Train

Who am I? Who are we?
Ask together with me here so I do not feel alone.

Follow white rabbit conducting the train.

Come on, let's get on board.

First stop:

One.

It's a warm summer morning in the backseat of a 1971 Ford. The morning is soft and prelapsarian and mom and dad in the front have finished their coffee and are arguing about direction. Two suns shine saffron in the gilded angle windshield reflection, as Dad hugs the gentle curves in the interstate the illusion disperses and two egg yolks converge into one scorching red eyeball in the midst of a fabric sky. Brown fields filled with life gone sour. Roots that never got enough wet love to mature. Then, suddenly, fields of flowers stream past, there should be a yellow brick road leading down the middle of them but there isn't. No emerald city absconding away the horizon either. Just trees, dark rough lines forming windbreaks in the distance, and the occasional decrepit wooden barn or shed.

Where darkness lurks.

Fighting is meaningless. They always fight. Roll down the window and redolent hot air harmoniously howls in to drown out the sounds of their quarrel. They are lost. Dad is just driving. The road is dirt. The road is dust. There is no road. The car stops, Mom threatens to get out and walk. An old dog walks up, sniffs a hissing tire and commences to take a leak. Dad sighs, and then follows her. "Stay here," he says and they talk in hushed tones for a while and come back.

Fools under and indiscriminant sun. Even this young, one can see there is no love. There are simply all these little components of attraction and the fact we've named them love is the single thing fools us.

I'm late, I'm late, cries the conductor. The train goes further back. Or is it forward? Who am I? Woh, woh, who?

Oh Oh! I'm late and we are

Lost.

Word vomit. Cashew, corduroy, pornography. Throw the words out there, one of them is bound to stick. Who knows which? Just keep going.

Neighborhood children running circles in their pajamas, dark skin and foreign tongued as their parents squat like crows in the dirt around grease-stained engines. As Jack says, Fellaheen, ornery and mean. Wild as the northern wind, and just as proud and confident.

Garage door wide open. A rudder on the shelf in the garage. Stopped steering the boat years ago, stopped going out on the water. Started wearing the same beige shirts, watering the same lawns.

Pass these dark muscled tribals on your way home. Thumping bass mating rituals cruise along the thoroughfare. Hot pavement beneath your bare feet— quick step—

comfort gives way like so many dreams, empty smoke packs along the highway. Children scrawling glyphs into a square of wet cement while the adults consult the figures. Only naïve brains could conceive of a leaving a permanent mark in stone. When rent is due the cosmic clockwork. How to pay? Pray. What might have been lost, is lost and more.

Quick step. Make the hard choices.

Unions rallied vow to destroy the control machinations of the sky. "Mommy how was I born?" asks a she-squaw. The world fucked me and we laid an egg of dark confusion that cost me everything. But death I still own. That's the only check I have left to cash. But the children commence to sing and clap. Playing a game of chase, they are Rorschach blot splatters from the collision of our hearts inertia. We fucked, we slept, maybe we dreamed, but who would have thought that night would lead to this? These lawns. These bills. These kids.

Great outcomes are but randomly connected to our conscious endeavors.

And yet we continue to act. To make the hard choices.

Keep moving until something big gets in your way.

Station stop. The train doors open and a wide slab of sunbeam plasters me in its warmth and I sit up and look. Only me. Somehow I alone am singled out in the smouldering glow of this slanting cast. As if a saint in a churchly scene at the center of some edenic world.
Suspended and breathing shallowly the air, everything shimmers and nothing is real, and I am in the centre of a very quiet world.

And then just as suddenly the doors slide closed and the world is garbled behind blue tinted windows and everything is dark and dusty and distant like a memory misted with time. A woman looks at her watch. Question everything that holds you together and watch your spine give out. Time is invertebrate. Try it! You'll see.

Everybody is crowded into this car. Students, teachers, drunks and kings. Neighborhood children rattle and tattle. Everybody. A man in a suit reads the sports pages.

Nobody

Won.

