Outland

My banjo accompanied me to the South Bank of London this past week, where I supervised the construction of yet another sandcouch, this one more massive than the first.

Oop—the stewardess is now sternly advising me to pack away my laptop for takeoff, but I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh bucket of chum for you hungry landsharks.

Cheerio.

Workship

The empress towers above us, her mammoth curves blocking the sun's light. We labor in shadow, pushing her cuticles back with dull scythes, buffing paint from her nails with acetone-soaked towels. Demarcus faints from the vapors. I revive him with a quick slap. 'Wake up, fool. It's time to harvest the nail.'

 In a few hours the sun will crest, and work will become impossible. 'Marcus.' He rattles his skull around in his head for a moment, then picks up his end of the timber saw, muttering under his breath. 

It takes us half an hour to get through the foot-thick keratin on her big toe, pulling back and forth against each other with the weathered longsaw. When it falls with a loud crack, we pause for water and admire its abalone underside. 'Better than last month, eh?' I ask, noting the deep burgundy in the pearled curve. 'Shit, better than all last year,' Demarcus snorts. 'If we can get these clippings past the guards, we'll make a goddamn fortune.' 

In another hour we have finished the toenails of her left foot, with the sun threatening to crest. We rush through the right foot in silence, our arms like pink pistons, blurry in the gathering light. As the sun peaks, Demarcus is finishing the final buff, cursing with spite. I load our cargo into the wagon, surprised by its weight, and pause to finger the iridescent pits that flare now in the noon light. Looking up at the blinding halo ringing the empress's silhouette, I smile, running my tongue over my teeth. The guards will be asleep any minute now. We only have to wait.

And then the long walk home, down the sweating gravel streets. 

And after that, the feast.

Evidence

The bones are calcified and stubborn today. They refuse to be whittled.

I pull my femur out through a small incision above the knee. The yellow deposits scarring its length blossom like lichens in the dim light. I marvel at the bone's heft, the way its enamel chips and peels beneath my touch. In books, the bones always gleam, as if the anatomist polished them himself. But here, in my hands, the body is no gem, no painstaking work of art. The body is savage. The femur is a war club, not made for dancing or walking up hills, but for battle. 

88 Keys

Fresh from the shop and ready for a spin
around the proverbial soapbox.

Slog

Apologies my absence, children. I left cousin Cleve in charge of posting this past week, but it seems Scout's burial proceedings were arduous and ongoing. 

Fear not children, as I have returned, and will get back to whittling my bones into sap-amber gems for your consumption tomorrow afternoon.

Until then,

Nonfiction

Jenny like to faint when she caught him out there yesterday. Him with his shirt off, and his eyes all red and rolling in his head, digging with that shovel in the rock-dry dirt. Said he called the machine men with their diggers but they couldn't come today, said he would do it himself, same as he did every thing.

But he couldn't do nothing. She'd seen him standing in the field a week before, holding a shotgun to that horse's dumb eye and shivering in his sweat. He couldn't do it, and anyone could see that Scout's dick was eat up with that black rot, and someone had to do it. Doc Harper gave him cream, but he couldn't rub it on without it flaking scabs and dropping brown blood in his hand, and he would cry then and couldn't do it. 

Look at him out there, digging still and that blue-gray body swelling in the heat beside him. Neighbor Dan said he never slept last night, just hacked at the ground and made low animal sounds all night long. I tell him he'll never get deep enough like that, but he's not here, he's somewhere in that dirt already, pulling it over him like a blanket, that blue-black body a pillow tucked beneath his rolling head.

Farewellena

Helena on the grand staircase moments before her farewell ball.

Postscript

Today marks the end of an era in our small city. This morning, Ilena and I bid adieu to Helena, our elusive and enigmatic roommate of the past three months. She had that particular quality one so often seeks in a roommate, but rarely finds: absence. After the despicable reign of our former tenant Melvin Bosh, whose shrill and wet-brained voice brought terror to our neighbors and ourselves alike, she could do no wrong. But she did one better—she spiked the windows with hot pink tulle and bird figurines, hung animal bones and abstract threaded paintings from the bare white walls, and sat peaceably on our humble porch rolling her slender spliffs and carrying on in her singular, easy fashion. Now she's on her way to Athens, Greece, where her red-clay Georgia banter will no doubt enliven the stark landscape of bone-white on blue one finds there. We will miss her, and we will hold her possessions hostage until she returns.

