In broken bone

Dried up blood

Wrapped up in a kind of lace

Dead earth and rough cloth.

Mary Jo (a short story) part 1 of 2

Mary Jo
part 1 of 2


Mary Jo knew exactly where in town was best for running through the razor wire. Where the fence was weakest, where nobody ever looked, where a person could get under the neon lights, slip out and get free. She knew all the darkest spots and the weakest ones too.
She sat still in the big tan fake leather chair from behind the front desk. She had moved to next to the dirty window and chewed the end of a pencil. She kicked her feet. All along the walls, there were black and white photographs that stared down, lines and lines of them, quiet and motionless, as grim motionless as the dead and dying dust flying in the desert air. The air stinks. Everything always smells burnt, all burnt up and nothing but ash. The pictures stared down at her every move…and she watched back. She is locked looking right in the shades of grey somewhere near the natural location of an eye…eyeish areas of all these frozen ghosts…oh, the staring pictures. Well tonight, she was staring back. Eye to eye locked together, tunnel tunnel, center-to-center, eye to eye.
The silver car parked out front was not hers. It was not hers but she did have the keys…well, at least she knew where they were and she could easily get to them. They were as good as hers…anytime she felt like making them hers, really… and she was definitely thinking of making that exact thing a reality. Just steal the son of a bitch. Why not? Fuck this hellhole. Who would know? She could just get the keys, start the car, drive the fuck away…dum dum dum dum…boom…never look back. Right through the fence…rocket. The silver car out front was not her car. It belonged to her friend, Fiona…friends, Fiona and Alex…it was their car. They had left the car with Mary Jo earlier in the evening. They left it with her so she could watch it as she worked her shift as the night clerk at the only motel in town. And on occasion, she looked out the window and noticed it was still there and then back at her staring match. She thought it was creepy enough that the owner of the motel insisted on all the weird southwestern desert motif…the town (and motel by default) was in fact located in western Minnesota…but the decorations were only off-putting, only strange…merely quirky… the real trouble was the collection of very old sepia and black and white pictures of apparently completely infamous, uninfluenced people. All of them so gaunt and sad…like each on of them dying of the worst disease…skeletal. Skull and bones. Victims of poisonings and syphilis and profound clinical boredom. Always looking down. The staring grey eyeballs. Wow.
She looked out the window. The car was still there…still fine…and she thought her friends worried too damned much. A large chunk of the pencil eraser broke free from her incessant gnawing. She coughed and sputtered and almost choked…perhaps to death or worse…but in the end pulled through and spit the slimy lump of pink goo into her hand, made a face of shock and shook the whole load onto the ugly carpet and rubbed the spot dry with her black boot. Doc Martins. Bouncing soles.
She thought about stealing her friends’ car again. She looked at it, new, clean, shiny, and decided it was not the sort of car she would like to steal. She had principles.

Travels 8..............

Out past the end of the world, past the last broken iron and smashed concrete footprints of civilization. We went out into the impenetrable dark canopy of living wild and woven tree thickets and gravel dust chaos. Out past the confusion of living, past the always talking and always distracting…out into the simplicity of roaring engine that turns wheels and road to fire and melts rubber and thought together. Out into the single-mindedness of running. Paranoia. Fear. We heard the sirens everywhere and with each peep or squall of whining sound, we went deeper and deeper in the backlands. Around here this is how folks escape trouble…any kind of trouble…they ran hog wild into the backlands of hills and creeks and cousins. We run past the lights of town and back around again doubling up on ourselves.
“Fuck Mitchell, what did you do?” Doug’s voice is slight and being carried away by the blowing wind coming through the open window like a hurricane.
“I don’t know.”
“He fuckin’ set the lake on fire.” Jeff’s word came out flat and fell straight down towards the ground…no reverb…no going loft…the word did not float…they fell and died. The car still burning through the atmosphere like a piece of clattering space junk falling back to Earth with a spectacular crash in mind. Something felt like it was coming. We drove past the last the railroad crossing with working lights…now we were in the backwoods.
The house got less tidy. The cars parked in front got older or not at all. The sounds got quieter for a few minutes and then got louder again…but I different kind of loud. Loud out here is a special kind of loud…a loud tolerable…a loud a person can hear through. A loud made for human ears and to be enjoyed by human ears, believe me it was a sound that could soothe, soothe or shake...a shake a person down to their barest core but even that could be a soothing experience. There is magic in places like this...untamed untapped human magic. We drove even faster out here…because out here there are no laws…no laws at all…only madness prevailed out here and a person was only bound by the limits of their imagination.
The half rolled down window next to me rattled in the door and slipped a bit further down. An empty glass bottle rolled around my feet in the floorboard. I picked it up and tossed it out the window. It crashed on the road behind. I watched the tiny little bits of glass shoot up and down falling back down like shards of ice. The little bits caught the red and white light of the taillights and sparkled.
“I cannot believe you did that man.” Doug shook his head.
“It looked fuckin’ cool” Dan said as he watched the breaking glass with me. He turned back around and returned to reading his magazine.
“Yeah, It did look cool, but fuck we are going to get in some much shit.”
‘What? No, we are not. Don‘t be a fuckin‘ twat dude…nobody is going to know it was us” Dan’s voice had a higher pitch and northern lilt that the rest of us lacked.

