Bad Magic

Superstition threatens me. I can't ignore it & I can't not think about it though I try. The notion that there are as many reasons why my pen or whatever falls the way it does as a certain planet or star is in a certain place or state relative to the others makes me all the more sure. When I lived in Harlem, I was obsessing about a now sort of old-fashioned telephone bill that wasn't available on the web. I could have called the phone company, I suppose, but no; I was sure that the bill was in my room. Those nights got phenomenally dark, and my window opened to a sort of three foot space that ended in the brick wall of the next building. It was a good spot.

I, for one reason or another, had a fishing rod in the room. I placed my cell phone on the hook, precariously, and allowed it to spin. It swung the line into a twist and then began to spin the other way. I waited. Eventually, the phone slowed to an average oscillation on a line that passed at the edge of the window. Behind the dark curtain, when I stood there staring at nothing on the windowsill, the edge of a white envelope appeared. The divination was a success!

Well, all these things are fine, but what can I do about dreams? I wrote a name yesterday, a name I rarely picture the face that goes with it, and in my dream she appeared. My rational mind has rules but in my dreams it feels like something is out to get me -- namely, myself. Even recently I could remember the content of dreams that weren't at all bad or stressful. Still, the vast majority of nights are haunted by one ghost or another, and if I'm thinking only in the monkeyworld I'm left to believe it's a psych thing.

So I wonder, "How much of my dreams did my own mind create?" All, none, some, whatever. I can remember things better if I'm hashing them over before I fall asleep, and there have been a couple, if not a few cases where I became lucid for a few seconds when I was dreaming, or woke without realizing the dream wasn't real. This evening I will come up with something nice before I fall asleep. I'll think of Richard Attenborough telling me all the things I didn't know about life. I'll pretend I'm on a private aircraft circling the antarctic with an amazing bed inside, where I'm given to dissolve into the hum of steady jet engines and Attenborough's voice. If I don't get greedy and make myself laugh, or feel compelled to get up and write a play or something, then maybe I'll have better dreams.

In celebration of the unfolding story of Colton Harris-Moore

I sat in the transport, listening to Led Zeppelin, watching the scenery slide by. My eyes were looking for a way out. The next ride would be 4pm, to return me. Barbed wire caught my attention, and behind it was a small airport. I studied the planes the way one studies a menu or a bowl of fruit. Which would have fuel? What fuel do they use? Jesus, that was a last-ditch resort, like pressing the hyperspace button to avoid a sure death.

I reminded myself that I should be afraid to think like this. Unfortunately, I wasn't. I considered the availability of highways or fields. The coast would be a good visual orientation. At some point, I thought, I'd have to cross water, which was a bigger barrier than the prospect of a death in the style of Icarus. Fire, crashing, breaking and bleeding are fine, but sharks would be worse. Already I was sabotaging my gestating escape. As soon as you realize what could happen, it definitely can.

The other option was to just trust that however and wherever the van and life led was fine. "Fine"... well, it's a life at least. I thought of the Wright brothers and early rocketeers. These men had a similar disregard for gravity, saw it as a challenge rather than a law. I couldn't imagine living before airplanes. There have been places and times I lived without electricity, but the air was a natural domain. In my youth, I remember saving my own and Jason's life by grabbing his steering wheel from the passenger seat to steer us out of the imminent death procession of freight trucks we had veered into. Let death be Zen.

The airport finished screening by. Over the radio, I heard, "wheel in the sky keep on turning..." Where was my spirit? Surely the world hadn't crushed it. Even when locked into a cell, my eyes looked for the unseen key. The wall was withing jumping distance. I could practice jumping until I knew I could. There wouldn't be any mistakes. Mistakes cost.

This magical way, seasoned with unlikely survival, gave perspective on the strange things afoot in the universe. I had to be on God's side. Without that, I would surely fail. The monkey and the bat are not governed by this, I thought, but I am. So long as my motivation was pure, I couldn't think of any evidence against notion. Life had given me the keys, I just misplaced them all the time.

What is lost?

All can't be lost. I have my eyes, my tongue, my ears are pretty good. My body, though some time has shown me that it does imprint age upon one, still returns to a fair balance after antagonism. The knot of pain in my back presses me through writhing postures and finally I sit up. It can't be forever, but it's very good for now.

Someone once asked me if I'd do a particularly taboo thing. I explained that yes, I would, if I never cared if I were alive or not. It wasn't a promise, I was giving the conditions under which I would. Shortly, then, after some consideration, I did realize that death didn't scare me. I've seen corpses, been to burials, and as real as death is I came to understand that I wasn't afraid of it. Pain I avoid, dismay and disgust put me off things, but death itself -- to cease the circus of my psyche wasn't a threat.