Mountaintop Removal. Roastedpork Revival.

Out into the province of wild turkey and whistle pig, of turk's cap and blueberry and jewelweed, to wash the muck of commerce and its labors from our dusty skins. With nought but a slack pouch of water between the two of us, Ilena and I scaled a mountain peak in a single hour this afternoon, the humid air slick beneath the canopy of rhododendron. Not content with the fogged majesty spread out before us at the pinnacle, not sufficiently dwarfed by the domes rising around us on all sides (their hulking green bodies resembling nothing so much as the mottled osage apples I called brainfruit as a child), we climbed down into the mountain and shouted each other's names against the wet-sharp walls. I brought her hands of half-ripe blackberries—which tasted oddly of soap—and she bared her bright stomach against their red and ebon juices, the lone spot of light in that dingy, narrow cave. 

After our emergence and descent, we happened across a cramped cantina several miles from town. We stepped inside. Minutes later, at a tiny wooden table, I came face to face with a dish that leapt up like a woodsmoke memory from childhood, wafting its pendulous come-hithers beneath my nose. My friends, it was a barbecue taco, but it was no mere taco, no. Slathered with red sauce and purple cabbage coleslaw, the roast pork thrummed with bassnotes as playful as my father's drawl, while the hand-drawn sign claiming   humane, sustainable   thrilled every self-righteous bone in my meaty, hormone-free body. Even as it bound me exquisitely in the moment, friends, this taco sent me reeling with nostalgia. With the second bite, I smelled the black cauldron of "flea dip" in my parents' kitchen as they circled around its bubbling cargo, adding dabs and dashes in that timeworn family ritual. I felt the texture of cheap one-ply paper plates at Great Aunt Darkus's picnic table, the tacky surface of the flowered plastic cloth. And then, I saw the covered dishes rise before my closed eyes row on row, with condensation forming on their gleaming shells. These sensations echoed like a struck chord, and above the chord—gently at first, now gaining volume gradually—a melody arose, tickling out like the squeals of pigs cavorting in a muddy creek. Oh friends, I heard the age-old rustle of wax paper against gristle, but there was no gristle—only a chestnut-smoked succulence which ran its blackened fingers across my tongue. 

I threatened to buy three dozen, take them back to town and hand them out to passersby like pamphlets from some deep pit missionary. But then I realized: this is my religion. No one else will sense its proof.

Weekend in Review

Fame, Ho!

After you dance all weekend, after you gambol in the pulsing heat on a makeshift paper stage, after your pants soak through like a thing swum in and the duct tape holding your sleeves together gives way beneath the sweat's assault—only then can you commence with the cremes and heatpads.

Stretched out on a couchlet like the supreme martyr diva, you summon water glasses of wine from the next room, ply backrubs out of the odd passing visitor, and loudly lament your loss—this grand sacrifice you make of your body for joy alone, friends, for sheer, unbridled joy. 

After the visitors leave, you pull a dog-eared wad of bills from between the pillows of the couchlet—the true spoils of your sacrifice—and as you count them once again, their rustle takes on a kind of beat, and you smile down at your crumbled-in arches and your battered calves, humming along to that terrible beat, that godawful insistent and seductive beat.

To the Mall!

But before the dance can begin, you must lay in provisions. Costumes must be procured—fright wigs and bulbous pants, bits of shiny metal that glint and wink as you move them beneath sun- or strobe light—you need dancing shoes, dancing socks, wicking breathable dancing underwear, several faces worth of makeup, and by then you are just beginning to get underway. I know, I know, it's a shame you cannot just throw on a wrestling singlet and go at it. I have tried before, and the results were just disastrous. Perhaps this would fly in Sri Lanka, but here, in America, folks like their entertainment gaudy and overblown, an assault on the senses so entire that it leaves audience members whelmed and disoriented, filled somehow with a vague urge to purchase something, anything.