The Exploding

Exploding

I am exploding like the dark night,
The dark-Extinguishing-the- light
Only them and us starry night
The covered up dark lonely night spread out like a blanket
Spread out
Across the sky.
And you write your name in the sky in the everything
The star ink
To make bright
The lightless
Cold night
Across the sky,
I spread out before you.
I am illuminated
I am the illuminated.
I am the stubble covered chin
The stubbled chin in my hand
My knuckle tattooed hand.
The blocked off
Half blind
Black eyes, sunglass-dark eyes
The dirty blonde sweat
The dirty hair
The dirty hair hanging down
In strings
The dirty greasy tresses
Across the sky
The moon light faded from neon sign light
Across the sky
The star inked arms, bulky
Knuckles not dragging
The ground
Held up
Fingers spread open
Across the sky.
I am all the light coming in through the cracks above
I am the breeze coming in from under the door
The busted tired little poor ol me
By the busted broken old radiator
The dirty hair
The stubbled covered chin
Exploding into bits
Little bits of dusty light
Dusty light
Coming in through the crack in the roof
Under the spread out sky
The spread out in star inked night
Across the sky.

this same dream

I have this recurring dream. a stranger or say, some alien visitor comes upon a wrecked earth long after all mankind has gone extinct and the only thing left intact that he can find is a recording of a live performance of "Once in the lifetime" by Talking Heads. I have this dream often. I have it and I smile because I like the impression it would give.

Travels 7............

The dark red amphitheatre stands teetering on the tall side of a dead grass, treeless hill. Gravel and slick black shards of broken asphalt is scattered all along the sun-bleached sidewalk. The entire scene is painted bright in purples and creams and blues, the breeze off the lake is cool. The world spins too fast here and the ground moves too quick. The car ride has confused my head. I am shaking. The sweat on my brow chills me as the briney scented air surrounds and chokes me. We all line up and look over the side of the hill, straight down into the white capping waves. Long grey rocks shoot up at us until off to the left a bit a short narrow beach appears.
“What in the fuck are we even doing here?”
“Ah, Dover likes to hang around the amphitheatre here sometimes.”
“Well, he aint here…lets go.”
Jeff is chewing on the end of a cheap cigar that he stole from some convenience store pillaged along our way. He chews and chews on it and finally pulls out a lighter and a sparks the gutted and restuffed cigar. The smell of crime fills the crisp sweet atmosphere. The scent of sin…of bored.
“Hey.” Jeff suddenly blurts out.
“What?”
“Why don’t we burn it?”
“Burn what? The amphitheatre?”
“Yeah, it would look fuckin cool, right.”
“We would get caught.”
“Bullshit! Come on.”
Jeff walks back to the car and grabs a half-filled gas can and Styrofoam cooler and a deep empty metal jar. He sits them down in front of me. I grab it up and help him lug it down to the small beach. Doug will have no part of this and Dan is busy just watching the madness unfold. Jeff pours the gasoline into the jar. He holds the gas can up in the air and the golden liquid pours though the breeze, leaving a greasy rainbow of fumes trailing behind it. He throws the Styrofoam cooler on the ground and stomps it into little bits…little flakes and bits of white foam flying around like a diseased plastic winter snowstorm. The wind blows cool off the lake and it smells like dead fish and slimy rocks. To the left a little bit down from where we stand on the narrow beach is a clump of dead trees standing solemnly in the green and blue bubbling water. The water bubbles and rushes because just past the trees is the spillway of the dam. It is a long way down…the spillway is extremely steep. Jeff piles up all the mad crushed pieces of cooler, tosses them in the air like a lunatic and then gathers them back up, and one by one places them into the jar with the thick smelly liquid gas. We all stand around and watch the foam disappear into the mixture.
“Man, we cannot really burn down this amphitheatre.”
“Oh, sure we can.”
“No man…fuck this is way too fuckin’ illegal…even for us.”
“It will be cool. Fuck it.”
We all stand there watching for what seems to be forever….waiting for someone to do something…no one does. No one does anything at all in fact…fate does it all for us. A long neglected ash off the “cigar” burning in Jeff’s mouth falls slowly, like a feather; down down down…it looks like the breeze is going to carry it off into the lake. I watch it going along gingerly and then suddenly it falls straight down…straight down into the homemade napalm…right into the jar. All at once, a bright orange light illuminates our shocked faces. Hairs are singed. Flesh is burned. Eyes are widened. In a flash I do the only thing I think possible…I kick the jar. The jar, flaming, flies far out in front of us and lands in a dramatic splash. The fire does not go out. The fire burns brighter and higher and spreads wildly across the water. A flamey froth of fire and watery foam…it spreads as far as our eyes can see. It climbs up the dead trees and begins to consume them in an eager rush. The flames bounce and writhe about…they reach the spillway and dance along the horizon for several seconds before the whole fiery display throws itself down the dam in a giant curtain. As soon as we witness the fall, we all break into a simultaneous run back to the car. Jeff already with the jangling keys in his fire blackened hand.
“Run away!”
We all scrambled back into the grey rusty car and exited the scene, rising flames behind us.