Normal people hide their feelings. If they're healthy, they find a way to vent. Sometimes that takes wearing a mask and saying what they couldn't otherwise behind an invented guise. Anonymity. Maybe it is in talking to friends underground, outside your circle. That's a mask. Maybe it’s the internet. Maybe you have a certain persona that you live up at work, and explain away to the wife when you get home as 'what it takes to climb the corporate ladder.

I wear a mask all the time, I am the mask. So, ironically, I can only express myself to her at safe intervals when I take off the mask. A normal guy, a little pale with eyes painted over, no longer fraught by natural fears. Frightened of losing her because she doesn't know it's me. Vicarious courting. Removed, I tell her things with this alter-identity that I want to say in person—

"What you think you should say," she interrupts.

"What?"

"You're not saying anything real. You're just saying what you think you should say. You're just acting."

Maybe. It is a lot of linguistic flourish with nothing much to say. Bill says you can't fake quality, or a good meal. Or a popular blog for that matter but who cares what people think. I do. I care to be seen with her in public. Her supple body and crass manner. That peppery smell along the inside of her neck.

"My boyfriend reads your blog." Yeah, great. That's just what a guy likes to hear.

"Which blog, mine? Or that boring literary sap who I'm so fond of. The one who doesn't need a mask—

"Acting."

"Can I buy you a drink?"

"Stop it. That's a line."

"That's not a line! We're at a bar, I—" I'm all about the chase but this is getting ridiculous. She sees through everything I do, far down to the fabled phallic void somewhere deep at the core of me, and all I get of her is shadows smoke and mirrors. Perhaps it's best to disengage. Normal people who hide their feelings would take this opportunity to withdraw the curtain of secrecy and face all that's left.

But who am I? Who are we? She seems to know better than anyone, and I'm not ready to face it if her eyes are any indication. A vacant look, unassuageable and bottomless. Her own mask, perhaps. I think it’s a mirror reflecting nothing, when really it’s a plea to be something.

Whites ring the pupil. White rabbit. White rabbit.
Train whistle sounds and the hour of our arrival is imminent.
Those that look out of the windows be darkened.
Day is night and time is nigh.

One o'clock.

Two.

Neighborhood children running circles in their pajamas too close to the tracks. Old Mr. Wrinkly Testicles, taking a piss in his green yard, peers over the white picket fence reeling in old dilemmas. Violent flashbacks and shaking. Now still.

Now is the violet hour. Bats with baby faces flutter about. Now the moon is out and the question boils in the depths of my thoughts inviolate, refining like a silver jewel on this deserted sea bed. Streetlights in lines that all fall apart. All falls apart now.

Now the city stretches out for miles. Now it is gone. Now the clanging of the tracks cannot be heard. Now the city sleeps and the little lights remain. Stars shining up at stars. Darkness in between. Sempiternal. The question is not the story.

No, the story is the asking. Our stories are the answer.

Now the train is stopped.

Now they disembark.

Now the lights are out.

Save one, who lingers here. Who are you? Who am I?

A light, alight, in the darkness.

Top Ten Facts on DMM

12. He's black.

13. Every other odd Tuesday he religiously meets with his surrogate parents on Sutter Street and broils a live cat for dinner on broken lawn chairs before watching his favorite movie, Big Trouble in Little China. Every other odd Tuesday.

.9. The Masked Man is 9 feet tall and weighs over 3 metric tonnes.

XII. He's had sex with women in 19 different foreign countries, and animals in 20!

7. He once drank his body weight in Piňa Coládas to appease the vengeful Pineapple Gods of Malayasia. Ingénue local women now bathe their children in water he once touched, to affect his continued favor.

21. He's 21 years old.

7. Much like the British Empire at its zenith, The Sun Never Sets on D'Masked Man.

\VII. The pilot episode of 80s Primetime Television Show Alf was based on a school report that a young DMM wrote about his family during summer vacation.

22. He is not 21 years old.

10. He's friends with that guy who busted Paul Reubens in that movie theatre.

100. The Australian billygoat plum contains a hundred times more Vitamin C than The Masked Man.

4. Finding The Masked Man on Easter morning is believed to bring good luck!

3. His evil twin was born on June 10^th, but DMM was born hours later on June 11^th, and again on August 11^th, and once again on November 5^th, (and, once again, on the 13^th day of March, but only in South America.)