Humanifesto

I am learning to embrace that childhood self that hollers "Hey guys!" while gyrating on a tabletop in a too-small shirt for the camera's loving eye—the self that grabs his nascent crotch and thrusts into the air repeatedly, not knowing the significance of the act, knowing only the vague and odd sense of power that comes from it—that same self that again screams out "Look! Look!" before falling down a carpeted flight of stairs, pantomiming injury.

Somehow that self went sour and disappeared. It slowly closed up, grew humble, learned to listen, to quiet his chattering mouth.

But I must reclaim that self. Proud imbeciles parade about in broad daylight, shouting their knock-kneed philosophies, their numbers growing week by week, their voices growing louder, more obnoxious. Meanwhile, the quiet scholar sits at home, greedily drinking in his solitude, certain he's above the common fray. Both appall me. Let me find my place somewhere between the two, half-wise and half-mad, not overvulgar but no longer underheard goddamnit, not content to nod my platitudes toward another bit of blathery pretending at conversation.

After all, I owe it to them, don't I? These poor souls would rather be entertained than drone on about their latest breakup, their rough day at the workplace, the rising price of free-range eggs—I, for one, refuse to live in a world where chicken products dominate the conversational landscape! You—fools, boors, lovers, friends—you need me, you need this temporary joy I bring, even if it is mere escape, even if later we will sit down and rehash your latest break-up. For now, hear my song, delight in my dance, and we will both be carried off on the legs of this slight and fleeting ecstasy.

And when my legs break down from dancing, when my voice goes bald and wilts to a croak, I will still have these hands, and from the page I will scream "look at me" and then ask 3 cents a word to watch. To some I will be a carnival sideshow, to others a simple diversion, but for myself, I will be the author and mastermind of a life spent wallowing in sensation and recitation, an author in full, and never again a mere spectator, content to watch as life strides by in its imbecile parade.

Re: Extended Absence

I'm lounging at the beach.

Soy Protein Isolationist

The devil talks to me. He brings out food on silver trays and whispers softly as he fingers improbable lengths of bacon--skeins of pork belly unwound from a spindle hidden in the room's northern corner. He clucks out creaking folk songs with a rasping throat, songs of feasting and bacchanal, of flesh and lust and crushed animal bones. As he sings he twirls a round of chicken asiago sausage gingerly on his four-knuckled finger, taunting me.

A cow is led into the room. The devil begins to procure hamburgers from its side, steaming blackened things piled high with horseradish and guacamole, packed with cayenne, fresh ground pepper and pressed garlic. He takes a fist-sized bite, and as he chews, the barest flash of pink dances on his tongue, and I know I am lost. Before he pours the cups of spicy mead, before the dancers arrive, before the orgy and the orchestra and the filet mignon stuffed with foie gras-stuffed truffles, he has got me.

Early the next morning, glutted and debauched, I will stumble up the rocky path toward daylight, guiding the cow by its thin silver chain, my tongue a tiny flash of pink behind sharp teeth.

Lullaby

The hair on her back was unbelievable, clumped as it was in irregular patches that shifted and re-formed while she slept. On a given night, the clumps might resemble a blotchy Rorschach test--she would see an ominous thunderhead in the mirror, I a loveseat--but by morning they would have transformed into a working map of the Philippines.

I admit, I was taken aback when I first saw her naked, but she wasn't ashamed--no, she was proud of her brilliant pelt. She just smirked with a shake of her head and guided my hand over the coarse blond prominences. The feel was almost electric.

Later we would follow the changing maps on her back into stifling jungles to capture rare albino lizards; into burnt-out holy cities in search of Moses's toenail; into an Arctic winter so cold it took three fingers from my right hand, just to recover a stone said to cure hunger and the occasional gallstone--we would grow rich several times off the black market fantasies of her glorious and curséd pelt. But that first night I knew nothing of the future. I only sensed the strange power that radiated from her as she snored away, the shocks of hair taking shape with a dull rustle beneath her comforter.

Meme Journal

In the dream, we are walking through labyrinthine corridors at a small college east of here, searching for the auditorium. We finally find it, but when we walk in, it is more like an enormous barn or ag center, with rough unfinished walls and dull dirt floors.