Travels 6.......

Equal parts fire and gasoline, water and dust, mud, sparkling ash, bent lights, impatience and blood. Equal parts half-deserted passions and overly indulged appetites, forgotten, lost and burning bored like blue fire…yellow lighting streaks, the scent of oil. This is the time of night when the moon really shines its brightest, when it really shows its teeth. Hanging high up there in the middle of sky, casting long pale lunar shadows behind our feet and trailing behind the red red taillights of our speeding car. The blond head we had witnessed turned out not to be the one we sought but just another tired kid, turning corners and banging around blindly. Not our lost friend back there in the in-between dirty alley behind an out of business liquor store and the family services center. It is in fact quite likely that Dover could have left town on foot and could be as far south now as the National Forest, hanging around by the lake.
Traveling, chunky, loud, riotous, the dirt peeling off the sides of the road as we swerve and scrape the guard rails outside of town. Big open pits in the Earth, filled up with wildly bright blue water (unnatural), polluted breezes blow off the polluted ground, water, piles, dead equipment, weed trees like Box elder, cottonwood and red cedars growing up in thick clumps between the gob piles, we drive through these awful foul deserted valleys. We drive through them to get through them…to get away from them…like everyone else does. All of it lying open and blank…coal ripped from the yielding Earth still waiting in stacks. The whole place has the look of a black and white, grainy, depressing documentary…like a film student’s final project (hoping for an A). The pilot light in the blast furnace of Middle American working class industry, a pilot light now gone out and what replaced the flame…coldness…despair…acholoism reigns supreme here in these hills. Alcoholism, drug abuse, broken homes, forgotten talents, worthless dreams….coldness…despair. An alkanet basin, a dug out pit, filled with brackish filth and 20th century rust.
We run along the guardrail, sparks flying as we randomly hit and bounce, we run parallel to an old creaking railroad track. We drive over it at times, back and forth over the same line of track…we pop and jumble each and every time, heading our heads on the roof. The roof over our heads is covered with drawings and words all scribbled up there in fits of madness in red ink…some things stand out more than other…some things fade. Each time we hit the metal railing or jump roughly over the tracks, I find myself staring up at a big red Buddha head drawn in the almost middle of the roof. It shakes when we shake and it appears to grin. It always catches my eye.
By now the dark green tops of tree begin to whiz past the window and the smell of real things, the smell of breathing trees, the smell of moist warm natural air…air worth smelling…worth breathing, smells start to make it their way to my nose. My face feels clean out here in this air. The trees grow their grasping hands up to the dark dotted sky and hold up all of our thoughts. Some things fade.