5. Twice, he correctly used the word catafalque in a sentence. The same sentence! Twice! Gosh!

5½. He hangs a portrait of his mother on the wall of whatever boarding house he is staying in for the night. No. Matter. What.

11. If The Masked Man ever meets the man who killed his father that fateful night ten years ago, he will regally don his mask, brandish a sharp knife, reproachful swagger up and say: …

The Leaving and the Left

When I left she cried.  It was gray day.  Slushy snow was on the ground and whirling clouds variously flocculate and drift, vaporously relaying their ambiguous messages overhead.  She weaved her rickety VW through dawdling traffic into town, across the overpass and to the bus station.

            "I've never been to this part of the city before," she said, and I looked at her.  Diamond earrings, jazzy red shirt and designer handbag.  Of course she hadn't.  We parked in a narrow space around back and waited a tense second before either of us said anything.

            "Guess I'll make sure its on time," I said.

            "I'll go with you," she offered, making sure to lock the door behind her twice. 

Everything seems simple until you think about it.

I wish I could take some virtuous delight in reporting on those who I've left. Sadly, they were all good people. Maybe they weren't. Can't remember any ruinous souls left strewn along the path. The blessing of memory is its selectivity. Dark spots are filled in like vacuous holes with the bright glow of warmer recollections. I remember leaving because reason won out on emotion. I remember leaving my heart behind. I remember being left.

When you stop moving you die.

Funny to think of exes. The very word, X, when spoken sounds like some strangely tallied scantron scorecard, the record sheet of how you've passed the relationship tests of life. "I'm still friends with all my exes," one reports solicitously. The ghosts of the past, our X's. X's crossed in bed. X's crossed via mass email status update. X's stretching back in a line of fading regret, from the familiar permanence of the present to the emptiness and echoes of the evanescent past.

I remember being left, when everything felt so right.  I remember a day in the park on grass tall and green and glossy and we lie on our sides and I stared up at the latticework of tree branches until they kissed the dark blue matt of penumbral sky where a storm was sounding its thunderous chords to signal impending dramatic entrance.  "I'll walk into the sky," I said dreamily and she sighed.  A gawky teenage boy polishing off the firmament of his imagination with a goddess at his wing.

            "I can't do this," she said, and miraculously everything within me suddenly shrank until I was terrifyingly small and the world was enormous.  Unfamiliar and abstract.  Blades of grass towering over a massive, jagged and alien landscape.  Ants were ferocious monsters in a dreadful convalescence of ferocious monsters.  I cried.  I remember I cried.  And everything around me seemed it had all along been in disguise, violently falling into unrecognizable pieces in a puzzle on the floor that itself reassembled into other figures, other puzzles.

The clouds move in aqueous silence as tiny flecks of snow start their slow descent over everything and I heft my bag from the trunk and board the bus. Springboard. I'll make it there by dark, I think, when she calls. On a phone, in her car, just outside the parked and revving bus in the parking lot.
            "I just wanted to say," she says, and starts to cry.
"It's okay," I console. Mercy. 

You never cried. Every time I left you, to think, and there were never tears. Maybe it was always assumed that I would be coming back. And even in exile, I always did.

All those commas that made up our otherwise levitant sentence, when for all others I wriggle away leaving only the skidsmear of a question mark. I wish I could take delight in so many questions, but to say I do would be a lie.

They who would believe anything, even lies they believe.

Another ex. Another mark on the page of time. Would you that I were now another one ledgered onto yours? Me who keeps moving. Me who keeps coming back. Traveling the world far and wide, sending postcards signed with an X to all those young friends now old and established into their fringes of the firmament. Me of the murkiest sexual compulsions, searching sad nights for a fix, the gas tank running low and the miles and miles of city ceaseless streaming passed, probing the unrecognizable lights for some grand statement, some grand conclusion, something wild and grand and free. You?

A Word Concerning the Differences in Masked Men: The Dark Knight vs. Da' Masqued Man

As well you may know I'm pretty important. In certain circles, I mean. Some jealously accuse me of exploiting the mask, and to that my only rebuttal is "well, wouldn't you?"