We sit in our front row seats--frayed lawn chairs--and the house lights dim. A hush falls as the main attraction is lowered to the stage on guy-wires. He's billed as the last long pianist, but his instrument resembles a cross between a harp and the sail of a small boat. As he descends, his assistants--two squat women in drab custodial uniforms--begin to play the National Anthem. It is halfway over before I realize that everyone is standing, the entire barn reverberating in a massive chorus. I have been sitting stock-still, entranced by the stubby and inexpert finger-plucks of the two squat women, thinking I could easily be the next last long piano protegé. 

Immediately, the older black man beside me becomes enraged at my lack of patriotism, and says so, firing tiny flecks of chaw-spit from his mouth. I launch into a lengthy explanation of my hard day at work (babysitting a neighbor's iguana) and my well-deserved exhaustion--how I just finished watching six hours of National Geographic (Goes Wild!) before the show--while, unbeknownst to me, my father approaches the long pianist to make a request. The next thing I know, I am at center stage, singing an African-ish acapella into a bulbous phallic microphone, with the older black man hyping me to my left, and the squat female assistants backing me up on hand drums.

As I reach the finale, Merritt Moseley approaches the stage with his infant daughter, and I drop to my back and hump the air emphatically as the crowd erupts. At least that's what I hear. I can't imagine anyone could doubt my patriotism after such an act, but as I return to my lawn chair, blushing, I hear my mother screaming "Let's see you do any better" at the restless jeering crowd behind her.

A Man and His Animals...

Stumbled across a brilliant comic earlier today, and thought I'd share it.

It's called garfield minus garfield.



Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.

It gets worse.

The next day, I was still on that bathroom floor, but this time it was not so whimsical. Too homebound to retrieve the litter scoop from my car's trunk, I dug in the ammoniac sawdust of the catbox with a badly burned piece of toast, rooting out a fresh deposit as Orlando looked on, cockeyed and curious. Dishes mounted in the sink. Torrential rain had called off work once again. Shuffling room to room in my dingy bathrobe, surprising the neighbors with short bouts of half-clothed calisthenics, I resembled nothing so much as a grown bachelor twice my age, biding time before my shows.

The day Ilena left, I was like an adolescent boy who'd come across some crude philosopher's stone--it all came back to me in a rush, the rub of my flesh against worn cotton as I left the airport, the dozen near deaths as I drove one-handed around the crippling curves of Barren Creek, the ejaculate, finally, sweet liquid pearls who shocked me with their volume. The novelty faded quickly. Now my limp johnathan nodded sadly against the belt of my loose robe as I ate bowl after bowl of cold cereal.

Earthly Delight

With Ilena gone, I revert to absurdity. Lugging my sprouting kit around the house like a knee-bruised child, finding just the right spot of sun or warmth to coax the mung's white fruits out from their olive casings. I carry it into the bathroom with me and read Carey's Illywhacker aloud, my breath fogging the bright green plastic. At room temperature and with a lot of light, the directions read, the seeds will germinate visibly. See me, wrapped in Ilena's fuzzy bathrobe, on all fours on the bathroom tile, watching my charges as intently as a child watches a seething anthill.

Concatenations

The Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year



The Rise of Arabic Poetry Idol



The End of Polaroid

Moment of Silence

Three

A slight man, tall, bespectacled, his lips drawn tight as the harmonies he sketches nightly, stooped over the falling-apart piano in his Aunt Ruth's parlor room, a stranger among the velvet drapes and crystal figurines. When she fades to sleep on the rumpled loveseat, he will rummage through the guest room closet, search out the summer dress his mother borrowed on a visit decades back, lace his taut arms through the shoulder straps, and waltz solo through the creaking hallway, far away from home. In two hours, Ruth will wake predictably, and he, now in a threadbare robe, will lead her to bed, with hands gripping her arms' loose flesh, his sharp nose bent into her head of drowsy curls.

