Violence (of the Upturned Still Life) with Pomegranates

There are days when I feel immortal and days like today when the cool autumn chill kicks in with its whispered terror echoing of my inner bones and I can feel them breaking apart at the molecular level.  Mask loose, face numb, wipe the counter of toaster crumbs. Human nature is hilarious.  The guy panhandling by the homeless camp on the corner laughs at his shadow. If I told you I could create a world without capitalist tendencies would you buy it?  

Alright kiddos listen up: 170 million people in America were under heat alerts last month. Last night I gently touched a luxuriant breast. Sweet! Sweat. The candle was dominated by burning.  Cisneros declaimed that stain and decay are romantic, but hunger isn't, at least not to the hungry. "Gravity wins in the end, your mother said." "Did you ever read Little Fires Everywhere?" "Not yet." "Me neither."

There are days when I could assure you that my existence will become legendary and more days when I cannot frame time, operate the phone charger, explain the science of flight even aided by pictures from the website.  We leave behind digital trails that can instantly coarse the world and are vulnerable to being erased just as easily. In the newstand in the terminal we bought a newspaper. A sloped man on stilts begirds the intersection, beseaches us for change. "Only God begets change for juggling on high" Sarah said. Such a great line. I was so jealous.

A portable amp screeched mic feedback and a man's voice heartily welcomed both ladies and gentleman to the 16th annual day of golfing.  I did not appreciate the exclusion of non-ladies nor non-gentle men. My 30s so far have taught me to hoard my lamentations like the man with the leather duckling collection he showed only to a select few.  You are the few.  This was on Friday.  Fawad teed off first for our group then stepped out of the way. I couldn't feel my legs give out from under me. This is the slow march to the end.  All summer our planet has boiled with storms, floods, hellish heat and fires. Don't you wish you could fly away?  I do.

There are days when, in September, everything goes so peachy-smooth not even knowledge of the impending heat death of the universe cancels out my verve, and days when the dinner meat that I couldn't cleft from the bone was left out on a plate by the sink overnight and I wake pre-dawn to find it dessicated, sinews drawn out, ominously foreshadowing that which we'd rather not see.  Literal spoilers. Still life with pomegranates interrupted by a Calendar App notification. Why won't it end close?  Time to go.  When our ride arrived I told Sarah I believe Uber should be free and paid for as a public utility.  "Hrmph." she said.

A vinegary voice calls us to board our gate. Shave and a haircut, two big carry-ons. “Ladies and gentlemen on behalf of myself and the flight crew we would like to welcome you aboard.” Why don't they just welcome us aboard then if they'd like to welcome us?   I send a tense text and turn my phone on airplane mode, starting to sweat.  God only knows. God makes his plan.  Cold air above from the overhead fan. Dizzy and sleepless, hungry and nauseous.

There are days when my words are monuments of stone against the ravages of time and days when, heard in the abstract I am a less welcome substitute for silence.  "I know when I'm not wanted," I lied to myself, sitting beside her on aisle, only she wasn't there.  I wondered where she was, where does she keep her ardor, her anger, her heat?  Somewhere deep in her breast.  "I could eat," I said when she returned.  She read aloud that Lou had texted her there'd been a shooting in a bar. She checked for it in the paper then gave up and checked her phone. We're all going to the same place in the end but sometimes we're not.  We read the dry earth's palimpset surface and understand it innately, even if some of the grammar is lost. I see the plane's shadow and laugh as we jetison into the cold, above the clouds moving so slowly, into the big empty sky full of the spinning sun burning so fully it is as if the closer we get, nothing else is burning or moving at all. 

Adz, Blur and Om

"Things are not always what they seem, nor are they otherwise."

-Well-known Zen Adage

The heat is palpable. You can see it throbbing the air, waves of distortion rising up in tandem on the horizon, the edge of every vista like bubbles of boiling batter, are we in an oven? 

Walking inside, into the slough of AC. Soothe is the word. It wetlicks my skin, like a balm I guess. 

What is a balm?

A weird old word.

Where does that leave us then? Finger wading stacks upon stacks in the office. An avalanche of rejection.  A glare on the wallclock’s number 3.  Maybe it doesn’t say three…  I am thinking about your cheek.  A kiss on that tender blush. Like an apple.  The fleshy lines of your arms…

Where does that leave us then?  Not where but when.  A long time from when we started. 

I did not walk here all the way from the airport to listen to myself talking.
I came here to watch you.
I came here to watch you all.
To see you listening.
Listening to me talk.
Talk without thinking…

Parking lot snowbank remnants beneath the springtime stars, “it's open mic night muthafuckas!”

Remember? 
 

No, you weren’t there.  Maybe even I wasn’t there.  My head was elsewhere. Yes certainly.  Was I walking home? Dusty boys playing by the side of the road. I check online. Weather in GoogleMaps is always fixed. Is that old home still there?  Where was it exactly?  Streetview.  I was leaving work. What was that job?  Did I drive or take the train?  A plane, a boat? 

I seem to recall
air fanned by a flock of hands,
the cats flanks flecked with burrs,
veiled windows, lit by sunset, or streetlights…
the smell of wood floors and coffee grounds,
the smell of lost causes, the taste of boredom
your Jacobean mouth…

Remember? 

Am I my own vision?  Yes most certainly, but how am I stretched beyond it? 

And what is it beyond my own vision?  Heat, for sure, the lines all rubbing together but beyond that, what name this stage, this set, a wind from other oceans we hadn’t known, the codenames of lost continents. 

What is this place called?  Not where but when.  The camera clicks, flash a light.  What do I see?  When did we enter?  Let's give it a name to say when it starts.  How should we stay? The points aren’t fixed.  

Like a starlit lake in the midst of San Francisco.  Midst or mist?  
The moon was late tonight.
Tonight I touched the dry warm skin 
of the building
because the night is the cure
the cure is the beginning

 Let me through.

The streetlight glare on the digitalclock number 3.  

Everywhere blurry hot and halogen.

My ideas no longer ideas
just two fine French doors you live inside
like I live inside this promise
like we live inside dreams
the best dreams where you did not yet exist
Yet not where but when
when inside I knew 
knew you in the universe
the universe would create you eventually
and the universe would continue to burn,
A dream fire fueled by a heart’s promise.


Or youth.

I was the lithe flower then and now I am the fat fruit. I am ready for a fall.  I am ready to fall apart.  I am ready for the seed somewhere within me to spring.