Sure it gets me into clubs, lands me bit parts in movies, and helped break up Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman... but don't hate me for it. There are many more people out there like me but worse, and far more deserving of your derision.

That leads me to my next point. Namely, I am not Batman.
There are similarities, I'll give you that. But when you shill out your 11 bucks to go see the Masked Man get beat up by Heath Ledger tonight or tomorrow let me first warn you that you won't find what you are looking for.

D'Masqued Man vs. D'Batman
A Comparison Study

The ruptuaries of Gotham look to their man in the silly mask to protect them when the politically correct methods have been exhausted. Batman is un-pc, and yet upholds a singular ethical and moral standard while going out to solve mysteries, and fight crime.

The commoners of San Jogbra California, my erstewhile habitatus Maskedmanus, rarely recognize me, let alone go out of their way to communicate with me. When I encounter mysteries, I sometimes curse and scratch my ass ineffectually. But wherever there is injustice or wrongdoing, wherever a small child cries for lack of a decent meal or the basic human rights of the weak and the innocent are trampled upon by evildoers in their cruel and treacherous ways, I will be there. Probably pointing, and laughing.

Batman is known as the caped crusader because he wears a cape, and is on a crusade.

Personally, I think capes are kind of gay. So I don't wear them. But I'm on a crusade to reverse women's right to vote! Who's with me men, eh? How about just the single guys against the wall!

Batman's job is to go out and save people.

D'Masked Man doesn't have a job.

He dresses in the night to resolutely save the day for hope and justice.

I dress for the night, sometimes, if you count club clothes and a hipflask, and ever remain steadfastly atrabilious.

In fact, now I remember why I don't leave the house all that often. It's not worth getting dressed for.

The Batman has muscles.
DMM's as skinny as a rail.

And the thing is he works out compulsively to stay in fearsome shape. See, not only am I skinny, but I wish I was thinner! Often when I get really stressed I will review everything I am going to eat that day in my head then cut it all in half. That calms me down.

Batman doesn't kill people.

The Masked Man made a killing at the casinos out in Reno two weekends ago! WooEEE!! KaChing!

Batman has a secret identity.
The Masked Man, likewise, has a secret— wait, what!?! Hold up. I don't like having my picture taken for a very legitimate reason.
See, there are those who believe I never allow myself to be photographed because I am actually a multidimensional shape shifter: This, let me be the first to tell you, is false. I believe you are thinking of Big Foot. In point of fact I am a fictional character, the protagonist of a dead comic strip that was drawn by myself. In a sense, you could say, that I created myself. Like God.

Batman, was created by Bob Kane.

That putz.

We do both wear masks.

And also, we've both slept with Kim Basinger.

But that's about all the similarities I can think of.

So remember, don’t be disappointed when you get to the Cineplex this weekend and your favorite Masked Man isn't up there on the big screen. I'm still plugging away on the interwebs once or twice a week, free of charge. Come to think of it, there's the biggest and saddest difference between us yet:

You're going to pay to see an actor play Batman in a movie.
And I'm here working my ass off blogging for free.

The world isn't fair.
Save me Heath Ledger!

Raising Fingers From a Fist

K. Yay. Game. What?

Make a fist.

Do it.

Now see if you can extend just your index finger so that it is pointed away at a 90° angle from the rest of your clenched knuckles.

Can you do it?  Of course you can.
Now, from a closed fist again, try the same extension with your middle finger.

Harder?
Now try your ring finger...

The pinkie shouldn't be too hard to get to 90°.  Mine wasn't.

Just a game to test your dexterity, and waste a little bit of your time.
But aren't all games, essentially, a mere expenditure of time.

-D,m'dM.

Missive

And To all of you little people
in between,

I'm so very, very sorry

~Fathom~

Alright First,

You, to the east

who burns on the distant shore

a candle on both ends

of time

Waiting.

Don't think all day.
Dive into my words

The doors I close

and read my soul ringing apology.

Our emails are touchstones

in this rich sea of the human concourse

but my former self, that tangent you touched

Where has he gone?

Far from your soft white light, far from your cavernous

flesh expanse and the mounting promise of

so much hot more.