The Fall

A month-old dream: Saul, a man (who in waking hours) I'd banished from my house, a man whose disrespect spat out of him in all directions, a toady to my enemy, showed up unexpectedly in the brown duplex where I was born. The dream's details are furry, but I distinctly remember his smug lippy smile and the way he danced pennies across his knuckles. Also, his Protean ability to endlessly alter physical form. Of course, I know that if you chain a shapeshifter, his form will solidify, and you can force him to foretell the future.

But I didn't want the future. As he turned into a chipmunk to scamper away, I caught him by the neck, displaying my quarry to Ilena. She flashed her one-sided smile, vaguely pleased. Turning, I threw his body sharply into a porcelain tub, and as a circle opened on his furred back and began spilling brown blood, Ilena grimaced, "he's only a creature," and left me to watch alone as the pool of brown fanned out around his pygmy corpse.

*****

Friends, even the person you hate most turns out ultimately fragile. Even this crusted shell I secrete to circle my own form eventually cracks, revealing me pink inside, and shivering. Are my black spells working? I want to take them back. I want to fold them away and forget them.

A word I spoke in mischief came through, not by my hand but by chance, and now I sit like a man who mistakenly crushed a bird trying to carry it, staring at the enormous hard-knotted hands that betrayed him. Enough obliqueness, though: our former roommate's cat has run away.

Snowscape

For Ryan

Sipping my evening chai in the now-brilliantly-silent sitting room, I pick up an old copy of Poetry magazine, a castoff I fished out of the co-op free box years back. I come across Billy Collins' selection standards for Best American Poetry 2006, a frank criteria that seems inoffensive--if not particularly inventive--until I come across the death blow: "no poems containing the word cicada." This with a freshly minted piece on my bedside which opens "Cicadas kamikaze down/ the torn screen door." And even though I realize that my hastily scribbled sketch isn't destined for Collins' desk, or any desk other than my own, and even though (or perhaps precisely because) I realize that my use of "cicada" is occasioned by the very notion Billy Collins opposes--poets choosing words on mouthfeel alone--I take a train to Billy Collins' house and kill him. Not with any relish, mind you. I just dispose of him quickly with a swipe of my Uncle Mack's butterfly knife and head back to the train station, where the urgent song of a perfectly-placed cicada swarm cleanses my thoughts.

Thinly Veiled

Dismissed from my post at the local rag, I fire off an early-morning missive that stretches into midafternoon. Satisfied that I've skewered the chumps, I strut around my newly acquired empire and echo laughter into the absence. Silence descends. The squatters are gone. Only their filthy footprints remain.

Soundtrack

Trust me, you need this:



Listen to the tunes.
Watch the video.
Download the album.
Purchase the discography.
Thank me later.

Oh, and ignore this review:

Ready the incendiary RJD2 into the revolver. Aim discriminately at a brooding Dmitri Shostakovich sampling the elusive Prefuse 73. Fire across the bows of a rewound Johann Sebastian Bach before ricocheting past Boom Bip, and you'll fast forward upon the man John Peel shot the breeze about until he sneezed.

Roll the tape for: layer upon layer of rhythms and melody; Eskimo glockenspiels; cut-from-scratch chemistry peeking through a shadowy keyhole.

Iron Out San Francisco will leave you rooting around in the wrought iron daisies growing under your feet. It might well affect you profoundly [...]

Dream Fragments

We thought we were superheroes of music. Really, we were just dudes with underwear on the outside of our clothes. Later, we would try to save the world by downloading the perfect album, but it wouldn't decompress properly and we'd sift through internet message boards all night long trying to find it. Like superheroes.

Sam and I filmed a warm-up set on tour, and the next thing we know, we had a dutch label "highly interested." They released a sampler DVD throughout Europe, and there I was at Chapter 3, shorts unzipped, my belly and breasts hanging out as I gesticulated ridiculously and performed embarrassing freestyles in front of a Hawaiian backdrop. Eventually all three rappers exposed their penises in sequence and the video cut to disturbing asian porn, seamlessly, in a way that made us laugh before the close-ups.

Turned out it wasn't a drumset at all, just a pile of toms, tambourines and cymbals shoved in the corner of a dingy room. All the instruments were like that--banjos and guitars just necks connected by rusty strings to their disassembled bodies.

Inaugural Address

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