It wasn't depression. I read depressing books perhaps, and my idle time was meted out in held breaths and urgent sighs, but my lot was not insufferable. My interests inclined to the strange, the bizarre, the magical and musical. Ultimately this macabre rite was a gift, in a sense. In a book titled On the Beach, the characters are forced to reconcile with the obvious and impending finality of their lives. They drank, raced cars, worried about their children, took care of their lovers, and generally worked on the lists of what needs to be done before that time comes.

The particular indulgence that precipitated this core of obsessiveness did not kill me. I lived. Games of chance don't usually appeal because I understand randomness to a decent degree and can see the ratios of outcomes. Recently I was reading a friend and he wrote about how he was leaning out over the edge of a great hole. I saw in that form my own doings, except I dove into the hole. A different and wiser man also told me, "The first rule of holes is: When you're in one stop digging."

So, after a lifetime in darkness and shadows, caves and burden, I wake up and look for the sun. It sometimes takes hours for the sky to crack dark and then blue. Once that sun is up, though, the waiting is done and the day begins. The chores and obligations, social and internal, crop up and then for me is to contend with them one by one until that same sun returns to the horizon and leaves the day to sleepiness.

My dream

Somehow the old man had died in the bathtub. The water wasn't even cold yet. All was dark but his face by light through the opaque window. I shouldn't have been there just then but I was. They sent me the key, and I opened the mailbox and found the old note. The man's right arm was hanging down, and not a foot from his lifeless fingertips a flashlight.

I picked it up. If anything happened I would carry the light out with me. As I did so I felt the shadows slide across the floor. So when I saw the silhouettes outside the window I stopped breathing. Turning, I could make out at least one face shape, a long and serious face, and a young one. I barely moved. There was a small handgun in the soapdish. Suddenly the room flashed twice, and I could see that it was a signal.

My left hand made a splash in the water by his leg, and my right hand barely flashed the light once. I could make out now 2-3 persons outside the window. After the flash, they seemed to acknowledge and move on. I didn't wait for them to leave.

Electromagnetics and Danse Macabre

Bury me under a lightning rod,

in a copper casket

filled with brine

from the dead sea.

That's my only wish.

Turritopsis nutricula can stay,

if she can

handle all the salt

in my electric repose.

Place sand, not earth

on the top of me.

That I can swim out

through fulgurites and

wrest the air again

into my cured lungs.

"You can in fact,

danse if you want to." - me(4)

Don't touch my head

if I appear to be dead

because when I wake,

I may make the mistake

of collecting your hand.

You'll need those,

in theory and fact.

Just save your tears

I'm covered in salt.

For the Magpies

Little white flecks seemed to lurk in the piece of moss I picked off the tree stump. It was elevated, but this is a lawncare sort-of culture, and I don't know what chemistry it could be endowed with. Still pica or insanity compelled me to have a nibble. It got gritty and crunchy. It reminded me of being a taster for someone, to check their meals for poison. I had an internal dialogue trying to wrangle with negotiations for recompense for such a vocation. "Well, sir, if you're prepared to arrange for whatever I concoct as a dream for each day as my last, then I'm your man!"

When I considered the view of the hiring paranoiac or man with such dubious regard for his well-being, I didn't think it met the bargain. After all, who wants to be subject to a man who doesn't mind if he's alive or not's whims? Then who is hiring whom? That could be an expensive rush just to trust that your food is not going to kill you. The grit got into my molars and I realized why stumpmoss was not a more popular ruffage. There were minerals and wood humus and it really didn't taste much of anything; it was more a texture that got to me. I switched sides so that my teeth would be equally worn. My spit was green.

Maybe it's not pica. I did have a phantom sense of minerals in my mind and mouth since I cut the lawn. I don't normally go around just picking things up and eating them, just as I come upon them. Red coloring gives me alarm, that kind of thing. Pines always carried a sharp character I don't think I would want to taste them, maybe I have thin firs, but not from the street. From an inside tree perhaps, that would suit me.

Truly, though, I wanted to know what the moss would taste like. I still can taste it, and it wasn't bad, as compared to the grit it was coupled with. My first nibble before I popped the small sample in my mouth like an old and familiar morsel cropped the freshest of the moss. I appear to be alive still, hours later, and am not able to register any psychic change thus far. If this is the last you read, then you can assume that I met my end eating strange things on a fool's errand. If not, then it is also potentially safe to eat more of the same sample of moss. I still do have an aftertaste, having written it up on my tongue, that I now want to go away and so shall go drink water.

Yesterday

And now I know that the day did close in balance and complete some circuit. It was pretty amazing, if pedestrian, very much literally, and now my legs hurt and I can't sleep.

And `ow.