Don't think all day.

Dive into your world

The doors burn open, see how far we come

Until

I've said I'm sorry.

And you.

You in the middle

center of this landscape of my affections and

attention.

You for whom I

reclaimed a bit of light.

Every kiss, every fight felt right

until it wasn't and in my lost lovelite oblivion mind

I failed to notice I'd

lost you in flight

there, she ascends, see? I, the boy who fell from the sky

Dying in

each drip of hurt

that make up this wave I sail upon

I am held up by my choice few quivering poetical stars

long dead, and ever unstable.

And on this wave I found a companion

who could be there.

And that wasn't fair to you

But I'm not apologizing.

The scene that sticks in my mind

is a day after you left

and the world was white and fixed and glassy

as if not at all real but a photograph of itself

and I wanted nothing more than the phone to ring

and it never did so I slept and had a dream

where a girl cradled a phone to her lap

and awoke because you had called.

Just checking.

Just checking.

Never checked.

Maybe that's what I loved about you.

That and your ungainly limbs, your translucent paper-fine skin

your, I am inarticulate

And this is pointless, and enough.

For now.

And last but not least

but certainly latest from the latent west

You who have swallowed the moon

and glow behind wild and fitful clouds that have

extinguished my sun.

I'm not the one.

You leave me gaping, content.

Keep me occupied these costive days

and barefoot I am reminded on our

quite walk into the wind

that the past is real and these

slivers of my heart you stab into your

self

to recall that your

self still exists

are not my full heart,

nor will that bird be open to you.

Fact is, he will fly away. See him soar?

Transpierce the daily paper and mail

See the sore vestigial masses

See him soar.

Fact is, he will fly away

over ground-zero, and weeping openly

past each tortured surly star

and into the now thwarted impossible.

This world is made of subtractions from a whole

the tiny pains and iniquities, that we get used to one at a time until we die

We are made of what we have lost

And this man, at least, the latest

the recreant

is grateful, but not the one.

See how he shines

The asshole.

And you,

now

You now, Me.

The artist who couldn't draw

himself perfectly

now drawing himself

not draw himself, perfectly.

Oh you of the shivering vanity

whose fleeting flits of attention can't mask his gnawing sadness

You. Now.

That's all you have.

Not half a heart or

these tasteless drivel words that drive you depend on

not more sex

or 'what others think' or

your worn out soul shoes, or the all the letters

to the unstoppably lost bawds of the universe.

Focus.

Don't be a fool.

Wear that mask a while longer

because you do now

stay with me

now.

Because now is all we have.

Bikini Respite

There's a strange, odd power, knowing you're not alone in this world.

Take your mask off, remove your contacts,

let your hair down

and call a few friends to come out and find solace

in the undulating infinity of a desolate landscape.

Like a mountain overlook, or the flat dessert, or the beach.

I called Jay. (Doug was busy reducing the females in his life to

variables in a complicated equation

and I wanted no part in that conversation

of ones and zeros

even if he'd been free)

and we went to the beach.

Little did we know that we wouldn't be alone.

There would be bikinis.

Oh the Pleasures of the

Voyeuristic Flesh.

"Don't stare," said Jay, "The peaches are marinating."

Brown legs and the soft fabric-covered mounds irreachable.

"There are too many girls in my mind

these days," I said as we searched for shade under

the promising sky

"more is the last thing I need."

"I'm trying not to think about work," said Jay,

"This is great!"

The Sycophantic creep.

I was trying to read my book, poems by Blake

and not let my peripherals drift

and when he came back he had a crowd

"This is Jay's friend who wears Masks," said Jay

inexplicably male-ego-inflated to the point where he can only speak in the third-person. "Man, this is Beth, Carol, Rita, Myra and Jessica."

"Hi!" they chirped. I decided to play along.

"I'll never remember that," I said.

in my head

they became the pink one, the yellow one, the tight Asian one you can see through, the sister and my new future soulmate.

Forget the longing and regret

Forget the ones you'll never ever get.

Forget it all and in the morning you'll say:

Yes. Yes I had a good weekend.

yes I did.

Now if only I can get this sand out of my …